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April 16, 2006 - Easter Day, Year B

Easter Day, the day of resurrection. It's a wonderful day, full of celebration and feasting, celebrating the events at the heart of our faith, the wondrous news
of the resurrection.

And then we come to church, and hear the gospel reading for today, the story of the resurrection
according to St Mark.
And we're disappointed. Because it's not exactly
what we expect.
Mark's version is a strange story:
a whole bunch of the details that we expect
are left out.
We have the women, we have the tomb,
but it's not entirely clear
if the young man sitting there
is an angel,
or just a young guy who's got some idea in his head
that's he's received a message from God.
And Jesus himself
has gone missing.
In the other gospels,
they find him in the garden;
the way Mark tells it
the women never see him.
They sneak off home, afraid and confused,
and don't tell anyone
what they have — or have not — seen.

In the earliest manuscripts, the very first copies of the gospel of Mark that have been found by archaeologists,
that's it.
That's the end of the story.
There's no appearances to the disciples, no ascension, just an empty tomb, three frightened women,
and silence.

Other copies of the gospel, made a little later, are different; they tell much the same story as Matthew, Luke and John, complete with appearances by Jesus, commissionings, and the ascension into heaven. It's what we expect. But this one, this gospel of Mark, this Easter story as we heard it today,
has none of that.
Just the bare facts. An empty tomb. A message. And silence.

And that makes me wonder. Why does Mark tell it this way? Why does he stop short, never quite getting to the point;
why does he never let us meet
the Jesus
who is risen?
We feel kind of cheated. Here we are, all ready to celebrate,
and we're left in a kind of limbo. What are we supposed to do?
Are we supposed
to follow the women's example,
to ignore the angel's command to tell the others, and simply go home again,
confused because nothing was what we expected?
Don't tell anyone, because no one would believe us anyway?
And how does that fit with the fact that 2000 years later, we're celebrating this resurrection? Are we wrong?

Well, as you can imagine, my answer to all of this is no. It would be simple to take this reading as our model, cancel the festivities and go home. No fun, but easy enough to do.

But I think what Mark is signaling
is that there is more to this resurrection business
than body climbing back out of the grave. This is no ghost story.
Instead, it is something so momentous,
that he doesn't want to rush us into thinking
that it can all be conveyed
by a quick appearance by the hero
who will then rush off
to get on with saving the world.
There are no answers here. We have to go looking for them
looking at the evidence, the same evidence that the women had at hand
that very first Easter Sunday
and decide for ourselves.
We're supposed to go back and check out the rest of the story,
to look for clues and hints to what is going on.

Because leaping too quickly to the resurrection, to Jesus standing there, holes in his hands and feet and side to prove it's really him, and unequivocally alive, leaping too quickly to the risen Christ
puts us in danger
of never really realizing
what it's all about.
Oh yes, we say, Christ is risen,
but if the fact that he is risen
makes absolutely no difference
to the way we live our lives
then it might as well
not have happened
at all.

And so we turn back into the gospel of Mark,
to find out
what it's all about.

If you've been following along with our gospel readings since we began the book of Mark in Advent, you'll know that Mark isn't interested in a lot of the things the other gospel writers think are important. Unlike Matthew and Luke, he doesn't tell us anything about how Jesus was born — the first we know is when John the Baptist arrives on the scene, preparing the way, and almost immediately there is Jesus, baptized and recognized as God's son. Mark doesn't give us a whole lot of Jesus' teachings — he gives us tha basics, but none of the detail that John records in such detail. And of his whole gospel, over a third is dedicated to the final week of Jesus' life,
and even in the other two thirds, there are repeated references to Jesus's death.

Mark's gospel
is about the death of Jesus. Because it's not until we confront his death
that we can understand, that we can celebrate
his resurrection
in all its glory.
Because without that death
the resurrection
wouldn't have a whole lot of meaning.

Why death?
Because death is the one thing we can be sure of. It's been that way
since creation.
We're born.
We live.
We die.
All of us.

But the death of Jesus
is more than that. It's not just the ordinarily end
of an ordinary life.
It's an extraordinary end
to an extraordinary life.
Because it's death entered into freely, voluntarily, painfully
for the sake
of the world.

The story of the garden of Eden
is not so much about two individuals, Adam and Eve, as the fact that
we are all tainted, marked
by evil.
No matter how we struggle against it,
no matter what our intentions are,
part of the human story
is the story of being hopelessly entangled
with what the bible calls sin — the things we think and say and do
that are smeared and stained with evil.
Of course that's not the whole story — humans are also incredibly and wonderfully shaped by good.
But that good always seems to get distorted somehow.
And it affects everything we do, and all the relationships we have, with each other
and with God.

And the point of Jesus' death
according to our Christian tradition,
the point of Jesus' death
is that somehow through it
our relationship with God
is made whole again. The smears and stains of evil
are removed, are bleached clean, so that God sees us as we really are,
beautiful and holy and good.
And nothing
can get in the way
between us and God.
Not even death.

Resurrection
without Christ's death
would get us nowhere.
Christ would be raised
and us with him, raised to be in eternal relationship with God —
except that those smears and stains of evil would keep getting in the way between us and God.
But because Christ died
there is nothing, nothing
that can get between us and God,
that can block
God's love for us.

And there's a side benefit too.
Because Jesus' death
didn't just clean up the relationship between us and God.
It provided a model for cleaning up the relationships we have with other people. Forgiveness.
Because God forgives us, we forgive others. That's good news.

And we'd miss it
if we didn't know the whole story,
we'd miss it
if we skipped right over Good Friday
and went straight
from the celebrations of Palm Sunday
to the joy of Easter day.

There would be a great party
but the very core of it would be missing —
that Christ died for us
and made us friends with God
so that our resurrection
like his
will end up being
a wonderful reunion
between friends.

And so this day
and every Sunday
we celebrate the resurrection
by remembering Christ's death
in bread and wine, the body and blood of our Lord
broken and shed for us.
And that meal, the one we call
the Eucharist, a Greek word that means
thanksgiving,
in the Eucharist we give thanks for the death of our Lord Jesus
and we look forward to the resurrection
where this Eucharistic meal
will become a heavenly banquet,
"a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. . .
[And] the Lord God will wipe away the tears from [our] faces."

An empty tomb. A message. Silence.
But we know more than that.
We know a Savior, a Savior
who died for us
and rose for us
and brings us the promise of life eternal,
and the promise of a feast beyond all feasts, a reunion banquet with our God
to which we are all invited.

Christ is Risen. Alleluia!

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2006