Psalm 118:1-4, 14-24; Mark 16:1-8
April 4, 2021
- Confronting Silence in Light of the Resurrection
Of the many, many thousands of people who were executed by crucifixion in the Roman occupation of Judea or Israel, we do not know who any of them were except for one. There is a reason for that. The cross was the most brutal, most humiliating, most dehumanizing way to die that the Mediterranean world had ever seen. The Romans did not invent it, but they perfected it. They were very good at being very cruel. They did not just kill you; they wiped you from the face of the earth. People who went up on a cross became less than human and were never heard from again. Everyone knew that. Who was going to reminisce about some faceless wretch who was crucified? The cross meant the end of you, your humanity and your memory.
That is what makes Jesus so incredibly interesting. Not only did people remember this man who was mercilessly crucified, they wanted to be associated with him, and we still want to be associated with him. Hold that thought for a moment, we have not only committed to being connected to a crucified man from first century Judea who was considered hardly worth the wood that he was crucified on, but we have also relished the idea of being identified as one of his followers. This is the most important part of our identity. He is not only our friend, our brother, and our teacher, he is our Messiah, our Christ, our Lord, our King, and our Savior. Instead of making Jesus into nothing, the cross and his crucifixion made him into everything. It magnified his humanity and exposed his divinity and made us forever linked to him in our joy and exultation. That’s what we are doing here, by the way, and why we are trying to blow the roof off with our praise. The resurrection of our crucified King is tremendously good news: someone who was crucified has become our hope, our light, and our salvation! Jesus is risen, hallelujah and amen!
There is nothing better to talk about in this entire world. This is the greatest news of the ages, the message that is working this very moment to restore creation in the grace of God, the testimony that continues to shape the world, but it is also something that we struggle to really express sometimes. Like the women who left the empty tomb on that morning of the Resurrection, we might even keep our mouths closed in a world that needs more than anything to know that the God who conquered sin and death is alive for us ALL. There is hope and love out there worth proclaiming, if we can only get the words out.
And that’s the whole enchilada. That’s the whole issue, the problem, and the scandal. When it is time to really come to grips with the fact that Jesus who was crucified actually did rise from the grave and is alive, we struggle to apply that to our lives. We are less certain of what it means that Jesus was up and around and walking and talking and even eating. It is easy to cling to the safe, personal fact that “Jesus lives so I will live”, but it gets a lot trickier if his life means more than that in the world today. You see, when the ladies found an empty tomb, the last thought in their minds was “oh, I guess we are going to live forever in heaven.” Honestly, they were somewhere between “someone stole Jesus’ body” and “he has actually come back from the dead.” At some point, they had to accept that the world no longer worked in the same way it had always worked before. I need you to understand that fact, too. If Jesus had himself actually come back from the dead, all bets were off. The world was literally different. Sure, they may have seen Jesus do some pretty amazing things and even raise people from the dead, himself, but he was destroyed by the Roman Empire and the hate and fear of their Jewish religious leaders. Jesus’ own people turned on him; his own disciples betrayed him and abandoned him. No one came back from a cross and what the cross meant. That was the end. Death was the end, even for Jesus.
Have you ever learned something that changed your world? Sometimes those moments are normal, natural parts of growing up, like the fact that your parents were not always right. Hopefully, it was world changing when you realized God’s love for you in a deeply meaningful way. Sometimes, it can be a diagnosis. Maybe it was something someone kept from you. I have a friend in Blackstone who learned when he was an adult, father and husband, that his father had a whole other family in another country. While his father had a family here, he had a whole other family somewhere else. You’d better believe that changed his world when he learned that, and he probably did not really know what to say about it.
This section of Mark’s gospel is a passage that I both love and hate. This is how the gospel actually ends in the form we have it, with fear and silence. The women did not know what to think, what to believe. Just because Jesus told them that he would come back does not make it any easier to accept or process. You have to let go of reason, if you want to go down that road. The oldest, best copies of the Gospel of Mark end here. Maybe the rest of the story got destroyed, torn off and lost. That kind of stuff happened. Maybe Mark meant to leave the reader in silence and darkness. The ending did not sit well with people, however. Obviously, the ladies did eventually tell the others, so later scribes added these passages to that follow. They are clearly additions since they don’t fit Mark’s style or writing.
But something else had to be said. There are times in life when things have to be said. Things must be done. Stands must be made. This community has seen that, as well. There are moments and occasions when people must stand up for what is right and speak truth to power. Unless Jesus literally came back to life just to take us to heaven, his resurrection also means something in our world. There is more to the story for us here and now. The resurrection of Christ is meant to continue turning this world on his head. The life and love of our resurrected Lord is still working itself out in our families, our communities, our nations, and across the world. There is no part of life today that is isolated from the redeeming, transforming power of our resurrected Christ.
How did people even get an idea to create food distribution ministries or a free health clinic or a shelter for women and children or basic services assistance or housing help? The natural, human response is to do for yourself, to take care of you and yours, to mind your own business, and to get as much as you can for yourself. But Jesus’ very existence challenges those assumptions: live for others, even die for others, if that is the call of love.
Back in August, Forbes reported that over 900 medical staff had died fighting Coronavirus in America. Since the vaccines became available, the Guardian has reported more than 400 medical staff deaths in the US, people are still sticking with the sick, even to the cost of their own lives. I’m not sure if there is any real accounting of the full number of healers lost. I could not find one, but it is clearly many lives. It would have been easy for endangered healthcare professionals to quit and go home until the situation became safer, but they refused. They treated the sick, even if their own lives were at risk. That willingness to lay one’s life on the line for another is a recognition of the value of life. Jesus said that is the greatest love. That was his new command – that we love one another as he has loved us. He gave his life for our sake and frees us from death and sin to open the door for us to follow in his kind of sacrificial love – the love we celebrate today, the love that brought him back from the dead.
Maybe it is a good thing that Mark’s story really ends with silence, like having a blank at the end of a sentence for us to fill. The greatest news the world has ever received has been remembered today. What do we have to say about it? Will we stand and speak in the living love of our Lord? To God be the glory. Amen.