Hilton Head Island, SC – April 21, 2019 - Easter
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 16:1-8; 9-20
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come upon them, and they were afraid. – Mark 16:8
Through all six Sundays of Lent, we have been following the events of Holy Week as they are recorded in the first of the four Gospels to be written, the Gospel of Mark. Today, on Easter, we come to the last of these six sermons.
The ending of Mark’s Gospel is the most problematic ending of any book in the Bible. That is because it has not one suggested ending, but four.
To understand what that means, we need to realize that until the time of Johannes Gutenberg in the sixteenth century, every single copy of the Bible was written by hand. Mass production of books was impossible. Therefore every copy of every Gospel of Mark, or any other book of the Old or New Testaments, was laboriously hand-copied by someone somewhere from an earlier copy that someone else had copied. There had to have been an original copy written by the original author of the Gospel of Mark, but no one knows where it is.
The problem with Mark is that there are four very old copies from the sixth century on, and they have four different endings. Whoever copied them apparently could not agree on how the Gospel of Mark should have ended. In the oldest version, the Easter story says that three women, led by Mary Magdalene, the most loyal of all Jesus’ disciples, went to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning. The heavy, large, round stone which had been rolled over the door to the sepulcher or mausoleum was rolled back, and Jesus’ body was not in the tomb. Mark said that “a young man dressed in a white robe” told them God had released Jesus from the bonds of death. They were to go tell the disciples that Jesus would meet them back in Galilee, as he had said he would do. But that account ends as follows: “And they” (the three women) “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” (16:8). And thus it ends.
Is that the end of Easter? With no appearances of Jesus to anyone? With three frightened women, fearful of telling anyone what the “young man” told them at Jesus’ tomb?
In the first additional ending, Jesus then appeared to Mary Magdalene, but only to her. When she told the disciples what she saw, the seconding ending says, “they would not believe it”(Mark 16:11).
A second additional ending says that Jesus “appeared in another form to two of them.” Presumably this is the same incident as the much longer account of the two followers of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke who were on the road to Emmaus. But, as with the first ending in Mark’s Gospel, when the two men went and told the eleven disciples what had happened, the eleven did not believe them.
The third additional ending, which may or may not be the last ending to have been written, says that after everything in the first three endings happened, Jesus next appeared to the eleven disciples themselves. Some parts of this ending are unique to Mark, and some are like other endings in other Gospels.
On Easter morning, when Christians come to church all over the world, each of us comes with our own ending to the Easter story. Most of us have done this many times throughout our lives, and we have cobbled together bits and pieces of each of the Gospels, trying to fashion an Easter conclusion that is acceptable to us. It is like that for every person of faith who ever lived.
It will be an everlasting ironic memory to all of us that the burning of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris occurred on the Holy Monday of Holy Week. My wife, my sister-in-law and I watched the tragedy with stricken spirits very shortly after the fire began. For me it felt hauntingly similar to watching the 9/11 attacks on television. It was the same kind of shocked incredulity and deep sorrow, except mercifully no lives were lost in the Notre Dame disaster. Nevertheless, eight hundred years of French and Christian history seemed almost instantaneously to disappear in flames, and what had looked like a permanent monument to Christian culture suddenly appeared doomed.
Shall Notre Dame be resurrected? Is it possible? Should it be rebuilt? The costs would be enormous, well into the many hundreds of millions of dollars. Even if it takes a few decades, can that great Gothic church come alive again exactly like the cathedral which majestically rose up on the Ile de France? We will never know, because such an enormous project, resurrected in its original Gothic splendor, lies beyond the scope of our lifetimes.
A few hours before the fire began last Monday, I and others in our family received an email from my niece, who lives in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas. She said that three weeks ago her husband passed out, regaining consciousness a few minutes later. For the next three weeks Tom underwent a series of many tests to try to determine what had caused the fainting spell. After many different tests, it was determined he has two major problems. Twenty-five years ago his thyroid was removed, but a suspicious mass was discovered in his thyroid area. In addition, his heart has three serious blockages. The doctors decided to do the neck surgery and the heart surgery at the same time. It occurred four days ago, on Wednesday
Tom is a veterinarian, and Kathy is a nurse. They both knew Tom’s condition was critical. But passing out on March 21 led to what we hope and pray is the providential solution to his difficulties.“Silver lining?” Kathy asked in her email, referring to the sudden loss of consciousness, which led to the diagnosis of two major medical issues, and the surgery to repair both in one anesthetic procedure.
Tom is an avid hunter, and Wednesday was the opening of the Kansas turkey hunting season. In her first email, Kathy said, “He’s mourning the loss of his regular lifestyle (for a time), but we are grateful to God that we won’t be mourning the loss of Tom.” On Thursday Kathy sent another email to family members, and then another yesterday. Everything went well in the surgery. The thyroid mass, which was proven to be benign, was taken care of. Instead of a triple bypass, Tom had a quintuple bypass, because, as Kathy the nurse reported, the cardiac surgeon said he had “plenty of donor tissue to work with.” Medical people, like military people, have their own interesting internal lingo. Kathy ended her email by saying, “Keep those prayers coming.”
