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Easter, 2000 THE SACRED AND IMPERISHABLE PROCLAMATION
When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance into the tomb?" When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered he tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (The shorter ending of Mark) And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation."
One of our student members, who is now at university in the U.S., sent me an e mail last week. He wrote: "Pastor Gene: I'm learning lots of interesting things in my Religious Studies class. I have learnt about the Pauline epistles: how some are truly written by Paul, some are pseudonymous, and some are anonymous…and I have some questions to ask you: First, how do you explain the ending to the Gospel of Mark (the real ending, not the added short or long endings?) I mean, isn't it a cheap shot to say that the women ran away because 'they were afraid.'"
Thank God for open, inquiring minds like this young man. Their questions keep those of us who are old timers in the faith from being stuck in the dismal state of mind that we have figured it all out. The future of the Church and the vigor of its faith hinge on strong, inquiring minds.
Our student correspondent raises the awkward matter of the terse ending of the Gospel of Mark, an Easter climax without a single resurrection appearance of Jesus. It's timely since this is the text assigned this year to be read on Easter Sunday. I believe many churches will take a safe course and either augment the original short ending with one of the later, two long endings, or shift to another Gospel entirely. At Easter people expect to be confirmed in the sacred and imperishable proclamation that Jesus is risen; and Mark doesn't satisfy that yearning easily with his strange climax whose original text ends at verse 8 on a fearful note: AND THEY SAID NOTHING TO ANYONE, FOR THEY WERE AFRAID.
Mark's original ending so upset the early church that very quickly Mark was edited by the addition of the two sentences, which end today's reading. Scholars call this "the new short ending." And then a few years later the second longer ending, verses l4-21 was added allowing Jesus to appear to Mary Magdalene, then two unnamed followers, and then the eleven disciples before the first gospel ever written draws to a close. Now that's Easter satisfaction!
Why in Mark's original Easter story are people afraid and why does Mark does include at least one Resurrection witness? I do not for a second believe that Mark just forgot to include something so central to our faith as one or more resurrection appearances of Jesus. Mark is good at detail so he could not have been absentminded.
I assume Mark tells us what he thought we needed to know in order to believe in Jesus and to have our own personal encounter with the Living Christ. Irony is the mark of Mark, his writing style and his outlook. Throughout the first gospel the real thing is happening off center; a favorite Marcan phrase is "on the way" and "as they went along" and in Mark's story about Jesus the Lord is always finding people not where they may expect to find him but out there, out there in their lives when the unexpected breath of God breathes on them in unusual places and ways.
The women, of course, did not expect to find Jesus alive at the tomb; but we do expect the risen Christ there because later faith and later gospels envelop the whole story of death with the much more powerful theme of life. So Mark disappoints us all because Jesus is not where we expect him to be. He is gone; he is out there.
Earlier in his story it is Mark who conveys the sense of haste after Jesus' crucifixion. The rush to the tomb meant the body could not be properly prepared for burial. The women were anxious to do the traditional ritual of washing the body in spices. In their anxiety they were up before dawn on their way to the tomb but totally nonplussed at the thought of how they would ever enter a sealed tomb.
Arriving at the burial spot, and seeing the stone rolled away, their anxiety is increased by seeing the tomb open because their first thought is not, "he is risen" but "the body has been stolen and we shall never be able to anoint it."
The women have approached death and the tomb, stone or no stone, with the naïve hope that somehow they can anoint the body. And then their naïve hope is confounded by fear: the body has been stolen. Death is like a stone, which separates us the living from the dead. And whether the stone is in place or rolled away, death is a canyon, which only one person can cross at a time. The poet Robert Frost said: "The nearest friends can go with anyone to death comes so far short they might as well not try to go at all." The women had tried to go as far as the sealed tomb; finding it empty their despair only deepened.
Mark does not have Jesus appear to the women; he has a young man, presumably a divine messenger or angel, who announces tersely: "the Jesus you seek is not here. He is risen. He has gone ahead of you. Go and tell his disciples. There in the Galilee you will see him as he promised you." This is Mark's sacred and imperishable proclamation, even though it does seem rather anti-climactic to our Easter expectations.
And then the women fled for their dear lives. It would appear to be a most dismal ending to the first telling of the Easter story.
For those who feel a need to try to explain Mark, some suggest the women were understandably afraid because they feared the powers that be would punish them if they reported the resurrection, or even the missing body. That is possible because in the book of Acts we learn that a bit later Peter and other disciples were punished when they began to spread the news of the risen Christ.
But most of us can hardly keep quiet about anything so we must wonder if these women expecting to find a body, and being instructed by an angel that the body had been changed into a risen Christ, would have remained quiet for very long. They did not need to shout from the rooftops and alert the authorities, but they surely told someone about it. And the two later editors of Mark assume that they did blab! In other words, their fear was real but passing.
Others suggest that Mark ended his story with its aggressive emphasis on "Go' in order to convince believers that they must get involved in spreading the good news. The women were afraid, to be sure, but anyone reading Mark's short ending picks up on the clear implication that believers are to get busy running toward Jesus in the world and helping with his mission. Jesus is already in the world and we have our part to play in spreading the good news.
But finally it may be that we misread the nature of the fear the women had. Perhaps it was not the kind of mind numbing fear which accompanies a horror film like Scream 3; maybe they went forth not in terrified silence but in trembling and hopeful expectation that the words of the angel would prove to be true for them, that Jesus truly had gone ahead of them and that they would soon see him.
