April 12, 2009 Easter Day
Mark 16:1-8
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining
I believe in love even when I cannot feel it
And I believe in God, even when God is silent
I believe through every trial, there is always a way.—attributed to a Jewish prisoner in the Holocaust
After the Good Friday service, as the evening darkened in the side yard where we few had gathered for worship, my friend said, Holy Week is almost over, and isn’t it a good thing, at least, that there have been no grave crises or disasters on top of everything else? Well, I said darkly, it’s still only Friday. And of course, I was joking, and we both laughed, and went our way. And then, Saturday morning, the phone rang and I heard the voice of my friend say my sister is dead. There was an accident, and her son called us last night, and she was my little sister and she’s gone. And today, it is Easter, and my friend is not in church, contemplating the empty tomb, but rather, on a plane flying to her sister’s empty home. A resurrection faith is not always easy to see, even on Easter.
The gospel of Mark ‘s version of the resurrection has always been an optional reading for Easter Day; its disturbing ambivalence usually passed over in favor of the more lyrical and celebrative story of the resurrection told in the gospel of John. Though the church has spent the entirety of the liturgical year following Mark’s urgent and powerful telling of Jesus’ story, the abrupt and, let’s face it, disturbing train wreck that is Mark’s last line—and they ran away, and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid—makes no sense to a people who have been primed by the good news of the gospel to anticipate a happy ending.
Anybody with half a brain knows this is an awful way to end a story that was supposed to be good news. Even the other gospel writers figured that out, and embellished Mark’s stark announcement and disappointing failures with a soulful walk down the Emmaus road, a breaking of bread with a mysterious stranger turned risen Lord, a breakfast on the beach, and a be not afraid, touch my hands and see that it is I who stand before you.
That people of faith and good will are uneasy with silence and ambiguity should surprise none of us. When someone you know is suffering, don’t you try to offer comfort?, hope? A family stunned by sudden, inexplicable loss will sit around, sifting through clues and telling fragments of stories again and again, trying to make the senseless coherent . , as if understanding will somehow heal what has been shattered. If you are lost in a world of hurt in the present moment, afraid of what the future holds, don’t you try to tell yourself, if I just could know that everything will work out in the end, if I could find some hope to cling to, I could hang on a while longer. It is human nature to hope; indeed, some would say, it is the spark of the divine within us. But sometimes the divine impulse is not the easy one.
Sometimes the new life we pray for must wait for the hard and holy work of bearing with courage our terror and our awe, living with our fear, and holding our faith in silence.
The early church knew that there was something really wrong about the ending of the gospel of Mark, and they did their best to fix it, stitching in a couple of alternative endings to improve the product, like a movie producer who, having learned from pre-screening that his ending caused people to reject the film entirely, calls back the actors and shoots a different final scene. The problem is, changing the ending does, in fact, distort the storyteller’s original intent… .changing the ending changes the story.
The gospel of Mark is not a story about his followers performing miracles, as one ending suggests. Nor does it glorify a heavenly, divine Jesus at the expense of the one who taught and healed and believed that the kindom of God was being wrought by revolutionary change in human circumstance and human community, right here on earth. The gospel of Mark does not glorify those who believe, and condemn doubt and failure, as another ending suggests. The real ending of the gospel of Mark embraces the human, both in Jesus and in us. It is a gospel less about resurrection, and more about discipleship. It is a story about what it means to love God and to follow Jesus… even when, and perhaps especially when, you and those around you fail and fall apart.
But if the other gospels said too much, and the additions to the gospel of Mark got the ending wrong, betraying Mark’s experience and intent, with what are we left? What are we to do with a faith story that begins with good news but ends with its surviving characters stunned, afraid, and silent in the face of an announcement of resurrection? Does God show up even when, like the women, we are undone, stunned and speechless in the face of a hope we do not understand and are not yet ready to touch?
In Binding the Strong Man, a Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Ched Myers writes: what do we say to brothers and sisters who in good faith did they best they could, despite all the mistakes and walked away empty-handed? Something has to be said, there is too much at stake.1 In this gospel, failure and faithlessness are not outside the horizons of believing. . .but at its very heart. And this must be good news to those of us who have been broken, in our faith or in our lives. Like Jesus and his disciples, we have been deserted… and we have deserted those we loved, and wept bitterly. Caught by challenges in our lives— joblessness, ill health, addiction, brokenness in relationship— do we not have good reason to question whether the “Way” we are following might not be a dead end? The sole witness to the resurrection in Mark—the young man dressed in white— is proof that our failures do not, in fact, lead us away from God… but into the heart of Christian witness and faithful practice. In the midst of the passion narrative, while the disciples run away and Peter denies Jesus, two verses in chapter fourteen describe a young man who, having followed his teacher into the garden, becomes terrified and tries to escape the soldiers gathered to arrest Jesus. As he turns to flee, he is caught by his clothing, but tears himself loose, and runs away naked. He meant to do the right thing; but was overmastered by his fear and by a danger he was not strong enough to face. He is never mentioned again in the scripture, except… some say that the “young man in white” at the tomb was no angel… but that same young man whom Jesus loved and forgave, a naked, ashamed deserter whom God re-clothed in love and mercy, and sent to the tomb to show comfort and faith to the three women, who, like him, were frightened, fleeing, and silent. God shows up when we come back from our own failures and frailties to stand beside a neighbor who is facing their own time of trial.
