Easter Sunday Mark 16:1-8 April 12, 2009

The Resurrection of our Lord/Easter Sunday 2009
“Just As He Told You”
Mark 16:1-8
April 12, 2009

“Christ is risen!”  He is risen, indeed!  “Alleluia!” Too bad to have allergies at Easter. And I know I’m not the only one, with the % of pollen in the air as high as it is. But it’s not a bad fit for the Year of Mark. Like allergies, Mark’s Gospel reminds us we’re human.  Mark’s Easter story is different from John’s.  John’s guides us to joy. Mark’s is for the struggling days – the days of allergies and hip surgeries, of accidents and economic whoa, the days of frightening diagnosis and grief.  It guides us like police escort guided our youth’s Mission trip into Mexico this week.  

So Easter still comes in Mark, but it comes in a way struggling people can hear it. It comes by way of an “I told you so.” Now “I told you so’s” aren’t always welcome.  Sometimes they stir a desire to throw tomatoes at whoever says it.  Unless, it’s said by the one person in the world we would most want to hear insisting they are right and our reasoned fears are gloriously wrong. 

But “I told you so!” isn’t exactly how Mark gives us the  resurrection story.  It’s actually “He told you so!”  The news comes second hand, from a young man in a white robe sitting in an empty tomb.  We’re not told who this young man is.  We can make guesses, but Mark tells us nothing.  All we know is that this unnamed man says the words that got the first Christians through the most devastating trials of their lives. Christians in the first century were being thrown to the lions by Nero.  They had been chosen as the easiest scapegoats for the problems Nero wanted to deflect.  Mark’s Gospel was first addressed to those early Christians.

When someone comes to your door to drag you off to throw you to the lions, it’d be very human to respond in fear.  It would set the reptilian part of our brain in gear.  So, while the last word in Mark’s Gospel being the word “afraid” might not impress us, it made a lot of sense in the first century.  To be Christian was to live much of the time in fear and how good it was to have a Gospel understand that fear and not belittle or berate it. Even faithful Christians could be afraid.

In that sense, Mark’s is a merciful Gospel.  It’s written for people who are not spiritual athletes, which I’ve heard don’t exist any way.  Being Christian doesn’t make one immune to fear or failure or frustration when the going gets tough.  Simon Peter, James, John and the rest of the twelve had already abandoned Jesus, but now Mark tells us the women, who were looking more faithful by coming to the tomb, aren’t any braver or holier than the rest. 

All fall short of the glory.  Yet, Mark’s Gospel still calls them disciples and it still announces that Christ has been raised and has gone ahead of them, and ahead of us, into life.  And Mark tells us, if we want to see the risen Christ, that’s where we’ll find him – in the midst of life.

As  merciful as Mark was to announce good news to the early Christians, we need his down-to-earth message just as much today. We’re hardly at risk from lions. But we are challenged to keep our faith intact when the world doesn’t much care whether we believe anything about God or not; and when we wonder where God is when children are killed by their father, or a little girl is found in a suitcase or accidents happen that shouldn’t, or injustices are gotten away with, or jobs or simply a place to live allude our friends, or even us, or drugs take over, or loneliness sets in.

We cannot do the good in the world we’ve been created to do and want to do, when a great stone of bitterness or doubt or fear barricades our heart and we haven’t a clue how to remove it.  We need a down-to-earth; close-to-home guide assuring us that somehow the muck of our human condition was taken into consideration when Jesus called us to follow him.  We know by now that the journey includes struggle, and how gracious it is that the Gospels have the same contours as our lives. Matthew, Luke and John touch other bends in the road.  Mark is for the allergy days.    

Like the early Christians, we too need to hear these words announced from the empty tomb. The young man says, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised.  He is not here.  He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  “Just as he told you!” Jesus had told them, and us, he isn’t defeated by the darkness of the world,  or the darkness in us – however dark it is, but goes ahead of us into whatever life brings. 

But the women who came to the tomb that first day of the week couldn’t hear it.  They were out of their minds in grief.  They weren’t thinking about whatever it was he was supposed to have told them.  What they did remember was how he had affirmed their worth and their value and how they had begun to believe it themselves.  What they did remember was that he had raised up their bent-over lives – called them by name and rejoiced in who they were. 

But then he was snatched from them for no other reason than that of loving ones like them.  So out of love and duty to a friend, these women go to the tomb to give him a proper burial with spices to anoint his body, and they expect a big stone will block their way.  “Who will get rid of the stone?”  But when they arrive, the stone is gone.  They were worrying about the wrong thing.  With their minds on so much worry they weren’t prepared for the biggest surprise of their lives. 

How human it is – to worry about the apparent rocks in our way when, quite to our surprise, the whole subject has been changed.  So Mark gives us this messenger in the white robe who tells us this extraordinary news: “He told you so.” Jesus promised – he would meet us in Galilee, which is to say, he will go ahead of us to wherever it is we get up in the morning and wherever it is we lay our heads down at night – in the midst of the big and little traumas of life.

What Mark gives us this Easter morn is a promise directed at anyone about ready to throw in the towel on the goodness of life.  Mark tells us that our well founded fears are gloriously wrong and that the one person in the world we most want to hear insist they are right and we are wrong has so insisted.  Quite to our surprise, the word is that in the end life will come out of death; good will be stronger than evil; hope trumps despair;  justice, mercy and a healed world are possible.

The invitation of Easter is to consider that instead of throwing in the towel, there’s an alternative.  God is not defeated, but has incorporated mistakes and miss-steps into the cross Jesus bore. The human brokenness that brought about the crucifixion didn’t win the day.  And the human brokenness we witness day after day, won’t win the day either.

The women came to the tomb with spices to anoint the dead, but they found the tomb empty.  They fled for terror and amazement and didn’t tell anything to anyone.  But the glad truth is, the story couldn’t possibly have ended there, because if no one told anything to anyone we wouldn’t have heard. Who knows what those women and the other disciples did when they arrived in Galilee – when they calmed their fears – when they told the story of that white-robed man saying, “He told you so!”  Biblical scholar Ched Myers says “fear does not imply desertion in Mark.  On the contrary, throughout the story, fear accompanies those who journey with Jesus.” (Say To This Mountain, p.208)

For over 2000 years we’ve been saying, “He told us he’d be with us in bread and wine of communion, in water and word of baptism, and in our imperfect efforts to live as his body in the world.”  If we’re a little bit afraid as we try to follow Jesus, maybe it implies we get a little more profoundly that there is absolutely no need to throw in the towel in the face of what haunts us. 

We may have finally gotten that because Christ is risen, we are free beyond our wildest dreams to instead throw that towel over our arms and join Christ’s risen presence in the world.  As we’ve been told, so now is it ours to tell, “Christ is risen. “He is risen, indeed!”
                                                                                                                       

Amen

   +Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson, to the glory of God
Faith Lutheran Church, Chico, CA