How many of you would have rushed into the APEX this morning bubbling with chatter if last night an angel in your dream had told you "tomorrow you are going to come face to face with Jesus at Easter worship." I imagine if that were your experience you would have come up soberly, entered cautiously, hoping and yet trembling in your hope that your dream prophecy would come true. It wouldn't be that you don't want to see Jesus face to face, but awestruck fear and trembling would certainly qualify your hope.
Mark wants to challenge us to believe that Jesus goes ahead of us, that Jesus is active in the world, and that anyone can expect to encounter Jesus in their daily lives. Mark, I believe, records no particular resurrection appearance because for Mark the risen Christ was available, not to a select few, but to anyone who lived in trembling hope of new life and new direction from God.
And that has always been the case because even if we tally up everyone who saw the risen Christ in the resurrection body in all four Gospels it's only a few hundred. And yet tens of millions have experienced the risen Christ, not in bodily form, but in their real life resurrection experiences and convictions. Not the first, but one of the most memorable, was Paul's experience of encountering the risen Christ, not in bodily form, but in nonetheless vivid and life influencing experience.
In the current film, THE GREEN MILE, based on a story by the horror writer, Stephen King, the striking black actor Michael Clarke Duncan is John Coffey, a convicted murderer, who is befriended by a compassionate guard, played by Tom Hanks. John Coffey, who we later learn is no murderer at all, is a Christ figure, a giver of hope and new life to everyone who encounters him on death row, except to two demonic men, the villainous guard Percy and the deranged serial murderer.
It is strange that Stephen King, a writer famous for his morbidity, malignancy, and an instinct for evil, shows an authentic Christian sensibility, in his novel which is the basis of this movie. Part of the evidence is Coffee's lines from the Green Mile. He says: "Only God could forgive sins, could and did, washing them away in the agonal blood of His crucified Son, but that did not change the responsibility of his children to atone for those sins (and even their simple errors of judgement) whenever possible. Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past."
Atonement is the lock on the door which we close against our past! That is a spin on Easter which should induce fear and trembling.
In a reenactment of the atonement of Jesus Christ for our sins, John Coffee, though innocent of any crime, assumes the evil of the two evil men sharing death row with him, and transfers all of his goodness upon them to eradicate their evil. As God gave the life of Jesus to atone or cancel our sins, so Coffey gives his life to cancel out the evil and sin of these two vile persons who threaten everyone else in that prison. The good of Coffee does cancel out and overcome the evil of the other two but at a cost: the wages of sin is death to the two; the cost of redemption is death for Coffey.
Stephen King takes his guidance from Mark for whom The Easter Proclamation, Sacred and Imperishable as the later editor phrased it so just because it is sobering and fearful and trembling if it is absorbed into our lives. And without our personal assimilation, the proclamation hangs there like every proclamation, imperial and royal ones or popular and revolutionary ones, hangs there in the air and eventually collapses and perishes. The reason the Easter proclamation is imperishable is because he has found many in their lives. Otherwise it is merely sacred propaganda on which the sun will set.
The Easter story, according to Mark, is sobering and trembling in its implications; death is overcome but at the price of death; sin is defeated but at the sacrifice of good. Jesus is still active in the world but it remains to be seen who will see him, who will experience his redemptive power in their lives, who will run toward Jesus and believing in him help him fulfil his ongoing ministry of salvation.
For Mark the women go in fear and trembling because they are yet to encounter the risen Lord and that encounter will hinge on their belief in him. Mark may not have felt any need to infuse his Easter story with multiple evidence of Jesus' appearance because he knew that belief in Jesus must be and would be the precursor of the experience of Jesus.
A missionary in Africa experienced great difficulty in trying to translate the word BELIEVE into the local dialect. He simply could not find the corresponding expression in the local language for belief or faith in Jesus.
Then one day a runner came panting into the camp, having traveled a great distance with a very important message. After blurting out his story, he fell completely exhausted into a nearby hammock. He muttered a brief phrase that seemed to express both his great weariness at finishing his race and task and his contentment at finding such a delightful place of relaxation. The missionary, never having heard this phrase before, asked for a translation of what the runner had said. "Oh, he is saying, 'I'm at the end of myself, therefore I am resting all my weight here!'"
The missionary exclaimed, "Praise God! That is the very expression I need for the word BELIEF" And so he was able to complete his translation.
To believe in Jesus, you must run toward Jesus in the world. You must give your all in that race. You must sacrifice all your energy, your very self, in the commitment. And then you can turn and cast yourself wholly and unreservedly on Christ, the hammock of your salvation, the place of rest and recreation for new and eternal life.
The first additional ending to Mark, which appears in this text tells us that afterwards Jesus sent out through the disciples THE SACRED AND IMPERISHABLE PROCLAMATION OF ETERNAL SALVATION. What a memorable phrase "THE SACRED AND IMPERISHABLE PROCLAMATION OF ETERNAL SALVATION", and that is the essence of the Easter story.
The Good News of Jesus, but the good news only begins in the proclamation. It needs to be claimed by us all.
We need to leave the church at Easter confident that whatever information and inspiration we have received here is only the precursor to meeting Jesus. He is here, but he is not here. He is in the world; he really is risen and still active wherever life overcomes death; goodness redeems disappointment; hope breaks the bondage of fear; and love sweeps over and lifts up the affections of humans.
Of course, we go in fear and trembling into a world where we expect to find Jesus and expect Jesus to find us.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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