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| Out of Fear, Hope |
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(Please feel free to email a response or a question) April 12, 2009 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11; Mark 16: 1-8 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. That ending of Mark’s story of Easter Sunday – these three women flee from the tomb filled with fear and without telling anyone what they had just experienced – that’s hardly the kind of ending we’d expect to hear on a day filled with wonderful music and beautiful flowers and lots of alleluias. It may, however, be exactly the ending that can offer us some helpful ways to think about this resurrection event that is so central to Christianity and yet so difficult for us to grasp. So I’d invite you first of all to put yourselves in the sandals of these three women who came to Jesus’ tomb as the sun was rising. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome had been with Jesus for quite some time. Mark tells us that they were part of that group that traveled with him through Galilee, in the northern part of Israel. They probably were in the entourage that came down to Jerusalem with Jesus at the beginning of this Passover festival. And they were there, watching from a distance as he died on a cross. Mark writes that the two Marys were there as Jesus’ body was placed in a burial cave and a large stone rolled across the entrance. If you have been at a cemetery when the body of a loved one is buried, you can understand the surge of emotions that must have gone through them. You stand there looking at a hole in the ground, a casket poised over it. Family members and friends walk forward to put a flower on the casket as a last act of remembrance, as one more way to express love or regret or kindness or forgiveness. There is a harsh finality to this moment. Here, then, were these women. This man whom they loved, who represented their dreams for a very different kind of world, had been killed. They missed him terribly on a personal level. And their hopes had been shattered, dumped behind that stone. They knew the burial was not really done properly because it had been rushed just as the Sabbath was beginning. They were coming back to anoint the body, even though they knew by now that it would be decomposing. They were coming back, even though they had not figure out how they might get the stone rolled away from the tomb so they could have access to the body. So here’s the first place we might put ourselves in the sandals of these three women. When are the times you have experienced a terrible loss? It might be the death of a loved one. It might be an illness that has drastically changed you life. It might be a job that has been lost, an income diminished, a relationship that is shattered. These losses are very personal to us. We also know that people all over the world face their own grief time and time again – a house bulldozed in Palestine, a family living in fear of a rocket in Israel, a baby dying of starvation in a mother’s arms in Darfur, an immigrant wasting away in the desert, a former prisoner finding that freedom means no place to live, no one who will hire him, no friends who will walk with him on the journey to a new life. All of us, all of these people, stand with Mary and Mary and Salome early on that Sunday morning. We know the odds of changing things – of rolling back an obstacle like a huge stone, of letting the sweet spices overcome the well-established stench of death – those odds are pretty steep. Then the unexpected happens – but it is not an unexpected revelation of joy. It is an unexpected addition to the disequilibrium these women feel. The stone has already been rolled back. That would seem to solve one of their problems, but it doesn’t really. The stone should not be rolled back. Who did this? Did they snatch away the body of Jesus? Or enter the cave and desecrate it? What is going on here? It gets even more unsettling. Instead of a body lying on the rock, there is a young man dressed in white sitting there. The author of the Gospel used a classic Biblical figure here to convey a message – an angelic being in human form. The first thing the angel says to the women is what angels always seem to say to humans in these stories: “Do not be alarmed.” Yeah, right. The stone has been moved, Jesus’ body is gone and there is a stranger sitting here looking very otherworldly. Do not be alarmed? Why not run for your life? But these women must have had a sense that something bigger is going on. They hear out the angel: “He has been raised. He is not here.” Now added to all the anxiety they brought to the tomb is a whole new level of uncertainty. In their grief – our grief – over death, illness, job loss, relationship woes, any of the world’s burdens – they had gone to at least touch the remains of the one who had given them hope. Even that possibility now was gone. They were looking into an empty tomb, a void. They had tried to do something and it seemed to have failed. They went through the chemotherapy, but the cancer was not gone. They saved up for a home, only to see its value and their equity fade away. They had applied for job after job, but all they could see was a phone that did not ring with a job offer. They had tried to make the relationship work, they had really tried. Now their heart felt empty, broken. What word of hope could this ethereal being offer them? “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” Oh, yeah -- and go back and tell this news to the rest of his followers, that motley crew that has gone into hiding, those guys who are not particularly inclined to believe anything a bunch of women tell them. Put all of that together, and you can understand why these three women fled from the tomb in terror and told no one anything. As Mark says in that last phrase: “For they were afraid.” Later editors would try to add some other endings to Mark’s Gospel, endings that would explain how these women told the other followers of Jesus what they had seen, how Jesus himself appeared to his followers and how he sent them out into the world. But scholars think the original version of Mark’s Gospel ended on this note of fear. And why not? This Gospel was written around the time the Romans – the same Romans who had executed Jesus – were brutally crushing the Jewish revolt in Israel. The Romans would destroy the Temple. They were also killing Christians. Where was Jesus for these early Christians in the midst of all this? Where is Jesus for us in the midst of our fears? “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” He is going ahead of us to the places from which we came – the homes, the workplaces, the families, the war zones, the homeless shelters. We come here to this place that proclaims that God’s love is stronger than death, the goodness will win out over evil, that there is always hope. And then we go back out, with a chance to overcome our fears and to carry Jesus’ words, to embody Jesus’ spirit in all of those tough places in our lives, in all of those everyday places where we get on with living in the midst of whatever troubles there may be. We can get absorbed by trying to figure out how someone who had been executed might return in a new, living form three days later. We can argue over the absurdity or the wonder of it all. What we do know is that the first generations of Christians experienced Jesus among them in ways they never could have imagined. It happened to his closest followers in those weeks right after what seemed like his ultimate defeat. Years later, Paul – who had never met Jesus, would write in his letter to the people of Corinth about how he, too, experienced Jesus even as he was persecuting those who had chosen to be followers of Jesus. The ruling powers of the temple and the state thought that by killing Jesus, they had gotten rid of him, that his troublemaking days were over. But in the end, he won, they lost. Throughout his ministry, Jesus kept talking about making the kingdom of God present on earth. We echo his prayer over and over when we say, “Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom is the world as God intended it to be, not as we humans have messed it up over a few millenniums. The real issue on Easter Sunday was not the condition of Jesus’ body – it was the reality that the kingdom of God – that God’s love -- was triumphing over the forces of death and evil. The triumph is not complete. There is still evil and death in our world. But in the end, the resurrection says that God’s love is stronger than all of those forces. That’s where our hope can take root. Not that every problem will be solved in the next 24 hours. Not that suffering and injustice and pain and grief will go away. Not even that we are guaranteed a reserved seat in heaven. Our hope is that as we return to Galilee – or wherever life happens for us – that we are not going there alone. The Jesus who lives beyond the cross, beyond the tomb, goes there before us. He has taken the worst humanity can give, yet he has risen above that. God’s love shines through him and God’s love surrounds us, just as it surrounded those three women. God looks to us to extend that love to those we encounter. Mark’s Gospel stops abruptly, with the women silent and afraid. Yet the story of the resurrection was not buried in silence or fear. Over and over, Jesus’ followers – men and women – told the story of how the hope of the world cannot be killed. That’s our story, too, if we choose to embrace it. So as we look for how we might embrace that story in our lives, let’s sing together as a proclamation of hope the first two verses of Hymn Number 242, “The Strife is O’er.” Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! The strife is o’er, the battle done; The victory of life is won; The song of triumph has begun: Alleluia! The powers of death have done their worst; But Christ their legions hath dispersed; Let shouts of holy joy outburst: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! |