When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they could go and anoint Jesus’ dead body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. 3 They were saying to each other, “Who’s going to roll the stone away from the entrance for us?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away. (And it was a very large stone!) 5 Going into the tomb, they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right side; and they were startled. 6 But he said to them, “Don’t be alarmed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.[a] He has been raised. He isn’t here. Look, here’s the place where they laid him. 7 Go, tell his disciples, especially Peter, that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.” 8 Overcome with terror and dread, they fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (CEB)
Reactions to the Resurrection: Our
Biblical Alter Egos, Week One
Arlington
Street stretches through the heart of Boston, packed with shops and businesses,
and often packed with people. But it
also lies just three or so blocks from the site where two young brothers
detonated a pair of homemade bombs filled with shrapnel—ball bearings and nails—that
killed three people and injured over 175 more at the finish of the famed Boston
marathon.
Where
Arlington intersects with Boylston Street, Boston police would set up a
barricade in the wake of the Monday bombings.
The following morning, on Tuesday, when people began to return to the
scene, a woman placed a bouquet of flowers underneath the Wood & Wire sign
advertising the business that had provided the barricade.
By
noon on Tuesday, a dozen more bouquets had joined this first one. Added to it were Boston t-shirts, lashed to
the barricade with plastic ties. Added
to those were cards written to the three dead, including an eight-year-old
child.
Out
of a place once occupied by the deafening silence that follows an explosion,
new voices were springing up, spreading out like kudzu across a barren crime
scene.
And
how fitting a tribute to the circumstances of the Resurrection, and the
discovery of the empty tomb. A barren
remnant of a crime—the wrongful execution of Jesus Christ—remains, silent, for
though we wished it otherwise in Palm Sunday, stones do not speak. The stone that guards the entrance to the
tomb is as silent as the dead it protects.
Until
Easter.
Until
that day when that stone is rolled aside, the tomb is discovered empty, and the
silence of the world is broken. Fanning
out across the world, the disciples and Paul and others begin the long,
laborious process of building this wayward little Jesus Movement into the
Christos Ekklesia—the Christian Church.
Except
that isn’t quite what happens here, in Mark’s telling of the Easter saga. Now, my intent behind this new sermon series
was to recall that traditionally, the church held Easter to be not just a day,
but a season—a 50-day long season that culminates in the story of Pentecost, of
the coming of the Holy Spirit as depicted in Acts 2. And so for the remainder of the season of
Easter, we will be keeping the story of Easter alive by looking at how
different followers of Jesus reacted to the news on the day of the
Resurrection, and we begin today with the story of Mary Magdalene and her
reaction to the discovery of the empty tomb, as told by Mark.
All
four of the Gospel writers are unanimous—Mary Magdalene discovers the empty
tomb. John depicts her as flying solo,
returning to the tomb alone, but Mark, Luke, and Matthew have her as a part of
a group of other female disciples of Jesus.
I could have just as easily, I suppose, entitled this sermon, “Am I
Salome?” but I think more of us know who Mary is.
In
any case, we are left with what has to be the most unsatisfying of all the
Easter stories, for two reasons: one, you’ll notice that there are no
appearances by the Risen Christ; there is only the empty tomb. And second, the story of the empty tomb ends
not in testimony, of the sharing of the discovery like in all the other
Gospels, but in flight from the empty tomb and a fear-induced silence over
everything that has just taken place.
And
we should feel permission to be unsatisfied with this ending, because the editors
of the New Testament were themselves.
The Gospel of Mark has two different endings which follow verse 8, but
they were not a part of the earliest manuscripts—Eusebius, the fourth-century
Christian and church historian, attested that the most accurate copies of Mark’s
Gospel simply ended here, at verse 8. In
other words, verses 9-20 were likely shanghaied onto Mark’s Gospel later on.
I’m
not saying any of this to impugn Scripture—it is, was, and will always be the
inspired Word of God. But if I’m honest
with you…if I had been there, wherever there is, when the canon was closed, I
would have probably asked for Mark to be closed at verse 8 as well.
And
it would not just be for the sake of historical authenticity, it would be also
to keep true to the spirit of Mark’s Gospel.
