Hilton Head Island, SC – March 27, 2016 (Easter)
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 16:1-8; Mark 16:9-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” – Mark 16:7 (RSV)
Is Easter Ever Over?
Most New Testament scholars agree that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, then Matthew, then Luke, and finally John. Assuming that is the case, it is not surprising that there is more to the Easter story in each Gospel subsequent to Mark than there is in Mark itself.
In fact, Mark’s account of Easter presents some major problems. If you read the last chapter of Mark in a Revised Standard Version of the Bible, you will notice that in some editions it ends with verse 8. Up to verse 8, it says that three women went to the tomb of Jesus to anoint his body with spices. They were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James (whoever this “Mary” and this “James” might be; there are many Marys and many Jameses in the New Testament), and Salome. We are told in Matthew and Luke that “Mary the mother of James” went to the tomb, but not Salome, who is mentioned only in Mark’s Gospel. However, Mary Magdalene is cited in all four Gospels as going to the sepulcher on Easter morning, and she alone went there, according to John. Mary Magdalene was the most devoted disciple of Jesus, all four Gospels vaguely suggest, and she may in fact have been his brightest and best disciple, although none of the male Gospel writers could ever summon up the courage openly to state that.
In any event, when the three women in Mark’s Easter account got to the tomb, they found it empty. Inside it they found “a young man sitting,” as it says, who told them about Jesus that “he has risen.” Our opening hymn proclaims the exact same idea: “Jesus Christ is risen today, alleluia!” It is not surprising that the Gospel and the hymn make this declaration. The Gospel writer and the hymn writer were so focused on the resurrection of Jesus that they claimed Jesus “is risen.” But Jesus did not rise from the dead; he was raised from the dead. I believe Jesus did not resurrect himself; he was resurrected by God. It is a distinction we must never forget. Jesus was truly dead, and he could not raise himself. Only God could restore him to life.
But the odd thing about the last chapter of Mark is that in its earliest form the resurrection story ended at verse 8, not verse 20. You heard the extended ending a few minutes ago when I read Mark 16:9-20. But in the first ending, vs. 1-8, the three women were instructed by “the young man” (presumably an angel) to tell the disciples to go to Galilee where Jesus would see them. Then verse 8 says, “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for fear and astonishment had come upon them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Christian people, Easter people: There is no resurrection appearance in the last chapter of Mark! It says that Jesus has been raised from the tomb, but no one saw him! At least no one saw him by the end of verse 8. Furthermore, it says the women “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” What a strange way to end the story of Jesus!
What are we to deduce from this? Well, let me tell you how some of the scholars explain it. In the first century, there were no books as we know books, with a hard or soft cover bound together with numbered paper pages from “1” through whatever. Instead there were parchment scrolls. Parchment was sheepskin that was sewn together in scrolls of varying lengths, depending on the length of the book. On the front wall of the synagogue are two doors opening to what is called “the ark.” Behind the doors is a parchment copy of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. The Torah Scroll is big, and tall, and heavy. After all, it is sheepskin. But because every copy of the Torah was a parchment scroll in antiquity, they still are parchment scrolls today. Tradition is one of the great virtues of Judaism. You could ask Tevye, the milkman of Anatevka; he’d tell you. Tradition, tradition!
Anyway, say some of the people who carefully study these things, it may be that the original Mark parchment scroll had the last part of the last chapter torn off somehow over the first years of its usage in the New Testament Church. That is certainly a plausible explanation.
However, that doesn’t explain it to my satisfaction, for whatever that is worth. I think perhaps verse 8 is all Mark knew of the resurrection of Jesus, and that is therefore all he wrote about it. Or if he knew more, that is all he was willing to write, because he may have been understandably skeptical about other far more amazing things he was told.
Ten and twenty and forty years later, when the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John were completed, other traditions had evolved regarding the resurrection which provided many more details and suggested much richer meanings for the claim that God had raised Jesus from death.
Each Sunday I read from The New Oxford Annotated Bible, which is no longer so new. The print is small but clear, and even an old person can read it. A footnote after Mark 16:8 says this: “One authority concludes the book by adding after verse 8 the following: But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” (It doesn’t say that anyone actually saw the resurrected Jesus.) “Other authorities include the preceding passage and continue with verses 9-20. In most authorities verses 9-20 follow immediately after verse 8; a few authorities insert additional material after verse 14.”
If you aren’t asking yourself why all this is being read to you, you aren’t listening carefully enough. Either the author of Mark or someone else in later decades apparently was not sure what really happened in the resurrection narratives about Jesus! Mark or this later person was unsure precisely what he should write! What actually happened, and was what was reported to have happened what really happened? Did God raise Jesus from the dead or not?
Every Easter everyone who has any interest in Easter in confronted with the central claim of Christianity all over again. The Church of Jesus Christ came into being in the first century of the Common Era because the early Christians were absolutely convinced that Jesus was, as the Apostles Creed says, “crucified, dead, and buried…. The third day He rose again from the dead.” To put it in the clearest and most unmistakable terms, Easter created the Church; the Church did not create Easter. Because the Church believed in the resurrection, the Church IS.
