Sermon
Easter Day
Mark
16:1-9
The Rev. Shelby Ochs Owen
The Rev. Shelby Ochs Owen
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
“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.”
This
is the ending of Mark’s gospel? What kind of ending is THAT? Women fleeing the empty tomb saying nothing
to anyone? How bizarre! And where on
earth is Jesus, the one the women have come to anoint in death and the one who
is risen from the tomb? Most scholars
agree that this is Mark’s true ending of his gospel. If you were to look in
most Bibles, though, you will see a couple of other endings, kind of like in one
of those novels where you get to choose the ending. Evidently scribes of the early church were not
comfortable with the way this gospel ended, didn’t like the silence, didn’t
like the suspense, couldn’t live with the ambiguity and wanted this gospel to
jive with the other gospel accounts. So
the monks wrote a couple of additional endings.
Another case of men wanting to fix things!
Back
to the women. Mark intentionally links
the women at the empty tomb to the women at the crucifixion and death of
Jesus. They had been brave and
faithful to Jesus; these women had followed him –followed him even to his death
and now they have been brought back on stage.
They bring spices to Jesus to anoint his dead body at the tomb. When they arrive the stone that has covered
the tomb opening has been rolled back and they see a young man who tells them,
“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.
He has been raised; he is not here…go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is
going ahead of you to Galilee.” We are
told hundreds of times in scripture “Do not be afraid.” And yet, these three women who have been so
faithful, so close to Jesus seem to have lost their way; their fear seems to
have stymied their mission to go and tell, their silence seems to doom them to
failure.
And
how often do we as individuals and as members of a greater body also lose our
way, seem doomed to failure?
It
was a dark and stormy night. 1995 the
year. Butte, Montana, the place. Hundreds of snow geese landed in a very
strange lake and by morning, 342 snow geese carcasses were left in the
lake. This was no ordinary lake
though. For many years this area had
been the sight of a copper mine pit where more than 1/3 of the nation’s copper
supply had been mined. In the 1980’s
when the demand for copper declined, the top of the mountain had been blown up,
the mining pit was abandoned and had filled with water. Very poisonous water.
What remained was a multicolored, -mostly red, highly toxic, 700 acre body of
water that was hostile to all living things. (This turned out to be the largest
body of contaminated water in the country.) The geese had died because of contact
with the metals in the water-the arsenic, copper, and cadmium.
Talk
about human failure! This was one huge
environmental disaster. Then one day an
ecstatic chemist found a stick with a brilliant green slime growing on it in
the lake, rejoicing that SOMETHING was growing in the lake. Finding this single celled algae and later
over 40 other small organisms in a place that had been so amazingly dead was
cause for hope. (It even turned out that some of the organisms would be used
for cancer treatments.) About a year after the algae was found,
scientists discovered a black yeast also growing in the lake, which actually
absorbs about 90% of the metals in the water, like a sponge. When the scientists researched the origins of
this yeast, they discovered that it is only found…inside geese.[1] The dead geese had in a strange way given
life to the lake or at least given the opportunity for life again. Where humans had lost their way as far as how
to treat the environment, nature had begun redeeming what had been lost,
bringing life to the dead. In what had appeared to be an end, a very dead and
contaminated lake showed signs of life anew.
What appeared truly broken is redeemed.
And it came without any human ability or intervention to fix the problem. The story had seemed destined to end in
failure. What had seemed like an ending though was not an ending after all.
Looking
again at Mark’s ending - Yes, the
women’s silence and fear seems to doom them to failure. Right after the man in the tomb tells them
not to be afraid, the women, at once, are afraid ---but not just afraid. The
Greek words used here are traumas and
eckstasis which increase the intensity
of the words terror and amazement that are used in our
translation. So they fled from the tomb,
for trauma and ecstasy had seized
them? When have any of us experienced
trauma and ecstasy at the same time?
These are not emotions or situations that we normally put in the same
sentence.
When
the women come to the tomb, they are bereft of hope, broken in spirit,
traumatized by the death of their Lord, and it is precisely in that moment of
brokenness that moment of fear and despair that God meets them and brings them
to a new place, a place of redemption. Just when things seem to be at their
worst God does something amazing. The stone is rolled away and their Lord is
risen! They are amazed, they are ecstatic
because they know Jesus is up to something even though they cannot explain it
or fully wrap their heads around it.
This
story seems destined to end in failure.
Maybe we can understand why the scribes wanted to add another
ending. But the really wonderful thing
is that by virtue of the fact that we even HAVE this story we know that at some
point the women must have pulled themselves together. Mark would not be telling the story to his
audience if the women had simply remained vocally paralyzed. Perhaps if we look at Mark’s opening line of
his gospel we will find a clue to the ending, “The beginning of the Good News
of Jesus Christ”. This line was
certainly a beginning to his Gospel account but perhaps Mark meant for the
entire gospel story to be a beginning and perhaps he meant for his audience to
continue the story of the risen Christ.
We
all have problems, every single one of us. We don’t always have the answers. Most
of us (not just men, not just scribes) want to fix things. But just as the
three women at the tomb must have figured out that their call was simply to
follow the risen Christ, wherever that led, we see that often our call is not
in the fixing but in the following of Christ.
In Mark’s so-called ending is an invitation for us to begin anew, to be
amazed in the midst of our fear, ecstatic in the midst of our trauma, hopeful in
our difficulties, even in the face of death, knowing that we worship a God who
out of love for us meets us in our brokenness to bring us new life, a God who is
victorious over the grave and a God who is in the redemption business!
Amen.
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