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The Day of Resurrection: Easter Day Mark 16:1-8 |
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For the Church, this is the culmination of all of it. (And if you've been here for all of it--all of Holy Week--you know more than others what I mean. This is the event of the week, the event of the year, the event to end all events. Today is as important as they come. Everything we're about as Christians hinges on the scripture account just read: the story of three sleepy-eyed, grief-stricken women discovering an empty tomb. It is from this special moment that all other historical moments in our religious past are interpreted. That's why church sanctuaries all over the world are full of people on Easter Sunday morning, even if they're half empty all the rest of the year. It's why people who would never darken the door of a church at any other time find themselves sitting, joyfully, in place and anxiously anticipating the beginning of the Easter mass. And that's wonderful! That's great! And yet, there's something very odd about it all. I mean, why this Sunday? Why do folks break down the doors for this one? Because, when you get right down to it, the story of Easter--as it's told in the gospels-- isn't really all that impressive a narrative. I mean, when you compare it to, say, the Christmas story, it lacks detail, character development, a clear outcome. In fact, the version we've just heard, Mark's version, stretches out to all of eight verses. (Wow! Some story!) There are no trumpets, no alleluias; all we have to go on is an empty tomb, two frightened Mary's and a Salome, and the stranger who frightened them--a young man dressed in white. If I were a marketing specialist and my boss told me to build a commercial market around this story, I would be hard pressed to know what to do. In fact, I think I'd recommend finding another story.--I've said before, maybe that's why the Easter bunny is out there hopping around today. He's a marketable alternative. (And not nearly as hard to buy into as this Resurrection stuff.) And yet, two thousand years later, here we are, joined throughout the world by millions of other Christians, hundreds of millions of other Christians, to celebrate the Resurrection event. So I guess the question is, "why are we here?" In the Episcopal Church, the most outspoken and chief advocate for the argument that Christianity must change or die—that we need to get over and expel from the faith things like the divinity of Jesus and the Resurrection—was a bishop who saw his diocese’s membership shrink by a third while he promoted that new thinking and the new growth he thought such thinking would achieve. Now, while it does seem odd that sensible, practical people would buy into stories that are outside our normal mode of human operation and interaction (time and space), I have to tell you that I don’t think sensible, practical, thoughtful people would just show up on Easter or any other Sunday to worship God unless they believed that there was something to all this. That though this is beyond natural explanation and reasonable understanding, there is something that connects us to God and calls us to pay attention—especially to the illogical, unreasonable, supernatural, miraculous events that are a part of our Christian story. Maybe even reasonable, practical people get that God is God, and because God is God, the illogical, unreasonable, supernatural and miraculous are not outside of God’s “strike zone.” That God transcends and exceeds even our imaginations, and that incarnation and resurrection and total self-sacrifice and grace are within God’s abilities, which, if God is God, are in fact limitless. Makes sense to me. But I’m not here to convince you of all that. I’m just here to retell the Easter story: the story of Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome, who went to the tomb at dawn that day initially hoping to anoint Jesus' body. There was nothing particularly special about this. It was a common Jewish practice usually performed a few days after death to show respect. They were sort of following that post-funeral routine, which all grieving people follow. Simply doing what was to be done. Now days, that routine might involve going to the bank to open the lock box, or making final arrangements for a headstone, or packing away our loved one's clothes in bags for the Salvation Army. But the feelings are the same. It's a way of working through the emptiness. And the three women had a lot of emptiness to work through. Their grief was surely enveloped in despair and outrage. Jesus, their teacher and friend, hadn't lived a long, full life. He had been cut down as a young man, crucified. And for what purpose? It was a story with a very bad ending--a story that confirmed the meaninglessness and injustice of life. As Macbeth says in utter despair at the end of the play: "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." The tale of Jesus of Nazareth had, in the end, so it seemed, signified nothing. So bearing their grief, the three women made their way to the tomb. We'll never know exactly what happened when they got there. The story's too vague. But that something quite unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt. The Gospel says the women fled from there both terrified and amazed because what they found--or what they didn't find--was not rational and totally unexpected. It was something that lay outside their experience and certainly outside their faith. But the tomb was empty all the same. He was not there! He had been raised, the stranger told them. Those three women were standing on the threshold of a new creation. And their lives would never be the same. Maybe that's why we're here today. Because we are believers (in Mystery) and because we have lived through the despair of the tomb and have experienced the Easter of the Risen Christ in our hearts. We are here at the beginning of this new day—this Easter Day— to hear the good news again, for the very first time. |
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