Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son
Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting
life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord's
resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving
Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and
the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Do we have any House of Cards fans here today? How about The Walking Dead? Or Bloodline?
Our “binge watching” of these shows has become a national epidemic. Who can
resist? The action ends on a suspenseful note that pushes us to download “just
one more episode.” CBS even ran a fake “Public Service Announcement” on April
Fools’ Day this year. The story said that TV stars would appear in ads to warn
us about the need to take walks and showers and get some sleep, instead of
watching one of these shows for days at a time.[1]
While I’m not that far gone, I did recently sit in front of the TV in shock and
disbelief, clicking the Netflix button backwards and forwards several times,
when the Season 3 finale of House of Cards was over. “No, it can’t be!” I
shouted desperately to my TV set. “I can’t wait a whole year to find out what Claire Underwood is going to do!”
Two thousand years ago, the author of
Mark’s Gospel understood something about cliff-hanger conclusions, as well.
Matthew, Luke, and John give us smooth and happy endings to the tragic
crucifixion story: Jesus himself appears to the women in the garden. He
commissions the disciples. He serves them breakfast on the beach. He ascends in
glory into heaven. But in the original ending to Mark’s Gospel (the ending that
we hear today) we get an empty tomb and women who flee in “terror and
amazement,” too afraid even to speak of what they have seen and heard. In Mark,
the horror of Jesus’ death so completely fills the hearts and minds of the
women that they cannot fathom resurrection. They don’t remember that Jesus told
them that he would rise again. They don’t remember his teaching or his power. They
remain hopeless and afraid, deaf and blind to what God has just done. This
jagged, open ending makes me want to holler at the Bible just like I did at my
TV set. “Noooo ….The story can’t stop here! Easter can’t end with fear and
disbelief! I want the happy Easter
ending! I don’t want to be stuck with fear and human failure all the way until
next Easter! Somebody fix this, please! Tie up these loose ends!”
And throughout Christian history,
that’s exactly what scholars and scribes have tried to do. In our Bible, we have
not just one, but two, extra
conclusions that ancient scholars tacked on in order to fill out Mark’s
original cliff-hanger ending. Even trying to get the church computer software
to print out today’s bulletin without these extra verses thrown in was
quite a challenge. More recent scholars, too, offer all kinds of speculation as
to why Mark would leave us with fear and silence: maybe he fell over dead or
was arrested as he was writing the final lines? Maybe the surviving manuscripts
were torn? Maybe the real ending got lost? But all of us binge-watching Netflix
users know the real reason why Mark ends with the women fleeing in fear: It’s
because the author wants us to rush back into the story, thirsty for more,
searching for what’s going to happen next.
Without a Netflix button to push or
another episode to watch, we are forced by Mark’s unfinished ending to return
to the story the only way we know how: by turning back to the beginning and reading
it again … and again … and again. Mark wants us to read it until the story
becomes our story, until we begin to see our lives through its lens. When I’m
“into” the House of Cards show,
consumed by episode after episode, I start to dream about the characters. I
listen to NPR at breakfast and get confused between the political intrigue of
the show, and the real political intrigue in Washington. “Now, did that really
happen, or was that in the TV show?” I wonder, munching on my toast.
Mark wants for the Good News of Jesus
Christ, Son of God, to become the Good News for us, as well as for the original
disciples. He wants me to see myself in Galilee, back at home with the risen Jesus.
He wants me to join the frightened women and the clueless disciples there. He
wants me to hear the morning news about fires and floods and tragic shootings
in Kenya all mixed up with the stories of Jesus’ miracles and compassionate
healings, his death on a cross, and his empty tomb that resounds with the
mysterious words, “He has been raised.” Mark
wants me to stop and ponder my world, unable fully to separate my story from God’s
victory. Home in Galilee with the Risen Christ, I have to wonder: “Wait, is this
ugliness that I’m seeing the real picture, or is God creating beauty underneath
it somewhere?” “Wait, do I have to solve this problem by myself, or is this
situation in God’s loving hands?” “Wait, am I really alone here in my suffering, or is Jesus
with me?” That moment of hesitation, of questioning, is all that it takes to open me to God's waiting, transforming Spirit.
The resurrection is not some
theological doctrine that we can chart out on a piece of paper. It’s not
something that happened in order to teach us some lesson about God, or even
about humankind. It is an ongoing reality that, as Rowan Williams says, “is the
recreating of a relationship of trust and love on the far side” of death and
suffering. “We learn and assimilate [the truth of Easter] by the risk of living
it; to those on the edge of it, looking respectfully and wistfully at what it
might offer, we can only say, ‘You’ll learn nothing more by looking; at some
point you have to decide whether you want to try to live with it and in it.’”[2]
Today’s Gospel invites us to do more than “celebrate Easter.” It invites us to live Easter, with Jesus at our side.
Like the scribes of the early church,
I have trouble leaving us on this most joyous day in the silence of the women
at the tomb. For those of us who won’t feel that it is Easter today without a
resurrection appearance, I will share one that I found years ago in the book of Revelation. One day, while reading on my bed, I randomly came across the first
chapter of Revelation cited in a theology book. As soon as I read the words, I found myself kneeling on the floor, sobbing. What I read was as follows:
“When I saw [the Crucified One on the Throne] I fell at his feet as though
dead. But he laid his right hand upon me, saying, ‘Fear not, I am the first and
the last, and the living one; I died and behold I am alive for evermore, and I
have the keys of Death and Hades. Now write what you have seen, what is, and
what is to take place after this …’” Those of you who have read my blog,
“Writing What I See,” might recognize these words. Somehow, the Risen Christ
spoke to me in this passage, in all of his majesty, powerfully enough to lift
me out of my fearful silence, to open my lips like he must have eventually opened the
trembling lips of Mary, and Mary, and Salome. “There is more to the world than
what you can see with your eyes of fear,” he said. “You need to proclaim the
‘more.’ You need to live it. You need to make it your world.”
Today, Jesus is alive, surrounding us
with his presence here in Galilee, waiting for us to decide whether we are
going to proclaim him, not just with our words, but in our lives. The Story that we are invited to enter is more scandalous than anything that Hollywood screenwriters can dig up. It is more alluring than any mere human drama. It is full of the darkness that we know so well and the strange light that warms and intrigues us. The Easter Story dangles before us the biggest cliff-hanger ever: What is the role that we will be called to play? And the best yet: there's no need to fight the urge to hear it just one more time.
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