It's Up to Us.

Mark 16:1-8. (Resurrection.)

I.

Most scholars believe that this is the original ending to the gospel of Mark.  Kind of leaves us hanging, doesn’t it?  The women say nothing to anyone out of fear.  The gospel thus ends with fear and silence.  What a let-down!  On a day like today, with tremendous music, and flowers, and a celebratory atmosphere.  “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

We may want a better ending.  This ending certainly feel inadequate... which is why later believers probably found it necessary to add different more satisfying conclusions to the gospel.            

But let’s reflect on why the women were paralyzed.  It was due to fear.  Fear is the great enemy of the gospel.  I think fear is the great enemy of life, and has led us into more tragedy and heartbreak, atrocity and horror, than anything else.

In this case, perhaps the women were afraid because they didn’t want to be rejected as crazy or scolded for making up a bizarre story.  They didn’t want to be accused of stealing Jesus’ body themselves.  They didn’t want to be the witnesses to someone else’s crime of stealing his body; that would make them targets of whomever did it.  They had a lot of reasons for fear.

But they also had reasons for hope.  They don’t just witness an empty tomb.  They are given an interpreter: The strange “young man, dressed in a white robe” tells them the good news that Jesus has been raised, and that he will meet his disciples in Galilee.

We, however, probably don’t respond to this story with fear, at least at first.  What’s to fear?  We are here with our families, friends, and neighbors, on a joyous holiday.  Many of us are wearing our best clothes.  We’re looking forward to a nice dinner.  The most we have to be afraid of might be whether the whole family gets along all day.

In terms of this story, we have two-thousand years of domestication under our belt.  We have heard this story so often that any danger or uncertainty or mystery has been thoroughly wrung out of it.

Fear is destructive.  But even fear is less destructive and toxic and corrosive than apathy, over-familiarity, domestication, and complacency.  Fear at least has some energy to it.  It is far worse if we have placed this story in a glass case like a museum artifact, or in a cage like an exotic pet bird.  If it is something we think we know, control, possess, and wear, like a comfortable old jacket, then we have missed the point.

Fear would be a better reaction.  If someone were to come up to me and say this story scared them, I would think that there is at least some hope for that person.

II.

This story turns our world upside-down.  Dead bodies are not supposed to just walk away.  Young men in white robes do not usually appear out of nowhere to explain things to us.  Huge rocks do not roll themselves away.

What the women see that morning was a different world, a world in which the conventional rules did not apply.  It was a world, for instance, where dead people did not stay dead.

Let’s face it, if you can’t depend on death, what can you depend on? 

If we were to suddenly wake up in a different world, with different laws and different rules, that ought to get our attention.  That ought to inspire at least some concern, if not fear.  If everything we’ve always known and depended on is now inoperative and void, what do we do?  How do we know how to act? 

The resurrection forces us to finally come to grips with the question: What if the world really is like this?  What if death really doesn’t have any power over us, what if it is not the end, termination, extinction, and barrier that we have always thought it was?  And if that is the case, then what if everything Jesus taught and did was, you know, like, true? 

What if violence really doesn’t solve anything?  What if the gentle really do inherit the Earth?  What if the proud really are scattered, the powerful brought down, the lowly lifted up, the hungry filled, and rich sent away empty?  What if that really is the way the universe works?

What if the empire really doesn’t always win; what if the One who always wins in the end is the God of love?  What if even the horror of crucifixion, the Empire’s most potent tool to keep people under control, what if even that didn’t work?  What if it not only didn’t work, but actually accomplished the opposite?

What if Jesus really meant everything he said?  Okay, he predicted his own death... but that was predictable and inevitable, given what he was doing.  You didn’t have to be Nostrodamus to see that one coming.  But he also predicted his resurrection, which no one understood at the time, and then it actually happens.                                             

This changes everything!  For the resurrection means we are living in a different world.  And living in a different world requires a different way of living.  If the resurrection is true, if it is an accurate depiction of reality, that is, if we are not wasting our time and effort here every Sunday morning, then a new kind of life is demanded.

If this new world is true, then it would be a disaster to continue to live in the old one.  We would be radically out of synch.  Our actions would make no sense and perhaps be unwittingly destructive.  We would continue to live in fear, be motivated by sins like anger and greed and gluttony and lust... all because we think we live in one world, one of scarcity and death, when in the real world is very different.  Indeed, we would be making this world a place of terror, injustice, and death, when it really didn’t have to be.  Imagine that!

III.

The new world revealed and ratified in Jesus’ resurrection demands a wall-to-wall transformation of a person, the community, the whole creation.  If Jesus’ resurrection is true, we can’t keep living the way we always have.  It demands a response.  It demands a witness.  It demands that we proclaim it to others, because it means that the world we have been assuming is real isn’t, and the real world is something very different.  And this is something people need to know.

Now there is something to be afraid of!  Having to give up familiar and comfortable habits and words and orders and logic and ways of relating to each other... even though they are based on lies and falsehood... even though they have had a murderous effect on people, and communities, and creation, and even our own souls and bodies.  What will people think, after all?

Here’s the choice the resurrection gives us: On the one hand, we may live in love, truth, peace, beauty, and justice... live according to the forgiving and accepting grace of God... live free of the fear of death, free of the Empire’s coercive grip, free of violence and exploitation.  We may live in the power of God’s resurrection life which permeates and fills all things and directs the whole destiny of the universe.  And we may accept and embrace the privilege of proclaiming this good news to others. 

Or, on the other hand: we may keep making bricks for Pharaoh, keep working for what does not satisfy, keep hiding in fear from the future, keep running away from death while at the same time investing in death to win, keep betting on violence to overcome violence — like that’s ever going to happen, and keep assuming that that stone is going to stay put, that body is going to keep lying there, and that these women go home with all their expectations completely fulfilled.            

The choice before us in the resurrection is spoken of by Moses at the end of the book of Deuteronomy.  “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.  Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

IV.

The ending to the gospel of Mark is not satisfactory.  It is not supposed to be.  Mark’s intent, I think, is that we are the ending.  We, the believers hearing the story, are supposed to be the on-going ending of the story.  If the women didn’t say anything to anyone, it is up to us to spread the good news.  It is up to us to be the good news.

So, the ball is in our court, as we say, using an analogy from tennis.  The next move is up to us.  That is pretty scary, I suppose.  I mean, we could swing and miss.  Or we could hit the ball out of bounds.  Or we could return it, only to have the opponent smash it back in our faces. 

And yes, that is the risk we take when we participate in life at all.  But this is also an opportunity!  And God’s Spirit of Truth is with us guiding us... but only if we plant our feet, keep our eye on the ball, and swing. 

To change sports metaphors, if the women at the tomb have dropped the ball out of fear, we can pick it up and keep the movement going.  We know what they do not which is that Jesus is alive!  His Spirit flows in the world.  We know that God’s love and life are the bedrock and essence of the universe. 

Yes, jumping into life is frightening and dangerous.  But it is not nearly as scary, toxic, and lethal as the alternative, which is staying where we are, doing what we have always done, thinking what we have always thought.  Choosing death is easy.

Let’s choose life!

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