Isaiah 25:6-9; Mark 16:1-8
Presented April 12, 2009, by J.D. Kline
Easter Sunday
I was visiting with my dentist recently, when he began to tell me about a patient he had seen not long before who, immediately upon taking her seat, exclaimed somewhat belligerently, “I don’t want any problems today.” And yet, she followed that pronouncement by pointing out a troubled tooth in her mouth.
“That’s a problem,” said the dentist. “Your tooth is cracked.”
“I don’t want any problems,” repeated the patient. But the dentist couldn’t promise a trouble-free visit; all he could do was offer the best treatment he knew how to provide.
Faced with life’s uncertainties and fears, life’s struggles and hurts, we often find ourselves dreaming of trouble-free living. Perhaps when we hear Scriptures such as this morning’s lesson from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 25, our yearning for trouble-free living is only heightened. For the prophet anticipates a time when God will provide a feast for all manner of people, a feast of rich food and well-aged wines, a banquet feast that suggests an ever-deepening level of relationship between God and the people of God’s creation, a banquet feast that awaits a time when God “will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of God’s people” will be taken away (Isaiah 25:8). These words were spoken, not to a people whose lives were comfortable and trouble-free; quite to the contrary, they were proclaimed to a broken and despairing people living in exile in a foreign land, a people who felt as if all the underpinnings of their lives had been knocked out from under them as they were forcefully uprooted from their homeland, a people who wondered if there is any hope left in life at all.
Easter has become domesticated in our day and age, so much so that many in our culture connect Easter with little more than chicks and eggs, bunnies and baskets, a celebration of the unfolding spring season and the donning of lovely new outfits. But the first Easter carried little sense of feasting and celebration, little possibility of hope and joy. Rather, the first Easter reflected the very opposite. The three women—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—made an early morning trek to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body with spices, shrouded in an aura of gloom. Like those exiles centuries earlier, the women surely felt as if everything they had known and counted upon was now lost to them, for they had dared to stand at the foot of the cross, witnesses of the agonizing death of Jesus. Along with the death of the person of Jesus came the dashing of his first followers’ dreams. Before his troubling death, they had dared to hope that Jesus represented one who could turn life around, one who could overcome violence and fear, darkness and desolation, one who could somehow make life new. Now it seemed as if such hopes were no more than an idle dream. As a result, the very last thing that would have been on their minds that morning was the possibility of resurrection and new life. Indeed, their primary question, Mark tells us, was “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” And we too, who yearn for trouble-free living, do we not also question who will roll away the boulders in our lives—the boulders of fear and grief, of pain and loss, of anxiety and loneliness.
The women are startled to discover that the stone before the tomb of Jesus has already been rolled away—and what’s even more startling, they encounter a young man in a white robe who urges them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here” (Mark 16:6). But of course, every time someone is Scripture is admonished, “Fear not,” “do not be alarmed,” it is precisely because they are standing face-to-face with a terrifying situation. Not surprisingly, the women are indeed alarmed, so much so that they flee the tomb in “terror and amazement” (v. 8). The translators of the Jerusalem Bible suggest that the women fled from the tomb because they were “frightened out of their wits.” In The Message Eugene Peterson paraphrases verse 8, “They got out as fast as they could, beside themselves, their heads swimming. Stunned, they said nothing to anyone.” The Living Bible puts it this way: “The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered, too frightened to talk.” And the translators of the New English Bible describe the women as “beside themselves with terror.”
The earliest and most reliable transcripts of the Gospel of Mark end abruptly where our morning lesson ends today, mired in fright and astonishment, fear and bewilderment, trembling and uncertainty. Most scholars believe that verses 9-20 represent later additions, added by scribes convinced that Mark’s original ending had been lost. After all, why end in anxious trepidation and ambiguity a testament aimed at proclaiming the good news that something markedly new is in the works? But perhaps the abrupt ending allows us to consider our own response to the resurrection story. Will we remain stuck in fear and uncertainty, or will we embrace a faith that speaks to our condition? A faith that, while it carries no promise of a trouble-free life, nor is it satisfied with easy answers, nevertheless enables us to trust, in the very midst of struggle and ambiguity, that there is indeed something far greater in the works than what we can now see. Is this not the power of the Easter story—the conviction that God enters into the very mix of life’s uncertainties and fears, promising new possibilities, new levels of healing and wholeness, new hope, new purpose, new life.
