Easter Sunday, April 20, 2003
Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur, Georgia
This is a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the
hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for it has been time out of mind:
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
the love,
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and
curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do
not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in
the world.
Down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Among all those who had followed Jesus, including the twelve men that he had specially chose, at the end only a group of women remained. After his arrest, all the rest had fled that night or drifted away over the next couple of days. Some fled to protect themselves from the same fate. Others drifted away after news of his death, realizing he was not the Messiah after all. According to Mark’s account, among his many followers only some women had watched in horror as their beloved leader was strung up on a cross like a common criminal.
They had followed Jesus and provided for him since the beginning of his public ministry in Galilee. They had known Jesus and believed in him. They had left everything behind to follow him. They loved him. But they had watched helplessly as he suffered a humiliating execution. They witnessed the torture, the pain, the blood, and the agony of the cross. And yet they stayed to the bitter end when Jesus gave his last cry and breathed his last breath. They looked on as his torn and lifeless body was taken down.
Though they could hardly walk, they had followed at a distance and seen where they had put his body, in a tomb cut from a rock. When a large stone was rolled to cover it, all their dreams were buried along with him. With no hope for the future, everything they did that day and the next must have been a torture for them, with every fiber of their being crying out, “What’s the use! Why go on?”
Three of the women rose early the first day of the week to go on and do what little they could. They had decided to go to the tomb and at least give Jesus a decent burial, taking with them spices to properly anoint the body. They walked in silence until one of them suddenly remembered the large stone blocking the entrance to the tomb and wondered aloud who they could get to help them move it. But when they came to the tomb, they saw that the rock was already rolled away. They must have been afraid that the body had been snatched to be cast into the town dump or some such further humiliation. Terrified, they cautiously entered the tomb. Sure enough, the body was gone. But then they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side of the tomb.
He said to them, “Do not be afraid; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 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.”
They stood there and said nothing for who knows how long. Then “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 that is the ending of Mark’s Gospel. Wait a minute! That’s it? If the Gospel of Mark were made into a movie, this would be quite unsatisfactory. It ends way too abruptly. Too much is unresolved. We don’t even see Jesus alive again. In fact, in the original Greek, the last sentence ends with a conjunction as in mid-sentence. Some early readers of Mark’s gospel couldn’t stand this inconclusive ending, and two alternative endings were added decades later to the original manuscripts. Some of those endings we could have done without, like the verses where people are encouraged to handle poisonous snakes as a sign that they believe in the gospel. Once when Larry Jones performed his unique poem/dance “Vine Snake Celebrate,” one person told me they feared Larry was going to pull out a real snake. That may have been as close as we’ve ever come to fulfilling that directive.
The other three gospels, which came later than Mark’s, each have stories about the risen Christ appearing to the disciples, such as the one we heard at the beginning of the service where Jesus gently calls Mary’s name and she recognizes his voice. I love the stories of unnamed disciples meeting Jesus as a stranger on the road to Emmaus and recognizing him when they invite him into their home, Thomas touching the wounds of the risen Christ, and Christ cooking up breakfast on the beach.
But Mark’s Gospel, in its original form, does not have a single resurrection story. Still, I have come to appreciate it just as much as the others. Terror, amazement, and fear just may be the most honest place to be on Easter morning. Of all the mysteries our faith invites us to contemplate, resurrection is the most astonishing and the most incomprehensible. It shatters all the categories with which we make sense of our world.
Patrick Wilson has said of Mark’s ending:
He refuses to tie the loose ends of the
gospel into a tidy bow of fleeting consolations. The final verses are
ambiguous: a promise greeted by fear; a pledge that we will ‘see him’ swamped
by our own uncertainty and dread. What Mark’s ending lacks in romance it makes
up for in shear realism. Isn’t this the world we live in? No enchanted world of
thinly fabricated happily-ever-afters, but a world in which we hold tightly to
the promise and fearfully tread our way through a tangle of doubts and
amazements.” (Christian Century, April 4, 1994)
When I realized that this was the year in the lectionary cycle of readings for Mark’s version of the resurrection, I called Kate Hauk. Last year on Easter, we were grieving the loss of Sarah Woolf. This Easter we are still grieving Sarah and now also are grieving the loss of yet another beloved teenager, Thomas Hauk. I called Kate to ask how she would feel about reading Mark’s resurrection story in the service today. She immediately said she would if it were the original version. That ending she could relate to; the one that ended with the women being seized with terror, amazement and fear, with no words to express all their feelings.
There is a tendency within Christianity to use the resurrection as a form of denial of death. You hear it when people say someone is better off now that they are dead. Karen’s grandmother died in February at the age of 101, after a remarkable life, leaving a rich legacy of love. For a good while, she had not recognized anyone, and showed no will to live. Maybe in cases like this, death can be welcomed.
Then there are deaths like those of Sarah and Thomas that come way too soon. These children and their families experienced suffering that was in no way natural. One day, near the end of those many long agonizing weeks as Thomas lay dying, Joan Durdin and I arrived to find Kate in bed beside him, looking as forlorn and despondent as I had seen her. It is one of the images I took with me into Holy Week this year.
Down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
I like the ending of the gospel of Mark because it refuses to offer easy or trite explanations to the questions of suffering and death. It may be just the gospel for us in the aftermath and ambiguity of another war.
From the messenger in the empty tomb, the women get neither consolation nor explanation, but they are told where they can find Jesus. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going on ahead of you to Galilee.” Did you notice that the fact that Peter and the disciples had utterly failed Jesus is not even mentioned? A new day has dawned, full of forgiveness and grace.
But why meet in Galilee? “Do you
know where Galilee is? Well, it’s nowhere special. It’s where Nazareth is, the
hometown of Jesus. You might recall that when someone was told that Jesus was
the Messiah, that person cynically remarked, ‘Can anything good come out of
Nazareth?’ There was nothing special about Galilee.” Maybe that’s it. Maybe that is what is special. We are told that
we will meet Jesus in the ordinary places of life. He will meet you on your
home turf, in the midst of your daily routine. The resurrection itself happened
on an ordinary day. “After all, Easter, ‘The first day of the week’ was the
Jewish workday. At the beginning of the workweek after the rest of the Sabbath,
they go back to what they were doing in daily life. Everything was getting back
to normal now after the events of the past violent weekend. And the risen
Christ was raised on that day, that ordinary beginning-of-the-work-week-day.”
(William Willimon. Pulpit Resource 31(2): 18-19)
A few weeks ago, a
small group of us gathered for Kate’s birthday. In previous years, Alexis and
Thomas had taken Kate out for her birthday. Not knowing exactly how to
celebrate this year, Kate had accepted Sally Sandidge’s invitation to dinner
and Sally had invited a few others to join them. Among them was Donna Woolf.
What I noticed as we ate and talked was how naturally Thomas and Sarah entered
our conversations—stories of ordinary time remembered in the context of our
conversations. I could feel Christ’s presence around that table as the spirits
of these beloved children were being resurrected.
On Easter, death has not been removed from our lives. Each and every one of us sitting here will die someday. But God has shown at Easter that it is not the final word. Suffering has not been taken from us. All of us will face suffering in our lives and those around us. But God has entered into our suffering and pain and shared it. But God has entered our lives and shares in our suffering and pain. God has shown at Easter that death is not the final word. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised, he is not here.” Jesus has gone on ahead of us to be present in all the Galilees of our ordinary living.
Christ the Lord is Risen.