Mark 16:1-8
10:00 a.m. Easter Service
April 4, 2021
It was a day to celebrate Communion just like we will today, but the service was to take place in a nursing home that had seen better days.
A dozen or so residents were rolled into the tv room for the monthly service, their wheelchairs parked in a semicircle around a table.
As the chaplain prepared the elements some were demanding to be taken back to their rooms.
On that day, one of the volunteers who helped out warned the chaplain that everyone’s medication was wearing off.
This meant that they were more awake then usual, but they also had nothing to hold them back from speaking up.
One of the women sang “Row, row, row your boat” as the service got started and was so agitated that she almost upended her wheelchair.
Finally, the chaplain clapped her hands and asked them which Gospel lesson they would like to hear that day.
She had to repeat the question a few different ways to be heard over all the noises and talking.
Then, one elderly woman’s voice could be heard over all the commotion.
“Tell us a resurrection story.” Everyone went quiet and then another voice chimed in, “Yes, tell us a resurrection story.”
(Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, p. 61-2)
We want a resurrection story – to reassure us that the humdrum routine of every day that feels mind numbingly the same isn’t all there is.
We want a resurrection story to arrive during the grieving process when someone we love dies too young or dies before we’re ready to let them go.
We want a resurrection story when the world with its wars and injustice and power grabs seems to be going to hell in a hand basket.
And Mark minces no words. After all, this is the one Gospel that neither tells us Jesus’ birth story, preferring to begin with Jesus’ baptism and it ends abruptly with the two Mary’s and Salome encountering the open tomb with a Jesus no longer dead and they bolt away, terrified.
This was such an abrupt ending that another writer later felt compelled to add an ending that would tie it up nicely with a bow, but few people have been convinced that these additional 12 verses came from Mark himself.
Mark lets the story speak for itself rather than proving a particular perspective. Matthew wants to make sure we know that Jesus has come as the promised Messiah to fulfill the covenant with a family tree that goes back to David. Luke goes even further and wants all people to receive the good news while John from the start proclaims that Jesus is divine when there were plenty of doubters of this news.
Mark leaves plenty of room for mystery with his ending of the story.
While the other three Gospel stories tie up the loose ends of their story so that it makes some kind of sense, Mark wants anyone who hears this story to fill in the gaps.
He makes us, all of us over these past two millennia, use our hearts and minds to come up with an ending – or maybe it’s another beginning.
The folks that would have been in the first audience to hear about this Easter experience that Mark recounts would have experienced it being read dramatically or even acted out and Mark writes it for just such a telling.
The peak moment, offered with great dramatic flair or even sung would have delivered the profound message: Christ is Risen.
Audiences would have gone home telling the story, filling in the details but this point would have been the clincher: Christ is Risen.
That’s what we want and when we embrace this closing line, we must also embrace the mystery that goes with it.
We don’t know how Jesus went from being buried in a tomb to no longer being there.
The women fled in terror and told no one – obviously, we know they did or we wouldn’t know – but who and what did they tell?
Who was the young man in white that tried to reassure them and had all the answers?
What comes next?
What is the lasting legacy of Jesus’ time on earth and his death and his return to life?
Without the resurrection, would we know about Jesus?
To end the story this way puts it all back in our laps.
The theologian N. T. Wright said that “Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.”
We get a glimpse of this with Easter.
But wait, we still have more questions.
It is oddly comforting that none of us knows for sure and yet we hold onto it all with wonder and awe.
And we will keep telling this story, living this story, and placing our faith in this God of mystery.
So, on this beautiful Easter day of unanswered questions but ultimate hope, let us lean into the poet Mary Oliver’s words from a work titled “Mysteries, Yes”:
Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads. (Mary Oliver, Evidence)
Amen.