Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, Acts 10:34-43, Mark 16:1-7
You might have noticed that I ended the Gospel reading two sentences early, compared to what is printed in your insert. That’s because those last two sentences were not in the original Gospel of St. Mark, not in the oldest manuscripts. They were tacked on later, making the ending less abrupt and disconcerting. The subsequent Latin versions have an even longer ending, to solve the problem of St. Mark stopping short of any appearance of the resurrected Jesus.
St. Mark does not doubt the resurrection, as his Gospel is full of the intimations of it. But why does he end his Gospel with the women fleeing from the tomb in terror and amazement, disregarding the young man’s instructions, reporting nothing to no-one, because they were afraid, full stop? Don’t they have good news to tell?
On Sunday afternoons I teach confirmation to a wonderful group of teenagers. Last month I was explaining the doctrine of the resurrection—the resurrection of Jesus in history and the future resurrection of humanity, and I was saying that the resurrection is not just spiritual but physical and embodied, and not just heavenly, but for the world, and one of the students said, “You mean, like zombies?” Good point, Julian! So maybe the women in the gospel story fled from the tomb in terror and amazement because how did they know that Jesus was not a zombie!
What would a body be like that had risen from three days of decomposition? Not a good thing, if it’s like the walking dead. What would it be like to live forever? Maybe not good, if it’s like being a vampire, despite the fantasies of True Blood. Maybe it’s like the elves in The Lord of the Rings, only without those ridiculous ears. The entertainment industry suggests that resurrection and eternal life are not just Biblical matters but secular preoccupations—here is what it might be like to live forever, here is what it might be like to rise from the dead. But then what gets envisioned is something to run away from. Like the women do from the tomb.
Let me shift this a bit. Our reading from Acts says that God had anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. Power is also a secular preoccupation, but the entertainment industry calls it "superpower". In my elementary Sunday School class I asked the girls to tell me the superpowers of their favorite superheros. I asked them if their superheros always use their powers to fight, and they admitted, Yes, always. I wonder, is there a Marvel superhero with the superpower to heal the sick and give sight to the blind and feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish? I haven’t yet seen Black Panther, but Wonder Woman saves the world by the power of her violence. These two movies have positive value when they celebrate people other than white males, but the power that we envision in these secular saviors is always a violent power. Good violence versus bad violence.
You can extrapolate from these movies to propose that the best way to deal with school shootings is to arm the teachers. But then, what is your vision of human life on earth? What kind of a world do you imagine, what kind of life can you hope for? If you think the more people that bear arms the better, then what can you believe is the capacity of human beings for a good life together, and what is the capacity of this world for long and happy lives within it?
Many Christians in America estimate these capacities as low. What they see is violence against violence until we die and our souls go off to heaven, and leave this world behind, and it’s only in heaven that we ever get the good life. Until then the 2nd Amendment protects us and comforts us with our God-given right to violence.
The Lord Jesus, however, presented a power that was absolutely non-violent. He could walk on water and calm the raging storm but did not fight the police arresting him. He’s offering a blending of power and ethics that the world ever finds incomprehensible, unbelievable, preposterous, and maybe with good reasons. Shouldn’t we persist and resist, shouldn’t we fight back? I know, but this image of power and ethics that he presents is not just about himself, it’s a worldview, it’s a vision of the world, and it’s not just for belief in God, it’s a vision of humanity and of your capacity, and you with your own ethical life are invited to offer form and shape to the world of God’s future.
It’s always been hard to comprehend and even harder to believe, even for those who were close to him. Of this difficulty the Gospel writers are not shy. The case in point is the disconcerted ending of our Gospel today. St. Mark was not shy of the women not comprehending the empty tomb, of them not believing the testimony of the mysterious young man in it, and their fearing the implications. That later on the church felt the need to add those nicer endings reveals that even the church has ever found the good news hard to comprehend and even harder to believe.
If the resurrection is good news, how can the good news be alarming? It’s at least because an embodied resurrection is so much more disruptive than simple immortality of the soul. If Easter were only a case of Jesus going to heaven when he died, there was no cause for alarm. It’s not hard to imagine immortal souls in heaven, it’s done all the time. Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and even Galileo found it perfectly comprehensible. Immortality of the soul is not alarming.
But in our confirmation class, once we got past the zombies, when we tried filling out a picture of embodied resurrection for embodied life in the world to come, we quickly encountered all kinds of biological problems and social and political obstacles to undying physical lives upon this earth. The good news of embodied resurrection starts getting just too weird, and the alarm bells go off.
The resurrection is a disruption even of immortality, it’s worse than a wrinkle in time, it tears the fabric of the cosmic order, or as Isaiah said, Destroys the shroud that is cast over all peoples and the sheet that is spread over the nations. If liberation is exposure, then that sudden opening can be alarming.
You know there are good things you’re afraid of. Belief means choosing between your fears—which fears you run from and which fears you walk through. This good news is for the hard times, not the nice times. This good news addresses the relentless realities of life and loss and pain. This good news is quieter than the loud noise of hatred and the clamor of violence. It is offered to you precisely in a time of discouragement and national despair, in a time of cultural exhaustion and personal stress. I invite you to believe the news that, while death comes to us all, and despite the necessary grief, you may expect that life is not finally defined by mourning.
The Gospel of St. Mark ends this way because the ending is actually a beginning, the beginning of a whole new world of unforeseen possibilities. At the lake in Ontario where we have our cottage there’s a shore of cliffs, twenty to forty feet above the water, which there is deep, and you stand on the edge, and your children are telling to go ahead and jump—they did! The ending of St. Mark’s Gospel feels like a precipice but it’s a launching, a take-off, a leap. The resurrection is wide open.
Believe it with a belief that is open instead of closed, a belief not in a hard set of doctrines but in God’s faithfulness, a belief not strictured by certitude but open to wonder and imagination. Believe this news in order for you to imagine that this physical world is ever more open to the presence of God in it, believe it to consider that your biological bodies have more capacity for God’s Spirit than you know, believe it to countenance that our political and economic structures have more capacity for love and for healing and for feeding the hungry than their known capacity for violence, believe it to inspire you to stand up and speak for this strong peace and persist and resist by the power of love instead of fear, in the forgiveness of sins instead of violence, in the power of life coming out of death.
The resurrection is both the central doctrine of the Christian faith and the hardest to believe, as I think St. Mark intends to show us. Today I’m inviting you to believe, to believe the good news of a righteous God saying Yes to this real world, Yes to this here creation, even as we wait and long for the full redemption that God has for it, Yes to rich food and well-aged wines, Yes to your own resurrection, Yes to your capacity for power and goodness that God has in mind for you, Yes to openness and joyful wonder.
Today you answer that Yes when you sing and pray and when you pass the peace. No matter how much you believe or you doubt, you were right to come here today to give yourself to hope and to love, and to answer Yes to the incomprehensible and unconditional love of God for you.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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