For they were afraid….

Mark 16.1-8

Preached Canberra Baptist Church, Easter Sunday (April 16) 2006

Every age has its dangers. Had we lived in Europe in the 12 century a fear of plague, the Black Death, would have been quite rational. During the Thirty Year’s War we might have feared the armies that battled across Europe leaving famine and bloodsghed in their wake. Those of us who lived through the fifties and sixties of the last century remember the new threat of nuclear war, a terrible new danger that threatened the viability of life itself. Today we face global warming, the possibility of the planet choking on its own exhaust, its own waste.

But we adjust. We tend to neutralise the impact of every new threat and push it down into the unconscious, until it becomes part of a general anxiety - living as if these things simply weren’t. It becomes a part of the landscape of risk that must be managed in the modern world. Fear – an element of modern living, something we all develop a facility for living with.

But fear of resurrection? What is surprising in Mark’s gospel is the response of the women at the tomb, those faithful, caring women wanting to do their final duty to their dead friend and master. They were focussed on the practical issues of the day, how to remove the stone, completely unprepared for Resurrection. They receive the news in the empty tomb and their response is to flle in terror and amazement: and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid. Not joy, not wonder, but fear. Here endeth the gospel. Fear and silence are the last word in Mark’s gospel. If we only had this book you wonder how the word of that empty tomb got out at all because the gospel culminates in fear and silence. And it wasn’t just the shock of it all, a momentary reaction, like the shepherds on the night of his birth. Oh they were frightened at first, but by the end of the night they came back praising God for all they had heard and seen (Lk.2 ) Not the women at the tomb: they kept mum, lips sealed, and there the story ends.

In Annie Proux’s novel The Shipping News old Jack, the lobsterman, gets tangled in his potlines, hauled overboard and drowned. Or so they thought. His body was dragged out of the icy North Atlantic and brought home and laid in an open coffin. But at the wake, he does just that. He was chilled in the water and his bodily functions slowed. He was deeply unconscious but alive. As he jerked up from the open casket with a cough like an old engine starting up, there was “a roar and screaming. Some stumbled back, some surged forward.” They raced Jack off to the hospital but “Behind them the whiskey was going fast, there was an immense babble of disbelief and cries of holy miracle”.

If a friend came suddenly back to life that’s what you’d expect – some falling back and some surging forward, a babble of disbelief and cries of holy miracle. Isn’t this how the world greets Resurrection? Isn’t this what fills the media today: an immense babble of disbelief mingled with cries of holy miracle. But for Mark: there is just fear, silence.

Now some of you may be looking at the page and thinking what’s he on about? There’s more stuff written here? From earliest days people have been scandalised by this ending and they have supplied what has obviously gone missing. These are later additions, not part of the original gospel. In your Bibles you will find extra verses entitled ‘the shorter ending of Mark’, ‘the longer ending of Mark’. But these were not written by Mark. If Mark finished it there, at verse 8, in fear and silence, he must have had a reason, and we must try to discern what it is.

I think there are two reasons the book stops there. A theological reason and a pastoral reason.

The theological reason is this: these women, who so often in the gospels seem much more intelligent than the men, especially around the Cross and Resurrection, these women understand the dimensions of what has happened. They understand what is at stake in resurrection and they know that the only proper response is to be sacred witless.

What happened in the Resurrection was not what happened to Jack the lobsterman in Annie Proulx’s novel. Jesus did not just splutter back into life like an old engine. So much of the Easter discussion focuses on this as if it were all that mattered. One of our prominent Archbishops said on Friday that what Easter is all about is whether there is life after death. A cry of ‘holy miracle’ amid the general babble of disbelief. Jesus, like old Jack, coughing up death and rising to general amazement. Some falling back in scepticism, some surging forward in hope, but nothing to do with resurrection! It is far more mysterious and wonderful than only that.

What the women knew is that resurrection changes everything! If Jesus is raised from the dead all is changed, changed utterly.

Yes, it does mean that death is not the end, but that is only the beginning, the meanest, merest start of things.

If Jesus is raised, God has said “Yes!” to the Cross! The Cross is not a mistake, a temporary on Jesus’ triumphal way. In raising Jesus God does not undo the Cross, or nullify it: he affirms it. The Resurrection declares that the Cross is not a failure but a victory, that suffering need not be defeat, but can be the gate of glory. If Jesus is risen, all valuation of human experience, all understanding of what if means to live and live well, is changed, changed utterly.

