A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — November 22, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  John 18:33-37;  Mark 16:1-8 with Shorter & Longer Endings

…they fled from the tomb, for terror and

for they were afraid. — Mark 16:8

…Jesus himself sent out through them, from eas

of eternal salvation. — Mark 16 (shorter ending)

[Jesus] appeared to the eleven …he said to them,

the good news everywhere. — Mark 16 (longer ending)

Does it seem odd to hear the Easter story on Nov. 22?

One of my favorite Easter songs declares, “Ev’ry morning is Easter morning from now on!  Ev’ry day’s resurrection day, the past is over an gone.”¹

Well, it’s true.  Like all Sundays, this Christ the King Sunday, this last Sunday of the church liturgical year, is a celebration of the resurrection.  It is the Lord’s Day!  And on this day, we have come to the final chapter of the gospel according to Mark to hear this gospel’s story of the first Easter.

Chapter 15 ended with the death of Jesus and the burial of his body.  All his followers have abandoned him—all, that is, except for a few women who look on as he is crucified and then follow to see where he is laid to rest.   All is lost, it seems.  Now in Chapter 16 the sabbath is over, and it is very early in the morning on the first day of the week.  The women have come to Jesus’ tomb, and someone—an unidentified young man dressed in a white robe—tells them the good news of Easter, “You are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here… he is going ahead of you…”  That’s pretty much how we first received this good news, isn’t it, a message told to us by someone else?  At some point in our lives someone tells us that  Jesus has been raised and is alive.  There is new life.  And we believe it… or want to believe it… or want to want to believe it.  We probably wouldn’t be here otherwise.  But now what?

 

Sometimes it’s easier to know how to respond to tragedy than to triumph.  Those three women in Mark—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—they know what to do about death.  Be there and grieve.  Go back to the tomb.  Anoint the body.  Give Jesus a proper burial.  Put the finishing touches on death.  Closure.  But in the light what they find there—an empty tomb, the message of resurrection, a promise—now what?  We come to this story with benefit of hindsight and with having heard several other stories of the resurrection.  But that is still a good question for us.  Now what?

All of Mark builds up to that question.  And in Mark 16:8 the story crashes to an abrupt end.  The women flee in terror from both the tomb and that promise—“They said nothing to nobody, for they were afraid.”  That’s it.  The first Gospel account to be written has no risen Christ appearing and calling someone by name or granting “Peace” or telling everyone what to go and do.  There is no comfort here, no joy, just this stark scene and a future that is wide open, unknown, and uncertain.  In Greek, Mark’s story ends virtually in the middle of a sentence.  The very last word in Greek is a conjunction, the word gar, which means “because” or “for.”  A conjunction.  So the story simply has to go on… to continue the way stories always have to continue—namely, with that question, “Now what?”

That’s our question.  Do you recall the first words of the gospel according to Mark?  They are, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  That’s not Mark saying, “Now I’m going to begin telling you a story called ‘The good news of Jesus Christ.”  Rather, that’s Mark saying to his readers, “Here’s the title of my book.  This entire book is called ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.’”  So the end of the book is not the end of the story, it’s only the end of the beginning of the story.  The story simply must continue in the lives of readers and hearers of those words, “He has been raised; he is not here… he is going ahead of you.”  The entire book asks us, “Now what?”

But wait a minute.  There are those two longer, alternative endings to Mark’s book.  Yet most commentators and scholars have long agreed that these extra endings were not part of the original.  They are simply not there in the most reliable early manuscripts we have of Mark.  They exhibit a different writing style, and they seem to have been added years, even decades, later.  I recall hearing as a once that Mark crashes to such an end because the original scroll was torn and the original ending lost.  But most scholars now agree that Mark, indeed, ended his story right there with the women silent and afraid.  I think the alternative endings were added by readers who just could not tolerate the uncertainty of Mark’s ending, the ambiguity of leaving such a question unanswered for the reader.  So they created new endings woven together from the endings of the other three gospels and the ascension of Jesus in Acts, resulting in something of a mixture of all their answers to that question.

Now, it is obvious from the very existence of the story itself that the three women did not remain silent.  They must have gone and told someone, otherwise Mark could not have been able to tell their story and we would not remember them or what the young man said.  I can imagine that they were overcome by terror and amazement when they heard that young man in the tomb echo Jesus’ words on the Mount of Olives after the Last Supper:  “You will all become deserters… But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”  Remember how Peter was brought up short by the cockcrow after his three denials, just as Jesus had predicted.  Similarly the three grieving women hear Jesus’ words there in his tomb and suddenly become aware of their own desertion of Jesus.  Oh yes, they stayed closest of all of Jesus’ followers to the cross, but in Mark’s story they were looking on from a distance when he died—from a distance, not right there with him.