One of Mary Oliver’s poems is entitled When Death Comes. Writes Oliver,
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purseto buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-poxwhen death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
With Mary Oliver, are we willing to take the risk of embracing life’s wonder and amazement, confirming that it is not enough simply to visit this world? Instead, our calling is to live life to the fullest, to trust that there is more than we now see. The challenge is to embrace all of life, even the difficult times, the times of pain and grief and uncertainty, all the while trusting that ours is a God who stands with us, a God who loves us with a love that will not let us go, a God who is ever in the business of planting seeds of new life.
Episcopal author Urban Holmes has asserted that the primary agenda for the church’s ministry today is to enable people to recapture their capacity for intuition and wonder. The challenge before us is to help one another rediscover or relearn our ability to embrace the goodness of life, to live in the promise that a time is indeed coming when the shroud of uncertainty and fear, the veil of violence and grief, shall no longer be the final reality in life. Is this not the promise of Easter—not that pain and grief and struggle are no longer real, but that they no longer have the final word in life!
Joan Chittister, Catholic sister, social activist, and frequent writer about the spiritual life, reminds us that change is ever a part of the reality of life. “Change may frighten us, of course,” writes Chittister, “but it may just as surely free us from our old selves and freshen us for life newborn. Change dusts off our dreams and explodes us into new beginnings.” It was to the ancient Israelites, resistant to change, forced to live in exile, convinced that life held little meaning and few possibilities—to such a despairing people Isaiah the prophet proclaims the coming of a new reality. Change is coming, asserts Isaiah. Speaking for God, the prophet cries out,
Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? (Isaiah 43:18-19).
Easter is about the unfolding of something new. Easter demands that we see life afresh. Easter requires that we be brides married to amazement, that we be bridegrooms, taking the world into our arms.
Some years ago Andrew Young wrote his spiritual memoirs, entitling them A Way Out of No Way. You may remember Young as civil rights leader who worked with Dr. King, as US representative to the United Nations during the Carter administration, as former member of the US Congress, and as one-time mayor of Atlanta. Young is also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and he begins a chapter in his memoirs with the line, “Going to Sunday School can be dangerous, especially if you begin to really believe the things that you are taught. That’s the only way I can explain my belief that the world can become a better place.”
Young writes of his early years in ministry in rural Georgia, recalling a particular time when the Ku Klux Klan was planning a visit to the town where Young pastored, angered by his efforts to register African Americans to vote. By that point in his life and ministry, Andrew Young had read the writings of Gandhi and wondered whether the pathway of nonviolent resistance might be used to alter the fabric of racism so enmeshed in American life. This caused Young to read the New Testament with fresh eyes, questioning just how seriously one ought to take Jesus’ insistence to love one’s enemies and pray for would-be persecutors.
But when it came to protecting his family, should the Klan appear at his doorstep, Andy gave little credence to nonviolence. Instead, he determined that, when the Klan appeared, he would go outside and face them directly, but he wanted his wife Jean to stay inside with a rifle pointed out of an upstairs window. Jean, however, wanted nothing to do with Andy’s plan, pointedly questioning him, “Don’t you believe in what you’re preaching?”
“Of course I believe in what I preach,” he answered. “What’s that got to do with the Klan attacking my family?”
“Well,” she responded, “if you’re going to preach about the cross and resurrection, you ought to believe that God will take care of your family.”
The encounter prodded Andy Young to ask himself, “Could I really believe in the message of the cross and the power of the resurrection?” And then Young continued, “That is the ultimate question of faith. In later years I would hear Martin Luther King, Jr. issue the same challenge, time and time again: ‘If men and women haven’t found something they’re willing to die for, they are probably not fit to live.’”
That first Easter, so bewildering to the early disciples, called for a response, and soon the frightened followers of Jesus found a new resolve. Soon they began living and proclaiming to the world around them that a new creation had begun, that seeds of new life had been planted, that justice and peace were values worth embracing, and that all this could be done because, in Christ, the power of evil had been decisively broken. We may not know a trouble-free life, but we can come to know the One worth knowing, the One who makes us fit for living, the One who stands with us in our trials and who empowers us to live life to the fullest.
Thanks be to God! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed. Amen.