If Jesus is raised, it means the power of the State, of emperors and priests, procurators, Parliaments and Prime Ministers is revealed as profoundly limited. The power of the State is built upon the right to punish and sanction those whom the state judges its enemies. Jesus was so judged and so sanctioned. He was subject to the ultimate sanction: the power of the state to take away life, to execute those whom the State so judges. What the Resurrection says is that this power is empty. The Resurrection declares that the state cannot control the life of Jesus or the lives of his followers. And if the sanction of death is empty, then how much more the lesser sanctions and powers of the State? Resurrection ushers in a fundamental and subversive freedom that triumphs over human judgments and state power. Ironically, ust before Easter, our government changed the rules so that refugee stepping onto Australian shores, is not legally stepping onto our shores, as if we can order back, Canute-like, the tide of human suffering that might wash up against us from time to time. The Resurrection of Jesus invites us to see through such laws, as petty exercises of power. Jesus welcomed outcasts and sinners (and presumably unlawful non-citizens) and said they would get into the kingdom ahead of all the righteous and the wealthy, and perhaps even some of the lawful citizens. And they killed him because of that sort of talk. But their laws and their judgements couldn’t stop him or his kingdom and they won’t stop it now. Empires and revolutions ever since Jesus have tried to domesticate and control his followers, but even death will not silence or inhibit them. If Jesus is risen, all power and government is changed, changed utterly.

If Jesus is raised, God has said, as he said at the Baptism and the Transfiguration: “This is my Son: listen to him”. Jesus is no longer a wandering preacher, talking about the Kingdom of God, about a brave new world in which things will be ordered differently. The mighty cast down and the humble and weak exalted, the hungry filled with good things and the rich sent empty away. They are fine words and wonderful dreams, but the blaze of resurrection casts them into a whole new light: all this teaching of the kingdom is not just muttering, it is a Manifesto of the new world which Jesus said is coming NOW! It was wonderful theory, but resurrection makes it frighteningly real. If Jesus is risen, all social expectation, all the norms of common life are changed, changed utterly.

Should I go on? Should I talk of human relationships and the power of reconciliation and love to break down the ethnic and cultural barriers that humankind. If Jesus is risen there is no longer Jew nor Greek, black nor white, slave nor free, boss nor unionist, male nor female. All is changed, changed utterly. And so it goes on, through every area of human life. Over the coming weeks of the Easter season we will explore just how resurrection touches human life now.

I suspect those women knew this, and they knew how frightening it was. If there is life beyond death, well that’s wonderful: fall back or surge forward as you will - many of us will have years to work out what that means for you!

But if Jesus is risen – the world is a different place, all is changed, changed utterly! You cannot get married, or go to work on Tuesday, or be a citizen in the way that we might if Jesus was just wandering about preaching. Christ is risen! The world is a different place, and if you haven’t thought it through and situated yourself in relationship to that new reality, it should frighten the living daylights out of you and silence all of your current thinking and speaking, and planning.

The second reason is a pastoral one. Mark starts his gospel with a clear declaraton of his subject” Mk 1.1. Right from the beginning he is telling the story to convince you that Jesus is the son of God, risen and at work in the world. What he is writing for is your response, your faith, your taking up this story and becoming part of it. So in the great climax of the story he cuts it off. He cuts it abruptly like a serial that demands another episode, like those old Batman shows that cut to the break as Batman and Robin are about to die in some gruesome way that you know will never come to pass… Although the manuscripts don’t show it, it is as if the story ends with the four little dots that indicate there is more to come …. somewhere!

The early writers who supplied endings to the gospel were right: it’s a story that’s unfinished, a story that calls for completion, for rounding out, for taking up and extended into new places and new times. Of course such a story as this cannot be left in fear and silence. Although that is an entirely appropriate response to the mysterious power of Resurrection, the story can never end there. And it is up to you and to me, and to all the hearers of this story to carry it on.

Luke made this point by writing a second volume – the Acts, the story of the early church. The tradition of John’s gospel is carried on by three letters which apply the story of Jesus and model what following him means. Mark has the opposite approach. He cuts the story dead with this tantalising, terrifying word of resurrection: what will you do with it? How will you respond to it? What will you make of it in your life and your following of the Risen Lord? Mark wants us to write the next part of the story to take up the silence and the frightening, dazzling, glorious new world that resurrection offers, and shape into words, and acts, and faith.

The wonderful thing about this gospel is not just ‘a shorter ending’ and ‘a longer ending’ there are thousands of endings as the silence and amazement at what this actually means for human life yields in thousands of followers to the wonder and joy of what that new world that resurrection brings might mean for them. All the broken ends, the violence and injustice with which we live, have been healed. The impossibilities we live with have to be reconsidered, reappraised, in the light of this great possibility. All the world and how we lived is changed, changed utterly by the affirmation at the heart of all Christian faith. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!