But Mark may not have been certain about the resurrection of Jesus, and so he ended his Gospel with the young man telling the three women that Jesus was alive again. But they didn’t see Jesus, and therefore Mark says they told no one, because they were afraid.
If you had been there, and that was all you knew, wouldn’t you be afraid? What could it mean? And what does it mean? Who would run out and broadcast what the young man told the women without more evidence to support his astonishing claim? People would think they were having delusions! They felt like Thomas in the Fourth Gospel: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).
The earliest Christians did not all believe in the resurrection of Jesus on the first Easter. It took many Easters, and many long discussions about what Easter meant, for the resurrection narrative to become widely affirmed. Nobody who dies is raised from the dead. We have never seen it happen with anyone else, so why should we believe it happened with Jesus? And anyway, no two Gospels report exactly the same details about Jesus returning from the dead. In some places the resurrection is definitely a physical reality, and in others it is a spiritual reality. Some followers of Jesus recognized him instantly, and other didn’t seem to recognize him at all. The disciples were in the upper room on Mt. Zion and the doors were locked, but suddenly Jesus was with them. A physical body cannot go through a locked door. And yet, when the risen Christ went to the Sea of Galilee to meet his disciples, he ate a piece of fish. A spiritual body cannot eat fish. Every Easter we are faced with all of it once again: What does it mean?
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people all around the world die. Shall they be forever dead? Christianity implies that if Jesus was not resurrected, neither shall they be. The apostle Paul wrote, and Georg Friedrich Handel repeated it in his oratorio Messiah, “Lo, I unfold unto you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet” (I Cor. 15:51). One day we too shall die, but if the Easter story is correct, if the central Christian doctrine is true, we shall pass from death to life eternal, and presumably we shall do it instantaneously, hearing for us what shall be the last trumpet. But the question for now and until the day we die always shall be this one: Is it true?
In The Chapel Without Walls, we don’t regularly recite a creed, nor are we required to affirm a creed. Chapel people don’t like to be pinned down. We like to keep our options open. But we, like all other Christians, indeed like all other people, are faced with the question which can never be answered beyond doubt, Did Easter really happen? And if it did, Is Easter ever over? Can we ever get to the place where we affirm it without reservation, and then happily move on? Or must we ask ourselves again every Easter, is the resurrection really real?
In 1966 the Joint Committee on Worship of what then was United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (the “northern” Presbyterians), and the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the “southern” Presbyterians), and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (which is located mainly in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina) came out with a paperback book called The Book of Common Worship: Provisional Services. All the clergy in all three denominations were sent a copy of the book. It was to be an ecclesiastical trial balloon to see if all three denominations liked its contents and were willing to use the book in worship. Subsequently the northern and southern Presbyterians merged to become The Presbyterian Church (USA), but the Cumberland Presbyterian Church is still the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, and shall probably remain so for the foreseeable future.
To my knowledge, that Book of Common Worship was never printed in hard cover. I tell you this because I have used my copy in every funeral or memorial service at which I ever officiated since 1966. It is very worn, the printing on the cover is badly faded, and the blue cover now looks like it has a disease of some sort from having been held so often for so long. But I still use it because the scripture passages are from the RSV, my favorite translation of the Bible, not an older or a newer version, and I have read these passages so often that I can almost recite them by heart, except that I never try, for fear I will muff something, and go into a purple panic.
However, I use my beloved worn paperback only for funerals and memorial services, and for nothing else. I use the older Book of Common Worship for weddings and baptisms, and, in previous years, I used it for communion services until The Chapel Without Walls began, and we don’t have communion services. At the beginning of the section for funerals, the Provisional Services book says, “Witness to the Resurrection.” That is what every Christian service for every funeral should be: a witness to the resurrection.
I stand in this pulpit on this Easter, as I have stood in other pulpits on many other Easters, to attempt to present to you as convincingly as I can a witness to the resurrection. Apparently it took a long time before most first-century Christians agreed that Jesus was raised from the dead, but they could never find unanimity on how he was raised.
My favorite male poet is Robert Burns, and one of my favorite Burns poems is called John Anderson My Jo. The speaker in the poem is a lovely old lady who has been married for many years to what Scots would refer to as a lovely old man. And she says to him,
John Anderson my jo, John,
When we were first acquent,
Your locks were like the raven,
Your bonie brow was brent;
But now your brow is beld, John,
Your locks are like the snaw,
But blessings on your frosty pow,
John Anderson my jo!
John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither,
And many a cantie day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither;
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go.
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo!
It is a beautiful love song of an elderly wife to her elderly husband. But does it end solely at the grave, where they shall be together at the foot of the hill, or is there something beyond that? Is Easter ever over? And can we ever be certain beyond any doubt that because God raised Jesus from the dead we too shall be raised from the dead?
In none of the Gospels is the purportedly empty tomb the end of the story. That can’t be the end of the story. And why? It is because Easter is never over. It is because we are confronted by the claims of Easter every time someone close to us dies, and when we contemplate our own deaths. It is because every Easter we must question it all yet again.
Easter is the most important day in the entire Christian calendar. It is perfectly understandable and acceptable why more people attend church on this day than on any other, including Christmas Eve. Because Easter is never over, they want to hear the incredibly Good News once again. It is so glorious, so inspiring, so triumphant!
But is it true? Is it?