On the Loose

Text: Mark 16:1-8

Easter Sunday

Entropy notwithstanding, it seems that the preference of the universe for life is strong. We do not know about how things are on the billions of life-possible planets that scientists think exist in God’s universe, but we do know how things are here. Every surface on this world is covered with life. Forests overtake cleared land in a generation. Flowers grow at bombed sites. The smallest organisms find habitats in the pores of larger ones. Weird plant-like things thrive at the bottom of the ocean, extracting energy from the heat of the center of the earth.

Yet for all, in the end order falls apart. Organisms lose their organization, and each living thing finally dies. Death is of the essence of life. It is what we share with every living creature. It is the one certainty. Death seems always to prevail. It is the one thing we know for sure.

So it should not surprise us that the women who come to see Jesus lying in his tomb are both terrified and amazed. The first Easter morning started with alarm, not joy. They had come to prepare the body of Jesus, which had been placed there out of expediency on the sabbath. But Jesus was not there. “He is not here.” The man in white who greets them points out the obvious. But his words are not helpful. He has been risen, the man says, which does not comfort them. It is not possible.

Imagine you go to the gravesite of a good friend—someone who is perhaps also your mentor and teacher. Someone who has died in tragic circumstances. When you arrive, you are greeted not by a tombstone as you expect, but an opened grave, and a man in a white suit, who tells you that your friend is not there. That he had risen from death. Would you be joyful? Or would you be terrified and amazed, as the women were? Shaking, it says more literally, and slightly out of their minds. And which would be more frightening? That that man was pulling your leg, or that he was telling the truth?

The women were prepared for reality, for what always was and what they knew always would be. To grieve, and cope, and to deal, and to witness the end of the story. To close the book. But there is no closure here.

The Gospel of Mark, unlike the other three Gospels, ends this abrupt way. After the announcement by the man in white, nothing more happens, there are no more shows, miracles, or sermons. Just silence. Open-ended, unresolved, the story stops with the women leaving, awestruck by this unexpected event, and also silent. It is on the face of it an unsatisfactory ending. What about the appearances of Jesus? What about his last words of instruction, his meal with the disciples, his proof to Thomas? They are not in this version. The ending has proved so annoying that over the centuries people have tacked on new ones, ones that make more sense to us and align more with what we expect. But those are almost certainly not in Mark, which ends as we just heard it. With an opened tomb, silence, and an open and unknown future.

The other Gospels prepare for us a soft landing. We, the disciples, get to see Jesus again, be with him one more time. See him standing here, not suffering on a cross. Share one last meal, one last loaf of bread, one last conversation. A chance to say goodbyes. To try to understand.

But not in the Gospel of Mark. The other Gospels make us feel better and try to repair our disappointment. But in doing so, and though they make the story wonderful, they also make it somehow less ( ) stunning.

Mark, for whom everything has always been urgent and quick through the whole Gospel, just stops.

Stops writing. But we, borne along like his characters, running full tilt, cannot just stop. We, like Mary and Mary and Solome at the tomb, are flung into the future, full of questions, anticipation, and trepidation.

Mark starts with these words: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.” It is just the beginning. It is not the whole story. It is not the complete story. It is not the final story. It does not wrap things up. It does not settle things. Its goal is not to make things clear. It is just the beginning.

To be at the beginning of something great is scary. Like sitting at the top of the first drop on a roller coaster. Stomach churning, which would be another translation of the emotions of the three women. Perhaps you know the feeling. Apprehension plus excitement, in equal parts.

Mark makes much in his Gospel about knowing and not knowing. The disciples are always a little clueless. They are made out to be foolish. But they are not foolish, just human. They, like we, know enough to get by, to live as creatures, to love and work and play.

Most things in life are mostly the same. This is good, and it is one reason why we can understand how the women felt at the tomb of Jesus two thousand years ago in a different culture and different place.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead—he is risen, he is not here—makes no sense. What they thought they knew, they did not. What we think we know, we do not. What they thought was the end of things was not. What they thought was a closed door was discovered to be an open one.

We learn much from the resurrection of Christ. We learn that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death. But mostly we learn that we know almost nothing. That what we think of as certain is not certain.