What led the women to eventually tell their story?  There’s no way to know.  Perhaps they followed after Jesus to Galilee and only after meeting him there were they able to tell their story.  But their hesitation, their fear, their amazement, and their silence all leave that question hanging for us—“Now what?”—since our own responses to Jesus’ resurrection involve at least some measure of all four—hesitation, fear, amazement, and silence.  Jesus goes ahead of us, summoning us to follow after him, yet we hold back, unsure.  One reason, I think, is that we want to know who Jesus is before we follow him.  But we cannot find that out second hand from books or other people.  The truth of the matter is that the only way we can begin to know who Jesus is is by following him.  So that Easter question—“Now what?”—becomes “What are we to do to follow Jesus?”

Now, I don’t have any exact answers for you.  The other gospels speak of things like going and gathering new followers, of proclaiming the good news to the whole world, of preaching forgiveness and repentance, and of teaching people to obey what Jesus has commanded—that is to say, the law of love, loving God with heart, soul, and mind, and our neighbor as ourselves.  In John, the risen Jesus says “Feed my sheep.”  These are all wonderful answers, answers that have inspired Christians through the centuries.  The various alternative endings of Mark echo many of these answers, as well as making a few rather odd additions.  I do think I’ll leave handling venomous snakes and drinking deadly poisons to someone else.

That church mission statement quoted in our worship bulletin offers an answer as well:  “As disciples of Jesus Christ we exist to let people know they matter to God by showing them they matter to us, in order that they may let others matter to them.”  There’s an explicit answer—a wonderful answer.  Our own IPC tagline is an answer, where we declare ourselves to be “a community of inquiry, prayer, and action.”  But in the oldest of the gospels, the author of Mark leaves that Easter question open for your consideration.  Now what are you going to do?

I’m not about to dictate an answer for anyone.  I can barely keep up with my own answers as I live them out and live my way into the next “Now what?”  When I first got sober nearly 27 years ago, I knew nothing for sure except that God didn’t want me to drink any longer.  And I came understand the reality of the line in the old hymn, “Amazing grace!  How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!”  As a practicing alcoholic, I couldn’t even imagine going to church.  When I was studying and then working as a scientist, I never would have guessed in a million years that someday I would go to seminary to become a pastor.  Kathy and I went off to San Francisco Theological Seminary with no idea we were headed to Lebanon, OR, for nine years and then on to this place with the odd name “Indianola” in a pagan land where the dominant religion is OSU football.  Who’s to know what Jesus will summon any of us to do next?  I need to keep living my own questions and answers, so there’s no way I can dictate yours.  What I do know is that Jesus has been raised, that he goes ahead of us, and that he summons you and me—each one of us!—to follow.  I know this despite all the times I have been filled with terror and amazement and held my tongue out of fear.

In the story, the young man—is he an angel?—tells the women to go and tell—go and tell the world that Jesus is not dead but alive.  Go and tell that God is a God of new beginnings, a God of surprises, a God who has done something wondrously inexplicable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.  They are told to go and tell, trusting that Jesus has gone on ahead of them in the midst of ordinary life, gone on ahead of them to Galilee, gone ahead of them to the place that is their home.  And the promise is that there, at home, in their daily lives, together with the Risen Christ, they will be part of turning dead dreams into living dreams, dead places into living places, dead love into living love.  So, what are they to do in response?  What are we to do in response?

There’s an old story about a wise old man and two village bullies who want to make a fool out of him.  They concoct a plan where one of them will capture a bird and hold it tightly in his hands.  Then the other will ask the wise old man, “What does my friend hold in his hands?”  They figure that the old man is wise enough that he just might figure that one out.  But the next question is a trap.  “Old man, is the bird alive or dead?”  If he answers “dead,” then the bully will open his hands and let the bird fly away.  If he answers “alive,” then a small, quick squeeze will crush the creature, and the bully will drop the dead bird at the old man’s feet.  Either way, they show him he isn’t so wise.

So they catch a bird.  And indeed, the wise old man figures out they have a bird.  But when they ask the second question—“Is it alive or is it dead?”—things don’t go so well.  The old man responds, “The answer is in your hands.  The life of the bird is in your hands."²

People, that Easter question is in our hands.  The one who was crucified… he has been raised… he is going on ahead of us.  Whether this message of hope lives or dies is in our hands.  It is up to us.  God has done a new thing, a strange and terrifying thing, an inexplicable thing beyond our control.  God has rolled away the stone and freed Jesus from death, and in so doing emptied out all the dead places in our lives and made them ready for new life.  It is Easter morning, the first day of the week, the first day of the new creation.  And God has left the story unfinished, counting on us to continue “the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God”—but not alone… No, we do not have to go on alone.  For the risen Jesus goes before us and with us.

Now what?  The answer is in our hands.

Amen and amen.

 

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¹ “Ev’ry Morning Is Easter Morning,” Richard Avery & Donald Marsh, Hope Publishing, 1972.

 

² This particular version of an old, much-told story is from a sermon by the Rev. Susan R. Andrews, Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church, Bethesda, MD.  The sermon and the idea of the entire book of Mark having the title “The beginning of the good news…”, (which is from David L. Bartlett, “Preaching the Lesson”) appear in  Lectionary Homiletics, April 23, 2000.