Easter Sermon 2024

I was really pleased with how my Easter sermon went--the written copy will be lacking a bit of the energy, but you'll get the general idea:

Mark 16: 1-8

Are you wondering what happened next? Are you wondering if we forgot to copy a paragraph or two as we prepared bulletins? I assure you, we did not. The Gospel of Mark ends here.

Are you feeling shortchanged at this point? We might say, “Don’t we even get to see the resurrected Jesus?” It’s much more common to hear the Gospel of John on Easter Sunday, and I see why. The writing teacher in me sees the other Gospels as much more developed. The ending is more satisfying. We get a first hand resurrection, not news of the resurrection.

You might be remembering different endings of Mark, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Most Bibles include a few more verses to develop this story in ways that are more similar to the other Gospels. But those verses were added much later, in the second century or later, and those endings were based on the endings of the other Gospels which had been written by then.

My New Testament professor would say that we’re missing the Resurrection appearances, but the Resurrection is here. We’ve got an empty tomb, after all. We know we have the Resurrection because of what happens after the women run away. They may have been too terrified to speak in the closing moments of the Gospel, but clearly they got over their fear. We’re here, in a church, hearing the story, with other versions of it if we want something different. We can infer that although the women ran away amazed and terrified, that amazement won the day. Or maybe, as other events happened to corroborate what they heard at the empty tomb, the women found their voices. That’s often how it works when we experience a traumatic event.

After those earliest days, people went out to all the ends of the earth to tell that story. They wouldn’t have done that if there had been no resurrection, if they had just lost a teacher who told them interesting parables in a poetic way.

In so many ways, the original ending of Mark, which we have here, is a fitting end to this particularGospel. The Gospel of Mark is short, and the pace is quick, even hurried. There’s an urgency to Mark, and the ending fits with this urgency. “Go, tell”—and the women do. No one lingers as they try to sort out who this man is and how he knows so much. They run away in both amazement and terror.

Amazement and terror might be a shorthand way of summing up the whole Gospel. Throughout the Gospel, we see people amazed and terrified—baffled and frightened and amazed and terrified. People don’t know what to make of what they’ve seen Jesus do, and of all the Gospels, this one shows a Jesus who is more reticent, more likely to tell people NOT to tell what they’ve seen. This ending fits the rest of the Gospel, with women leaving in a state that is both amazed and terrified. And it fits the story—Jesus raised from the dead? Even now, thousands of years later, it’s a profoundly disturbing ending. Think of our own lives, all the times we’ve prayed for a different ending. We might pray for a miracle cure, but once our loved ones die, we understand that act as final. The women in the Gospel of Luke have been through a trauma, witnessing the crucifixion of Jesus—and now, news of resurrection, along with an empty tomb. The urge to run away makes sense.

The women are sent back to Galilee, back to where the ministry of Jesus began. Jesus waits for them there, for the ones who watched him die, the women. You may remember from our reading last week that the women watch him die on the cross from a distance. Mark doesn’t give us the crucifixion scene of support at the base of the cross. Jesus dies alone, but he comes back. The women are told to tell the men, and Peter by name, Peter, the one who denied Jesus. Jesus waits for them there, in the place where it all began, waiting for the ones who ran away, for the ones who denied him, for the ones who deserted him along the way. Jesus waits for us too. Nothing we have done is too awful for redemption.

Some Bible scholars point out that the men are headed towards Galilee, and one Bible scholar says that they were probably running for their lives. But Jesus has gone on ahead of them. This detail, too, fits nicely with the resurrection message. We may think we’re on the run, but Jesus waits just a bit on up the road. As always, Jesus is one step ahead.

This ending speaks to the mystery that we proclaim each week: Christ has died, Christ has risen. The ending, both of the Gospel of Mark and of the work God is doing in the world, is open ended, a work in progress. The women are sent out with a message and a task—and so are we. The story is not complete—why do we think we should get a tidy ending?

Some Bible scholars see this ending as elegant. The women run away, too terrified to tell anyone. But clearly, something changed. We don’t get to hear the particulars, and that leaves us free to imagine a different ending, or to imagine all the ways it might have happened. More importantly, this bare bones ending invites us to enter into the ending. The story ends this way—with a non-ending—and that invites us to insert ourselves into the story.

In some ways, Easter is about endings. The Roman empire kills Jesus and believes they have rid themselves of a rabble rouser, an insurgent. The religious authorities kill Jesus and believe that they will win favor with Rome. But Easter reminds us that earthly powers don’t have the final word. Earthly empires don’t get to write the ending. Earthly empires aren’t nearly as powerful as they would want us all to believe.

We may find it hard to believe, this idea that good will prevail, that love wins in the end. We live in a world where it seems the rich will prevail. We live in a world where the rich evade justice and the poor are punished. But Easter promises a different ending.

Like the women in today’s Gospel, we may have trouble processing this idea. Life changes, and often faster than we can process the information. We're left struggling, grasping for meaning, refusing to believe the good news that's embodied right before our eyes. We don't recognize the answer to our prayers, our desperate longings. We're stuck grieving in the pre-dawn dark. Or we are too terrified to even talk about what we’ve seen.

That’s O.K. Jesus waits for us, back in the place where it all began. Jesus waits for us to catch up, just a little further on up the road.

Each and every day, God commits to the forces of creation and resurrection. Each and every day, God invites us to gather together, to begin our ministry anew, to join God in overthrowing the forces of brutality with the force that is love. Each and every day, I hope we say yes, even if we are terrified, even as we are amazed.

Empire is so much more fragile than it seems. Chaos always lurks at the margins—and sometimes chaos moves front and center. But God has a larger vision and invites us to be part of it.

Today and every day, I hope we say yes.

And rest assured that if we say no, we’ll get more invitations. God will not abandon us. No—God will wait for us, on up ahead, and when we get there, we’ll realize that Jesus has been by our side all along.