In a sense, the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John try to tame the story of Jesus. If that is possible for an account of the divine and human son of God who rises from the dead. But they tie up loose ends and move us gently from the ministry of Jesus and the hopes of his people to a new revelation. We know where everything is, we know where Jesus is and we learn where he is going and what we are to do then.

But in Mark, everything is up for grabs.

A joy of the resurrection of Jesus is that we discover that our certainty—even the certainty of death—is an illusion. And that there is much more beyond what we know. That things we cannot imagine are possible. And that we can be profoundly surprised. The vastness of the unknown future is open to us.

Jesus is risen. Jesus is on the loose.

Palm Passion

Text: Mark 1:11–11 and Mark 14:1—15:47

Palm Sunday

The gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels. It is also moves the quickest. It starts fast and ends suddenly. Scenes are jammed together, one thing happens immediately—Mark’s favorite word—immediately after the other. Short and sweet.

Which is also what sermons are supposed to be on this day. Preachers are advised, the handbook says, not to preach at all, or at least hardly at all. The text is supposed to speak for itself.

Except it does not. At least the way things are arranged on this unusual, double-named Sunday. Palm and Passion. One moment Jesus is greeted as a king would be. The next, as we will hear about in a few minutes, he is condemned to death, mocked as king, and executed. Immediately, it seems, from glory to humiliation.

But that abruptness is not in the Gospel story. It is an artifact of the church’s fear that people would skip the Passion, the church’s crabbiness that many people go from the triumph of the Palms to the triumph of Easter, skipping over the carefully detailed drama of Holy Week and the cross altogether. So we get the Passion now, a few days premature.

In Mark, the frantic pace of things at the beginning of the Gospel is not present at the end. Time flows differently, more slowly. Two thirds of Mark is about the life of Jesus up until his arrival in Jerusalem about which we just heard. (There are no palms, by the way, in Mark’s of account of Palm Sunday, or in Luke’s or Matthew’s. They appear only in John). One third of Mark’s Gospel is about Jesus’ last week. And half of that is about the trial and execution. It is as if the camera zooms quickly in from the big picture, gradually slowing down as it focuses on what Mark, as director, wants us to see as the main point.

Organizing the readings as we do today is like showing clips rather than the whole movie. We would do well sometime, on this Sunday of the year, to read the entire Gospel of Mark. It would take about ninety minutes. What we would learn is that it is all one story about one Jesus.

We would learn that something happens with Jesus from the time he arrives in Jerusalem until his trial. It is not just empty space. We would hear some of the most memorable parts of Mark that we now miss. Of Jesus tossing the check-cashers and religious objects salespeople from the Temple (calling these honest merchants a bunch of thieves). Of his teaching that with enough faith we might throw a mountain into the sea, that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s but to God that which is God’s. And of his admiration for the widow who gave all she had. We would hear him denounce those in authority and predict the destruction of God’s house, the Temple. We would see that the death of Jesus is the predictable end of the life of Jesus. And that he is killed not because people hate the good but because Jesus actions make them as worried, angry, afraid, and protective as we would be, and often are.

We would learn that the life of Jesus is not a bunch of episodes, like beads on a string, any more than ours is. One event does not explain or validate another, nor does one thing undo another. The ministry of Jesus is not vindicated by his Palm Sunday procession. And that triumph is not undone by the events of the Passion. And that sorrow is not overturned by his resurrection, which we celebrate one short week from today. His life, like ours, was glory and sadness woven together; hopes met and unmet, both; plans both fulfilled and frustrated, like ours.

Perhaps it seems absurd to say so, but in Mark it is not all about Jesus. In Mark, the people by the roadside cry “blessed is the coming kingdom” not, as in the other Gospels, the king. The joy of Palm Sunday, and the heartbreak of Passion Sunday, and the hope of Easter Sunday are all one story, the same story. We cannot, do not, have one without the rest. It is a story about a new realm, God’s kingdom. And about our deep longing for it, and about our struggles finding it, and about the promise of hope given to us by God through Christ that it will come to be. It is a story that speaks for itself. Let us hear it. (reading follows).