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Text — Mark
16:1-15
When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of
James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.
And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen,
they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will
roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they
looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already
been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man,
dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were
alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; 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.” So 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.
Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first
to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out
and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and
weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her,
they would not believe it. After this he appeared in another form to two
of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and
told the rest, but they did not believe them. Later he appeared to the
eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided
them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not
believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go
into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.
I thought it would be good, on Easter Sunday, to risk shocking you with
the fact that the Bible gives us no description of Jesus’ resurrection.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say anything like: he started breathing
again, so he got up, walked out of the tomb. It doesn’t say he
dematerialized or vaporized from the tomb. It doesn’t say what happened
to the molecules of Jesus’ body. It doesn’t say that his spirit or his
soul left the tomb but his body stayed behind. The Bible says nothing
like that.
What the Bible does describe are various appearances of Jesus to
his disciples, after his resurrection. We’re told what the
disciples experienced. This focus on experience — including our
experience — is very important and I’ll come back to it.
Here another fact. Even these accounts of appearances vary from gospel
to gospel, and vary even within gospels. Sometimes, Jesus is
unrecognizable. They think he’s another person, a gardener, or a
stranger walking along the road. Sometimes he walks through doors like a
ghost. Sometimes he proves he isn’t a ghost by eating fish or a piece of
bread with the disciples. In one account, he tells Mary Magdalene not
to touch him. In the next chapter, he tells Thomas to touch him
and even to put his finger in his side. To Paul, Jesus appears as a
blinding light.
And here’s something else that is so bizarre it’s hardly ever mentioned.
In Matthew’s gospel, it says that the very moment Jesus died, not three
days later, others who had died previously — ordinary people — rose from
the tombs and appeared on the streets of Jerusalem. How do we deal with
that?
Why did the writers of the Bible include so many conflicting versions
and put them side by side? Were they sloppy editors? Or, do these
differences tell us something. Do they get us to read and understand in
a deeper way? I’m not suggesting that this was necessarily a conscious
decision, but are the details in conflict because we’re not supposed to
get hung up on them? We’re not supposed to latch on to them the wrong
way and confuse them with what the “Easter event” means for us.
In terms of the molecules of Jesus body, or the molecules of other
people’s bodies climbing out of graves, the resurrection of Jesus is
challenging to believe. And yet we embrace it because it points to
something about resurrection from death in our own experience —
something we trust with our hearts, sometimes in spite of our minds.
A lot has changed since Jesus lived on earth. We know about molecules
now. Life is easier, for most of us, than it was then. We live longer
and not as close to the edge. But even for us, even for people in this
relatively more comfortable world, life is still hard for most people.
It takes a lot of energy. It takes work and concentration. It’s
complicated. It takes a lot of adrenaline.
There’s a part of every one of us that feels close to “not making it.”
Disaster can happen at any time. We can get sick. We can have a car
accident. Chaos, or evil, can crash into our lives just as they crashed
in on Jesus’ life. That’s actually what makes Jesus’ life interesting.
If he’d been a successful urban preacher in Jerusalem, we never would
have heard of him. All our accomplishments can wash away — and, in the
long run they will wash away — like sand on a beach. We feel close to
the edge. We are close to the edge. This is our human condition — the
condition of Adam.
The question lurking behind all of this is: where will God be when the
beautiful surface of life breaks down? Will God be with us? Will we know
it? Will it be okay? Will we still be blessed, then?
The Easter stories vary in terms of the surface details. But the surface
isn’t what Easter is about. What the gospels say consistently is that
Jesus was not raised by human effort. He wasn’t by his will power. The
disciples didn’t raise Jesus by their will power. They abandoned him. On
the surface of his earthly life, Jesus did not “make it.” He died with 2
criminals.
But God raised Jesus from the dead. God took a physical, human,
struggling, on-the-edge, mortal life that went over the edge … and God
gave it a different form of life.
This is what Easter is about. Where life runs out, resurrection life
rushes in. It’s not about human power by itself. It’s not about what we
do. It’s about what God does.
Remember from our text when the angel said to the disciples, “Jesus is
going ahead of you, to Galilee. There you will see him.” Galilee is
where they came from, and Galilee is where they were going back to
fishing, trying to make it.
Later today, or tomorrow, we will go back to trying to make it. We have
work to do, and we need to do it. But there’s more going on. Here we
come back to that emphasis on experience that I mentioned — the
disciples’ experience and our experience. Our experience is that God is
active beyond what we do and beyond our powers and plans.
You may see your life fall apart as the disciples did, and Jesus did.
But Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee. He will appear. There you
will see him. Our bodies are mortal like Jesus’ body. They wear out, or
they break down. But Jesus is going ahead of you. Be on the lookout.
There you will see him.
You may feel abandoned by God. Your life may not be what you thought it
would be. A long time ago, Jesus’ life wasn’t what he thought it would
be. Jesus is going ahead of you. Keep the faith. There — ahead of you —
you will see him.
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