Text: Mark 16: 1-8
from “Cancion” by Denise Levertov
. . . When I am a woman—O, when I am a woman,
my wells of salt brim and brim,
poems force the lock of my throat.
When we are the women at Easter’s empty tomb, when we imaginatively enter Mark’s resurrection story as if we were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, we initially approach the day’s traditional rites with dutiful solemnity. But when we are these women, O when we are the Easter women, old duties suddenly seem pointless, as pointless as anointing a dead body that can no longer be found, as senseless as anointing dead doctrines of Christianity with sweet smelling words. Suddenly, new possibilities seize us with both “terror and amazement” (Mark 16:8).
I invite you to enter the Easter story today in the spirit of these three women. I invite you to let resurrection dawn upon you both suddenly and slowly, until the poetry of Easter unlocks your throats. I invite you to consider what the women’s experience of the resurrection can teach us.
You would probably appreciate some background on Mary, Mary, and Salome, our avatars at the tomb, but the Gospels reveal little, tradition is inconsistent, and surely these characters serve a literary not literal function. Indeed, the four Gospels offer four different resurrection stories with four different casts of characters at the empty tomb. They can’t all be factually true. But we can be sure of the radically countercultural way Jesus respected and included women. And before we make too much of the fact that the women fled at the end of Mark’s Gospel, remember Mark previously told us the male disciples had either betrayed, denied, or deserted Jesus while the women had stayed near the cross and had dared to anoint his body on the third day while the men hid. The women’s flight from the tomb was Mark’s way of signaling, in the final words of his story, that even the women ran away at the very end.
Let’s also bear in mind what these women witnessed earlier: the torture and death of the prophet, teacher, and beloved friend who’d brought them healing and hope. In an atmosphere of betrayal and conspiracy, how could they trust or even make sense of the stranger’s message that the crucified Jesus would meet them later in Galilee? So they ran away. And they told no one.
Mark ends not with a triumphant proclamation that “He is risen!” but with fear and silence.
I emphasize that unsettling point because it is not how you THINK the story ends. Each Gospel presents a very different account of Jesus’s resurrection, and you might have subconsciously added some details to today’s reading that are not there. Look back at the Gospel reading to see if your eyes and ears deceived you. Did you notice that in the resurrection story which concludes the Gospel of Mark, the resurrected Jesus never appears? Mark’s readers glimpse an empty tomb and a man (not an angel, by the way) telling the women that Jesus is risen. But a post-resurrection Jesus does not appear to the women, does not allow the doubting Thomas to see the nail prints in his hands, does not ascend into heaven. Look back at the final verses and keep in mind these are the final verses of Mark’s entire biography of Jesus, our oldest Gospel and the one Matthew and Luke took as their main source. Mark ends abruptly with the statement that the women fearfully keep the story to themselves, contrary to the messenger’s command. Mark ends with terror and silence. If Mark had been the only Gospel to survive, we would have only the secondhand testimony of an anonymous man who told the women Jesus had risen. We would not know if the women believed this stranger. We would only know they had run away, and though the man in white told them to tell the others Jesus was alive, the book ends with the narrator’s statement that they did not.
Well, Happy Easter.
Of course, if we had only Mark’s Gospel, we’d still recognize that someone at some point told something of this experience, else the Marcan community would not have passed along the story to us! But Mark’s version of the resurrection does not attest to any original disciple knowing and sharing the news that Jesus had been raised to new life.
Yes, some versions of Mark do add another twelve verses to tidy things up a bit with appearances of Jesus to various people mentioned in Matthew, Luke, and John and well as his ascension to heaven. But almost all scholars agree those twelve verses were added to Mark many years later in at least two stages, and the best translations omit them. The oldest manuscripts do not contain verses 9-20. Perhaps a conscientious scribe wanted to improve upon the story’s ending. After all, maybe the final page was lost or maybe the writer dropped dead before writing the most important words of the Jesus story. We can forgive an overly zealous monk for wanting to correct an ending that hardly seemed to ring with Easter enthusiasm.
But in this case one or more copyists, eager to affirm the eternal Christ, likely added verses that, in effect, hindered future readers from recognizing Mark’s rhetorical methods. You see, some biblical scholars think the original ending is the culmination of a brilliant strategy Mark has been building up to all along. Over and over Mark shows us that the disciples do not understand Jesus’s mission. Repeatedly, Jesus tells them NOT to tell anyone what they have seen and heard--though some tell anyway--because they still do not comprehend the meaning and methods of God’s reign. They are not capable of transmitting the Good News yet. However, after the crucifixion, the followers of Jesus can no longer insist that he will rule with power and might. After the cruel cross, after the empty tomb, Jesus’s way of radical love is unmistakable. At last his followers can understand. At last they are commissioned to tell the Good News.
And that is when, ironically, the most perceptive, even the women, flee in fear and confusion. And there the story ends.
But we as the readers understand. Mark plays to the reader’s understanding in contrast with the original disciples’ lack of understanding. Mark’s first readers already affirmed that Jesus was resurrected in the lives of their faith community. Mark’s first readers were living through persecution and peril and were themselves beset by fear. The rhetorical move that Mark makes is to invest them with the responsibility of carrying on the work of Jesus, to be the faithful ones in contrast with the first disciples. And 2000 years later, you and I also read of the women’s silence and resolve that we will carry forward the Good News. We feel the responsibility for continuing the Way of Resurrection. We know that it’s now up to us.