A gospel that ends so abruptly in silence begs for someone—anyone—to jump in and carry on. If the women never spoke up, how was the story of the resurrection told? If fear was the final experience, how did the church at last find its voice of reconciliation, love, and welcome? Who carried on? In the early eighties, a German novelist, Michael Ende, wrote The Neverending Story, which concerns a boy, Bastian, who is so alienated from his family and his community that he escapes into a book. His world becomes that story in a place called Fantastica. Bastian loves this story, until he begins to discover that the characters in it are beginning to seek his help in order to resolve their crises. He tries to remain in his fantasy of perfect detachment. . .but comes to understand that the story he is reading is doomed unless he gets involved. Like the women at Jesus’ tomb in the gospel of Mark, Bastian waits, remains silent, paralyzed by fear: and then to his horror, he finds the story turning back on itself, dragging his name into the unfolding disaster. Finally, because he can do nothing else, he jumps into the story, where his presence gives the story new life, a resurrection. And when he leaves the Story at last, he learns that his life and his relationships in the real world have been renewed and transformed. On Friday morning a man was commuting to work on the Palmetto Expressway. In front of him, another car was cut off in traffic, swerved to avoid an accident, and flipped, hitting the median. The car burst into flames. It was someone else’s tragedy, and the responsibility of Fire Rescue, but the man and three others stopped their cars, ran to the burning vehicle, and working together, pulled out the driver and then his wife, removing them to safety. Not one of those disciples ever learned the others’ names… but when the man walked into work a half hour late, sweaty and covered in blood, someone’s story had not end in tragedy, and another’s story was transformed forever.
In this gospel, the end does not answer all questions, but asks the most important one of all, in the absence of the Risen Hero, in the face of fear and silence, who will take up the story with his or her own life?
Mark’s gospel does not end in Jerusalem with an empty tomb, pointing the church us toward heaven where the risen Christ waits to save us. It does not end with a Resurrection, but rather with a man whose own hope was resurrected pointing his friends back toward Galilee, where it all began, where they can begin again. “Galilee” is a border town, a rough and chaotic place. There, believers mix it up with people whose world view and experience is alien to their own. There, one language is spoken on your street, and another is spoken one street over. Fragile ties are created between people who are different as enemies live side by side. Everyone fears, everyone fails, everyone must get over themselves in order to get along, in order to live. Fifteen years ago this month, the country of Rwanda blew itself apart when tribes who had lived as neighbors engaged in a bitter war of genocide. Today, in the faces of children who were born out of the violence of rape in wartime, the necessity of finding a way to live in the borderlands can be plainly seen. John Rucyhana, who had fled Rwanda as a teenager, returned to his homeland in the midst of the violence because, as he said, I needed to have the grip of the horror and then be part of the solution. He is an Anglican bishop now, just another failed disciple jumping into the story and returning to Galilee, where it all began. He founded a school in 2001 called “Sonrise,” for the orphans of the million who died, because the son of God rises into the misery, into our darkness.
On the borderland with Hutus and Tutsis and their children, he is building villages of reconciliation, to bring victims and perpetrators together. One resident is Jeannette, who lost seven family members in the genocide. What is it like for her to live side by side with a neighbor who admits to killing women and children? In the beginning it was very difficult. But now, I forgive him. Rwandans cannot afford to wait until the pain is over, Rucyhana says. In this small country, he sees a parable of reconciliation, as if God is using the brokenness, the ashes to set an example for others. . . if Rwanda can recover from this, other nations can recover.2
Reading Mark’s gospel reminds us: finishing Jesus’ story is no easy matter . . if it were, they would have done it long ago, and we would have long ago forgotten its pat and happy ending. In the end, there is only one genuine witness to the resurrection: for each of us to follow in discipleship where Jesus has already led, into and through the borderlands, those hard places where most of life unfolds, where a faith rooted in ambiguity, earthiness, and a living human community is being built, and we ourselves are being raised by one another and by God, again and again, to new life.
1 Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: a Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p 456.
2 Quoted in Newsweek, 4/13/09; from ‘Against the Odds”, a radio documentary of Ellis Cose Inc., debuting on Public Radio stations this week.