A sermon preached by The Reverend Canon Dr. David Anderson at St. Jude’s Anglican Church, Oakville, on Easter Day, March 31, 2024.
I speak to you in the name of our risen Lord. Amen.
It is a new day!
After Jesus had died on the cross his body was buried in a hurry because the Sabbath day was approaching. His body was placed in the tomb, and this morning as we read Mark’s telling of the story of Jesus, he brings us in the early dawn hours on the first day of the week to the tomb where Jesus’ body had been laid. The Sabbath day of rest has passed and Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bring spices to anoint the body of Jesus.
The time is very important. It is very early in the day. The sun has just risen. It is early yet; remember that.
The Greek language in which the New Testament was written has a very exacting sort of grammar and the ability to draw readers and hearers into the immediate presence of what is being described. And that is the case here. We read, “And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.” A better translation would be, “they come to the tomb.” This is what is known as the historic present tense and it means to draw us right into the present time of the story so that we too become witnesses, even participants with these women. We come to the tomb.
On the way we are talking about the difficulty that we might have when we get there, because there is a heavy stone covering the entrance of the tomb. We are drawn into the story again. “When they looked up, they saw (no, ‘they see’, ‘we see’) that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back” (16:4). Listen again to the details of what happen inside the tomb: “And entering the tomb, [we see] a young man sitting at the right side, dressed in a white robe and [we] are amazed (startled, struck with awe)” (16:5).
Mark continues to pull us into this drama when the young man offers assurance, “But he [says], ‘Do not be amazed, startled, awestruck; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.” And then comes the message that is the heart Easter then and now: “He is risen; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him” (16:6b).
The young man gives a commission. The experience of the empty tomb is a message that is meant to be proclaimed. The young man continues, “But go, tell.”
Who are these women supposed to tell? It seems fairly obvious that they are to begin by telling the other disciples of Jesus. They are told that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee, the place of the early ministry of Jesus with the disciples. Jesus has already told them, some chapters earlier, at the Last Supper, that this is where he would meet them.
But there is a problem with the way that Mark finishes this story, indeed concludes his Gospel. “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.” (16:8).
That’s how Mark’s Gospel ends. Oh yes, if you look in your Bibles you will see some words after these, but all of those were added later. Copyists who wrote out those manuscripts of Mark, spending all of that time writing out the Gospel, would get to the end and find it all very anti-climactic. What do you mean they didn’t tell anyone? So they added on what they thought to be a more satisfactory conclusion. There are two such conclusions offered in most Bibles, just be sure to look at the footnotes.
Afterall, the other biographers of Jesus don’t end their resurrection accounts the way Mark does. While Mark begins in the usual fashion, its early Sunday morning, the women are going to the tomb to tend to Jesus’ body, the stone is rolled away, they hear the word that he has been raised, they are sent back to tell. All of that his standard. Nevertheless, Mark seems to botch the end of the story completely. “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
We have problem. Actually, we have at least two problems. First, this is the only resurrection account in the Bible where Jesus never actually makes an appearance. That’s a problem, isn’t it?
And second, the two women disciples utterly fail, at least that is the way it seems. And that is more than a little surprising because it all starts out the way we might expect. After all, the young man who met them greeted them is the classic way that always signals good news: “Do not be afraid.”
If that phrase, “Do not be afraid,” sounds familiar, it should. We hear those words on Christmas Eve when the angels appear to shepherds to announce the birth of the Christ-child in Bethlehem. It’s what the angel Gabriel said to Mary when he greeted her and was about to announce that she would be the one to bear Christ into the world. It’s what the prophets of old would say as they sought to reassure God’s people when they were about to announce good news. So biblically speaking, if someone starts a speech by telling you not to be afraid, you can know that what you are about to hear is good news.
So, the women—the two Marys and Salome—are greeted with a signal that they are about to hear good news, and then they hear what amounts to the best news they could have ever imagined. “Jesus, who was crucified, has been raised. He is not here.” Then he gives them simple instructions: “Go and tell.” But they say absolutely nothing to anyone. And that is the end of the story?
You can understand why some well-intentioned monk tried to improve the ending.
But here is the thing. Maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised about Mark’s ending after all. In fact, there are two things happening throughout Mark’s biography of Jesus that might almost cause us to predict an ending like this. The first thing is the fact that throughout Mark the people who should know what is going on—like the disciples—never seem to get it. Time and time again they do not understand. Jesus tells them three times that he will suffer and die and they never understand, and they are surprised when it happens. Now the women do better than the men. The men all run away and desert Jesus. The women at least had the courage to stay with Jesus until the end and ventured to his tomb to care for his body, but like the other disciples, maybe they still don’t get it either.
The second thing that happens in Mark, that perhaps makes an ending like this not all that surprising, is the fact that throughout Mark’s Gospel the people who do realise what is going on can never be trusted to tell. This doesn’t happen very often, but the pattern is there. Take for example a story from near the beginning of Mark, and the demon that possessed a man at a place called Garazene. The demon recognizes Jesus right away, but you can’t rely on a demon to tell the good news. And close to the end of Mark there is the Roman centurion, who after he watches Jesus die says, “Truly, this man was God’s son.” But we can’t count on a Roman centurion to tell the world about Jesus.
So, this really is a problem. All the people who should know, don’t. And all those who do know, can’t be trusted to tell. It is a real bind.
Except. Except there is one other person who has seen and heard everything that Jesus has said and done. That person heard Jesus predict his death and saw that everything he said came to pass. That person also entered the tomb and saw that it was empty and heard the order to go and tell. Perhaps one of two of us might remember that we spoke about this person when we were reading the early chapters of Mark’s Gospel several weeks ago and were reflecting on they way that Jesus and his biographer Mark seem to keep Jesus’ identity a secret from almost everybody except one person.
Do you know who that person is?
At the beginning of this sermon, I talked about the way that Mark tells this story in a way pulls us right into the experience. You see, we are the people who know! Mark tells the story so that we understand as his readers or hearers.
With the events that we have witnessed at the tomb, we have been drawn into the early dawn hours of a new day. With the women, we have come to the tomb and the discovery of the large stone rolled away. The message of the young man is also addressed to us. Mark was very careful to tell us the time. It is early in the day. The day is still full of possibility for us.
Mark writes this open-ended biography of Jesus that threatens to end in failure, precisely so that we understand our role in telling the good news. We have been invited into this story all along and now we are invited to pick up where others left off. Perhaps now we understand even better how the women felt. Finally, we understand their response fleeing from the tomb “for terror and amazement had seized them” (16:8).
This is where God meets us this morning. Right here where the other shoe has just dropped on us. Right here at this “oh-oh” moment when we realise that we have a role to play. Right here where an ending has the possibility of becoming a new beginning and where God offers to take what looks like a failure and offers it back to us as an opportunity. The future is still full of possibility.
This is precisely where the God that we worship is in the habit of meeting us. God often comes at the point of our brokenness, not just to be with us, but to do something amazing. We might not always see it, we may not understand it, but God will be there. And the story doesn’t end. The story doesn’t end where Mark left off, neither does this story end where any of the other Gospel writers finished, but this story continues to be written in our own lives. And we can invite others into this story by telling them this good news: that Jesus Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.
Amen.