Life is tenuous. For Jesus it was always tenuous, and especially so in the last week of his earthly life. It is always tenuous for all of us as well, but fortunately we are rarely existentially confronted by that ever-present reality.
A few nights ago Lois and I watched The End of the Affair. The movie is based on a novel by Graham Greene. It stars Julianne Moore as a woman named Sarah Miles and Ralph Fiennes as a writer named Maurice Bendrix.
In the story, Sarah is married to Henry Miles, a high-ranking British civil servant. Early in World War II, she meets Maurice, a novelist, and they fall in love. (Whether this evolved from the fanciful imagination of the incomparable Mr. Greene or from an actual occurrence in his life I do not know.) Maurice writes up their story as a novel, and as a novelist would describe it. In the movie there are many flashbacks, and we, the viewers, must pay close attention to understand the unfolding of the bumpy plot.
Neither Maurice nor Sarah believe in God, but as the story moves along, we are informed that secretly she has begun attending a Catholic church. Maurice jealously thinks she and the priest are having an affair, and he hires a private detective and his young son to investigate. The boy has a large red birthmark on the side of his face. (There is a lot to follow in this lengthy Easter illustration, so please stay with me.)
Early on in the movie, Maurice says of Sarah, “I never saw her again, and that was the end of the affair” – except that it wasn’t, because the flashbacks keep drawing us farther and farther back into the complicated plot. (If you wonder on Easter morning whether this going anywhere, it is --- I hope.)
Maurice and Sarah are together in bed when a buzz bomb’s rocket stops not far from her house. Henry gets up to see if there is any damage, just as another bomb falls directly on the house. Sarah thinks he has been killed, but he survived. Finally he struggles up the stairs, where he finds her kneeling beside the bed. He asks her, “What were you doing on the floor?” “Praying.” “Praying to what?” “Praying to anything that might hear. I never believed in prayer, but I said to God, ‘If you let Maurice live, I’ll never see him again.” Then Sarah told Maurice, “Love doesn’t end just because we don’t see each other again.” Later in the movie, and in yet another flashback, they have been separated for a couple of years. They see one another by chance. Sarah says to Maurice, thinking about God, “I only made two promises in my life – to marry Henry, and to stop seeing you.”
Halfway through the movie viewers are led to believe that Sarah is gravely ill, and by the end, this is confirmed. At her graveside service, Maurice sees the detective and his son, who have come to mourn her loss. Maurice had befriended both of them. The boy’s large birthmark has somehow disappeared. Maurice is mystified over how that could have happened.
After the funeral, Maurice and Henry have their own personal post-mortem about the emotional maelstrom into which they both have been drawn. At the end of their amazingly civil conversation, Henry says, “I always knew she was with someone. I’m glad it was you.”
Through all of this sad drama, Maurice is typing up pieces of the story in his semi- autobiographical novel. At one point the writer says to God, “I hate you, God. I hate you as though you existed.” Graham Greene wants the reader – and viewer – to know that it is odd for an atheist to be addressing God in writing. Then, at the very end, in the last flashback, and this one before Sarah had died, Maurice types, “Dear God – Take care of her, and Henry, but leave me alone forever.” And that is the end of the movie, the end of the book, and the end of the affair.
But it is not the end, just as Easter was not the end. With God, “the end” is never the end. In the turmoil and tragedies and uncertainties of our lives, God is always there. It is as Francis Thompson wrote about God in his famous poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” “I fled Him, down the nights and down the days/ I fled Him, down the arches of the years/ I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind/ And in the midst of tears/ I hid from Him.”
On the first Easter morning, God demonstrated that to us. He has not forsaken us. He will never forsake us. The one whom we loved was raised from the tomb. Death cannot destroy life.
What does it mean? How did it happen? Was it physical? Was it spiritual? What did Mary Magdalene and the other women and the disciples see? It is and it forever must be an enigma. If we can explain it, we have not understood it, and if we can’t explain it, by some wondrous God-granted gift, we do understand it – not completely, not totally, but at least partially. And that is enough. That is all there can be.
Only faith can authenticate Easter. It is impossible to ascertain it as fact. Trust alone can make it real to us. Whatever ending we choose to give to Easter, it is not the end. We must become committed to something we cannot validate through the normal processes by which we are able to verify other realities.
Gospel writers did their best to make it real to us, and other New Testament luminaries gave us their versions of what the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth mean. At its most fundamental level, however, only our faith can authenticate Easter. Only we, like Sarah Miles in her way and Maurice Bendrix in his way and Henry Miles in his way can come to grips with the profundities of trust in the divine (“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you existed….Dear God – Take care of her, and Henry, but leave me alone forever.”)
God won’t do that. He continues to seek us by means of the triumphant, angry, elusive, confrontational, apocalyptic, and enigmatic Jesus. Eternal love doesn’t end just because Jesus dies. Jesus lives again forever, and so shall we. Ultimately, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, or our own anticipated resurrection, is a mystery, a riddle, a divine enigma. It cannot not be an enigma.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!