The young man inside the empty tomb says that Jesus the crucified has gone ahead of them to Galilee, that backwater district where he’d started his ministry. “There you will see him, just as he told you,” says the stranger in white.
And there, in the continued work of healing and feeding and freeing folks caught in the domination system of the Empire, Jesus’s gradually comprehending followers did reunite with Jesus again. The writer doesn’t have to fill in the blanks for us. From this final chapter of Mark that instructs the disciples to meet up again with Jesus in Galilee, we readers circle back to Mark’s first chapter and recall where Mark’s story began, with Jesus calling the first disciples from their fishing nets along the Galilean shoreline. You’ll see him there again, the strange messenger in white says, as you fish for people and rescue them from the waters of Empire.
Here are two things I understand about resurrection: it happens gradually and it happens in community.
It is no wonder that the resurrection took a symbolic three days. Realizations dawn slowly. Mary, Mary, and Salome could not perceive the resurrection of Jesus immediately. But in the forty years between Jesus’s state execution and the writing of the Gospel of Mark, the Marcan community had time to make meaning together out of the beauty of Jesus’ life and the horror of his death and the continued real and transforming presence of his Spirit among them. Gradually and communally they created this story of what the vital, healing, transforming way of Jesus meant to them.
And this is why I suggested we become the women. So that we realize the point of Mark’s seemingly unacceptable ending is that we not allow the story to end there. We take up the women's role from there.
Mark’s clever rhetorical choices make the readers into the sole possessors of the Gospel. Like the people who first read Mark’s Gospel, we should come away feeling that it’s up to us to carry on the mission of Jesus. We have heard the story. The original actors in the story failed to some extent perhaps, but the story lives on as long as we tell it with our lives.
Sure, the story continues to get extended and reinterpreted and sometimes manipulated and mangled. The beautiful story of Easter gets co-opted by Hallmark and Cadbury and politicians and preachers. But even you and I get to “contribute a verse,” to borrow a phrase from Dead Poets Society.
However, if you are like the women, you need some time before the poetry unlocks your throat. You need time, I need time, for the story to unfold in our hearts and lives.
Like Mary and Mary and Salome, we react first with fear when we face something totally unexpected. Even good news may sound threatening. And we may flee. But when we DO go to Galilee and begin that healing work in the world, we see where Christ remains, Christ who is the heart and mind of God. And we find resurrection—slow and communal resurrection—happening in and through us.
We at Open table have witnessed recently the beginnings of resurrection as Rosemarie has come back from the brink of the grave. But resurrection is NOT instantaneous—as those know who watch Rosemarie make slow, hard progress to think and speak and move. Likewise, it took many days or perhaps years for the followers of the Way to frame their story into meaningfulness for their lives.
Even when we’re in the process of resurrection, it doesn’t always feel wonderful. Just ask Rosemarie.
Occasionally one of you will say something like this to me: “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t returned to church after all these years. It was easier not to think about Jesus and church. It’s hard now to rethink Christianity and try to live in ways that are consistent with Jesus’s life. This is all harder than I thought.”
Resurrection happens slowly and communally. Sometimes our first impulse is to run from a bracing or unexpected word. That’s okay. Because after awhile, the Spirit of truth and love lures us back.
Joan Chittister says that “until we find ourselves with new hearts, more penetrating insights, less need for the transient, greater awareness of the spiritual pulse of life, resurrection has not really happened for us.”
Mark’s resurrection story is about what is happening in us and through us. Mark’s resurrection story happens to people in community.
There will be folks who participate in Open Table for awhile and then leave. Even the good news of Progressive Christianity that is reviving a moribund church will frighten away some.
But our mission at Open Table is not to put Christianity on life support. Some things must die so that others can be reborn. It’s scary when religious assumptions are questioned, when the parts of Christianity we once held as essential are stripped off like binding grave clothes so we are free to walk out of religion’s tomb. A new self, a renewed church comes out of that darkness.
But be assured, friends, that our small congregation is not alone in recognizing that American Christianity “is flailing and failing.” A “spiritually renewed and intellectually credible Christianity” has been undergoing resurrection for the last two decades. An article this week titled “A Resurrected Christianity?” by Diana Butler Bass is one of many suggesting that what we at Open Table are doing is in line with a growing movement of liberal mainline Protestant churches, “Emerging" churches, and progressive Catholics from “around the edges of organized religion” asking new questions and trying to “reform, reimagine, and reformulate” church to resurrect “a heart-centered Christianity.”[ii]
My friends, this is extraordinary. Once again, the body of Christ, which is the Church, is being resurrected.
Clarence Jordan said, “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples."
Like the women in the story, we are both amazed and terrified. In fact, we don’t quite have the poetic vocabulary for this resurrection of our individual and congregational lives. But when we are the women of the story just beginning the resurrection process, wells of salt brim and brim, until finally Gospel poems force the lock of our throats.
Christ is risen! Alleluia!
[ii] Bass, Diana Butler. “A Resurrected Christianity?" Huff Post Religion (8 April 2012) . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-butler-bass/a-resurrected-christianit_b_1410143.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=1329620,b=facebook
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