Baptized at the age of two months, I guess you could say I have been a Christian my entire life. I have been swimming in these waters ever since I can remember. And so the first time I realized just how strange our gospel story is was when I read it with a Chinese college student. I was ministering to a college campus at the time. A young woman came to me. This was her first semester in the United States. Her English was pretty good, but she was eager to improve it – and she was also curious about Christianity. So we agreed to meet weekly in my office to read the gospel story together.
As we worked through the passages, more than once she stopped and looked at me. She would scrunch up her face and say, “Huh. Why did he do that?” “Why did he say that?” She was more than surprised. She was, perhaps, disdainful.
If you can remember hearing the story for the first time, then maybe you know firsthand how strange it is. C.S. Lewis, that wonderful writer who expressed the essence of Christianity so powerfully and so imaginatively, calls the resurrection story “the strangest story of all.” I wonder if we can see how strange it is.
We have a habit of putting a nice filter over it – gauzy, soft light. Gentle faces. Smooth skin. white, clean cloth. It’s a pretty picture, our Easter story.
Mark gives us the shortest, most concise version of the story. After the Sabbath, the women went to the tomb with their spices so they might anoint his body, which had been laid in the tomb on Friday. This is Sunday, very early in the morning.
And as they walk there, they chat amongst themselves. They share a concern about how they would move the stone. The Friday before, when his body was taken down from the cross, Joseph of Arimathea brought it to a tomb hewn out of rock. He rolled a stone in front of the opening before they all went home. The stone, these women knew, was quite heavy. They doubted their ability to move it on their own so they could anoint the body of their Lord.
When they arrived there, these women were stunned to see the mouth of the tomb open before them. Is it possible that some of the men had come earlier to do this for them? They stepped inside the tomb where they saw a young man in a white robe.
A young man in a white robe – an angel, of course. Right? How many times have you seen a young man dressed in a white robe who was not an angel? His first words to them were the same words that angels always open with: Do not be alarmed. Do not be afraid. That is what they always say.
The angel explains to the women that Jesus is not here, of course not. He has done what he said he would do. Just a few days ago, in fact, he said, “When I am raised up I will go before you to Galilee.”
And if you followed the link at the top you know that is where we left it. He is not here. He went to Galilee, just like he told you he would.
Perhaps we don’t think much of it, because we have heard the story so many times, we fill in the rest. He is not in the tomb. He is raised. Now you will see him again in Galilee. Go and tell the others, and so on and so forth.
It is a story that has been told in bits and pieces, pretty much as we do – little bits and pieces every Sunday morning – over and over again. The first witnesses told it to someone else, who then told it to others, who told it to others. The story handed down from one to another to another over the ages.
It traveled across deserts and rivers and oceans, through forests and cities, from mouth to mouth, the story of Jesus Christ. Little bits and pieces, here and there.
The story that Mark wrote down was handed to him by others, in bits and pieces and woven together to create the narrative we now have in our Bibles.
The story we ended with verse 7 of Chapter 16.
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.
But this is not where Mark ends the story. There is one more thing.
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.
This is the story as Mark told it. Maybe Mark himself sat around the fire with others in the evening sharing stories. and he told his story. His listeners leaned in to hear. He says,
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.
And his listeners are motionless, mouths open. Waiting for him to go on. And then what, they ask. Mark shrugs. That’s all I’ve got. Is it not enough?
Well, no, we say. It is not enough. Because we want to know that the disciples carried the good news of the resurrection with them back to the others. We want to know that they did, in fact, see Jesus again as he promised they would. We want all the post-resurrection details.
We wouldn’t get it from Mark, though. Mark left that to others to tell. Other evangelists, like Matthew, Luke, and John. Other apostles like Peter and James and Paul. And the next generation, and the generation after that.
But let us not leave behind the first story – Mark’s story – where the women fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Let us hold this story close in all its sparseness and severity, because it is this story that assures us that, yes indeed, something profoundly, powerfully, awesomely otherworldly happened that day.
Something that terrified them because it utterly upended everything they knew about the world.
Something that terrified them because it was unnatural. This is more than the return of new life in the springtime, bulbs that flower, trees that bud with new leaves. That is all that we expect, but the dead resurrected? This is something new.
Life came back into his beaten and broken corpse, and he arose. Jesus rose from the tomb where his body had been laid, to become the living proclamation that death has been defeated. That love wins. That in the end is life.
In the end is life. and this life comes not from our own good intentions or cleverness, or the strength of our human will. It comes from the awesome power and love of God. That is the only way life comes.
We are no stronger or wiser than these first disciples. The women who ran away confused and terrified. Like them, we need time and experience to form our faith, to teach us these truths about life and death. To recognize that this truth is a perfect fit for that gaping, dark hunger deep within us. It fills us, it completes us. In it we know that, as T.S. Eliot wrote, in the end is our beginning. In the end is life.
Again and again, whenever we are faced with death, the church asserts this belief: That God has defeated the power of death in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a hard truth because we wish to never have to face death at all.
And so when we have to face this truth, whether for the first time or the hundredth time, perhaps we are ready to say what we believe…what we know deep in our souls had to be then and is now and forevermore: Jesus is risen.
Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed.
All praise be to God.
Amen.
Photo by ArtHouse Studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/entrance-to-