One of my New Testament professors in seminary was an expert on Mark’s
Gospel, and she always referred to it as “a Passion story with an extended
introduction.” When you consider that
Mark is 16 chapters long, and the theme of Jesus’ death largely dominates the
Gospel from chapter 8 onwards, fully half of this story revolves around it.
And
so when Mark finally does arrive at the empty tomb, the work of God has already
been done, as evinced by the words of the angel who is seated where Jesus once
lay—“He is not here; He has been raised!”
And
that’s it. Mark’s version of the empty
tomb is, in a Zen-like way, absolutely perfect.
This is an incredible story—as New Testament scholar Douglas Hare put
it, “We must remember that the story was no more believable in the first
century than in our own day. It must
have seemed as ridiculous as some of the tall tales that are presented as “news”
in or supermarket tabloids.”
But
unlike the stories of, I don’t know, some B-list celebrity growing a second
head or whatever, there is no sensationalism.
Unlike the tabloid purveyors of today, Mark does not gild the lily. Instead, to take from Hare again, “The story
is told in a simple, restrained fashion, without any defensive attempt to make
it less incredible than it is.”
It
is so incredible, in fact, that at least initially, it cannot be told. The empty tomb is so shocking, so
fear-inducing, that there are literally no words for the women who have
discovered it, even when the words are spoon-fed to them by an angel. That is how incredible this is.
That
is how incredible, how against-the-grain, how world-turning-upside-down, how
life-changing, how mind-boggling, how truly unbelievable the power of God
really is.
And
because we took a bit of that power from God way back in the Garden of Eden—when
Adam and Eve took from God the knowledge of good and evil—we can do the same
thing to ourselves—do things so incredible that the only thing they can inspire
from us is wordlessness.
Sometimes
those things are good. But I fear that more
often than not, those things that inspire such silence are evil. Things like 9/11. Things like the assassinations in the 1960s
of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Jr. And things like the Boston Marathon bombings.
What
happened this week in Boston is something that I have no doubt we will also remember
in vivid detail—where we were when we heard the news, how we followed the
manhunt, and the reactions of all our leaders to the news that the younger
brother was captured alive. In the vague
recesses of our memories, the details of any one day, any one week, or even any
one month may escape us, as they have become victims to the cutting room floor
by the ruthless editor that exists in our own mind that decides what to keep in
our long-term memories and what to discard.
And
based on the initial silence of Mary—and the other Mary, and Salome—we might
well wonder if Jesus Christ would indeed become forgotten to all but the
historians, a footnote in Israel’s struggle for liberation, another in a long
line of claimants the mantle of the Messiah.
But
because we know their story—simple, incredible, ungilded though it is—we know that
at some point, they must’ve broken their silence and shared with the world what
they saw and felt.
And
it was so this week in Boston. After the
bombings, you could see the silence in the streets. Arlington, Boylston, and much of the city
center was barricaded off.
Deserted. Empty. Silent.
But
like the women who followed Jesus, we returned.
They returned to the empty tomb bearing spices to honor the fallen
Christ. And we brought bouquets of
flowers, t-shirts, cards, poetry, anything we could offer, to honor the fallen
of yet another violent episode of American history.
Like
Mary, our initial reaction was one of stunned, terrified, dreadful silence.
But
time passed. The story got told. And, like kudzu, the reactions to the story
grew and grew.
The
story of the Resurrection grew into a church.
And the story of Boston has grown into things like the crowdsourcing of
over $1 million to pay for the victims’ medical expenses. It has grown into things like Big Papi, David
Ortiz, shouting to the heavens, “This is OUR FUCKING CITY” and the FCC doesn’t even
object. And it will continue to grow as
the story continues to be told.
Am
I Mary? If I were to discover the empty
tomb, would I stay silent, and for how long?
Perhaps
the best way to answer that question would be to look at yourself over the past
week. When I heard about Boston, was I
shocked and stunned into silence? For
how long? When did I start talking about
it? And most importantly, when did I start
regenerating my faith in God and in one another by seeing the reactions of
others to the same horrors I have just seen?
Because if the bombings were a Crucifixion, within our reactions lies a Resurrection.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
April
21, 2013
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