Message by John Brierly McCall, D. Min.
Mark 16:1-20
The great Yankees manager Casey Stengel once said: “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who haven’t made up their minds.” Good advice. So it may follow that on Easter morning the preacher’s job is to keep the doubts and questions about the resurrection away from those who haven’t made up their minds.
Not so. In our tradition, questions and dilemmas and differences of opinion are the norm. A vibrant faith depends on wrestling with issues and facing doubts and pushing through. Over the six weeks of Lent you’ve joined Elsa and me in looking at familiar themes from different angles. We’ve used the metaphors of water, body and blood, cup, cross, sword and palm.
And we’ve emphasized that there’s never been just one story line or one doctrine in the Christian community. That’s confusing in part because we collapse the various accounts together in mind and memory. So, when we think of Christmas we layer Matthew, Mark, and Luke together with a dash of the Little Drummer Boy and Santa Claus.
And when we think of Easter we imagine one unified, consistent account. In truth, there are six or more separate accounts in the Gospels and Epistles, but none of them tells us just what happened in the tomb between Good Friday and Easter morning.
We just heard the message the way Mark tells it. This is account is the earliest known. What’s there and what isn’t there matters. Specifically, Mark originally ended at verse 8, telling us three women disciples went early on the morning after the Sabbath to prepare Jesus’ body for proper burial. They worried about how they’d roll away the large stone that sealed the tomb. They were startled to see the stone had been removed and an unknown, unnamed young man (conspicuously not and angel) said Jesus had been raised and had already headed home to Galilee.
Mark ends his account saying the three women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” This is the story according to the earliest known authorities, maybe 30 years after Jesus’ death. The eye-witnesses were gone. The later Gospels hadn’t been written yet. Mark wrote:
“Jesus was crucified; he has been raised; he is not here; the place where they laid him is empty; he’s gone on ahead to Galilee; there you will see him.” (vs. 6, 7)
Just 8 of 665 verses in this Gospel – I have to believe Mark didn’t consider this most important part of story. But it didn’t stay that way for long. Right here on page 55 in our pew Bibles, we see that other, later authors weren’t satisfied with Mark’s account. They dressed it up, added more verses, added more mystery and drama. You can see for yourself how different the styles are… two or thee editors, at least, added other elements to the story to express their own convictions of what it all meant.
And from these additions still later authors wrote Matthew and Luke adding even more elements to the story… all of this happening 40, maybe 60, maybe even 80 years after Jesus’ death. From the first, simple account in these eight verses from Mark, the Christian church has grown to more than two billion adherents with elaborate narratives and doctrines that go far, far beyond the first claim.
So, here we are: Jesus’ disciples, gathered this fine Easter morning with all the Gospels tumbled together in our minds and memory as though there were one unified story, one claim, one explanation of the Easter mystery of an empty tomb. Instead we find that many different believers had many different ways of telling the story.
But they all give witness to the same truth: either the gruesome reality of Roman crucifixion was the last word or it wasn’t. Either Jesus’ death on the cross silenced his disciples or it didn’t. If hate and evil and death had prevailed, we wouldn’t have come today… we wouldn’t even know Jesus’ name.
And here I find enough. Enough. To be clear, what do we find? At least three things:
First, whatever happened on that first Easter, it shifted focus away from Jesus’ death to his enduring presence. The weary, terrified, scattered disciples came together again with great courage and power and when they realized Jesus was still among them.
Second, Jesus was the teacher and founder, but we, the disciples, are the church. And that first generation church learned very quickly that God’s love for world shown, in Jesus Christ, is not in the writing or in the telling of story, or literary skills of author. It’s in the living.
If we fail in that it really doesn’t matter how we try to explain what happened at the tomb.
Third, god’s intention for the church is to witness to the world in our own time as Jesus did in his time. Easter is “true” and empty tomb matters only to extent we show the living Christ to our broken world, proving by our deeds and witness that God is at work, that hate and destruction cannot prevail, that life, not death, is the final word.
A story brings the point home.
The Reverend Vernon Johns was Martin Luther King Jr.’s predecessor as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1960, Dr. Johns went to Baltimore to join a conference of white Southern Baptists and black National Baptists who were determined to address growing racial tensions. He was visibly annoyed during the worship service as a white pastor got all lathered about salvation and being true Christians being “washed in the blood of the Lamb.”
When Vernon Johns had the opportunity to speak, he boldly said: “The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross.”
He then turned directly to the preacher and said, “You didn’t preach about anything but the death of Jesus. If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday.
[What] about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man? That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’ own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him up there [on the cross]… I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a {bleep} what happened to him after the cross!”
I wish I’d been there…
It was because of Jesus’ God-filled, love-filled life that his living presence has drawn in disciples across the ages. A glorified Christ is not enough – even on Easter, We are disciples of a servant Jesus… because death could not silence him and hate could not kill his message.
We’re here to bear witness that Jesus has changed our lives; has taught us what matters;
shown us what to do and how to love; and has pointed us to life that endures beyond death. We are the proof of Easter.
In that spirit, Teresa of Avila, the 16th Century Spanish mystic, left a prayer with which I close:
Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
No hands but yours, no feet but yours;
Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion Looks out on the world,
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good
And yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now…
Amen!