Happy Easter! In Mark’s gospel, the Easter story ends with fear and uncertainty, but the cliffhanger ending invites us into the story. God is doing something new in our world, even today. Christ is risen!
The text this year for Easter is Mark 16:1-8. Helpful this week was Jim Somerville’s Easter sermon here and Anna Tew’s reflection here at Modern Metanoia.
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed.
You probably know there are four different versions of the Easter story in the Bible, with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each telling their own version. As usual, each Gospel writer picks different aspects of the story to emphasize.
The most familiar is probably John’s version, with Mary Magdalene finding the tomb empty and running to tell Peter and another disciple that someone has taken Jesus’ body and she doesn’t know where they’ve put it.
As she stands outside the tomb crying, Jesus himself comes up to her, but she mistakes him for the gardener until he greets her by name, and then she believes. John includes some beautiful details in his telling.
This year, though, we’ve just heard Mark’s version of the story, and I think this might be my favorite telling.
When he describes Mary Magdalene’s visit to the tomb, Mark mentions two other women who go along with her, another Mary—this one the mother of James—and Salome. The women are going early in the morning to give their friend and teacher Jesus one last gift by properly anointing his body for burial.
On Friday when Jesus died, these women had been there watching, and they’d followed all the way to the tomb, but the Sabbath was about to start, so there was no time to do anything but quickly lay his body in the tomb.
Then they couldn’t do anything on Saturday, because that was the Sabbath day of rest, so Sunday morning is the first chance they have to take care of his body.
So they go first thing in the morning, and when they get there, the stone has been rolled away. Not only that, but there’s an angel sitting there, robed in white. And, Mark tells us, they were alarmed. Makes sense—this is not at all what they expected!
They’ve spent the last 36 hours or so coming to terms with the idea that all their time with Jesus was for nothing, that this guy they thought would be the savior of the world is dead and gone, and now that they’re finally able to tend to his body, it’s gone. So yes, they’re alarmed!
The angel tells them, as angels usually do, “Do not be alarmed. (easier said than done, right?) Do not be alarmed. Jesus has been raised.” He gives them some instructions: Go and tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead to Galilee, and you’ll see him there.
Mark doesn’t mention anything about anyone chatting with Jesus in a garden. In fact, he doesn’t even mention the women passing on the message to Peter or John or anyone else.
Instead, Mark ends his story about Jesus with this fascinating line: “They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That’s the end of the gospel.
Now, if you’re looking at the back of the bulletin, you’ll see another two sentences there in brackets.
I realize precisely zero of you came to church on Easter Sunday to hear about Biblical source text criticism, but forgive me for just a few seconds, because those last two sentences don’t belong there.
The oldest copies we have of Mark’s gospel, the ones written closest to the actual events of Easter, don’t have those sentences. Mark didn’t write them. If you look in a Bible, it’ll likely label “The shorter ending to Mark” and “The longer ending to Mark.”
What seems to have happened, is that as Mark’s Gospel was copied and passed around, some people felt it needed a more complete ending, a bow tied onto the story.
If you look in your Bible at home, you might even find a few more paragraphs labeled “The longer ending to Mark” – that one’s a very different tone from what Mark actually wrote, with Jesus lecturing the disciples for abandoning him and then promising them they can handle snakes and drink poison without being hurt. People just weren’t satisfied with the ending Mark actually wrote.
But Mark’s cliffhanger ending is intentional, not a mistake. You know what a cliffhanger is, right? When the story ends in the middle?
Like one of my favorite movies, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. At the end of the movie, one of the main characters has been captured. It looks like the evil Empire has won. But the rebel heroes are working on a rescue mission…and then the credits roll.
One of Christin’s and my favorite shows right now, This Is Us ends almost every episode with a cliffhanger. The point is to make you come back next time, to see how the story turns out.
The longer endings to Mark aren’t a director’s cut or something; Mark knew what he was doing. He ends his story with a cliffhanger: The first witnesses to the resurrection overcome by terror and amazement, not saying anything to anyone. And yet, obviously they got over their fear. Obviously, they did say something, because we have this story.
With this cliffhanger, Mark is saying the story of Jesus isn’t over. He’s giving us a call to take up the story. We, God’s people, the church, are living the sequel, the rest of the story.
Pastor Jim Somerville tells a story about composer Franz Liszt. Apparently, his wife would get him out of bed in the morning by playing the first seven notes of a scale on the downstairs piano. do re mi fa so la ti…and then she’d go back to the kitchen to finish cooking breakfast.
Poor Franz would be so bothered by the missing final note that he couldn’t help himself – he’d have to get out of bed, stumble down the stairs, and play that last note: do!
There’s something in all of us that craves resolution, completion, that wants to put the final note on. That’s what Mark’s doing: He’s telling the story of Easter with the ending left off, so we can’t help but tumble out of bed on Easter morning and finish it.
You and I are called to look for the living Jesus, and to tell others about him. Fear and amazement are understandable, even rational, but the truth is, the tomb is empty and that’s really, really good news that absolutely must be told!
Despite all expectations, despite every precedent, death was not the end of Jesus. Easter is God’s announcement to the world that the story isn’t over.
The message is entrusted to us. Death doesn’t win. The tomb is empty. We get to proclaim the good news that crucifixion and oppressive human empires and violence don’t win the day. Disease and loss and sickness and all the other junk that comes with life in a sinful, fallen world are temporary, not permanent.
As Peter preaches in his sermon in Acts 10, we are witnesses to what God has done. Jesus was put to death, and that should have been the end, but God raised him on the third day.
The resurrection proves that this Jesus was not just some guy, not just some good moral teacher, not some hopeless optimist babbling about peace and love; he was and is God in the flesh, the one the prophets testified to, God with us.
This is the good news of Easter: God is with us. God is with you. God has not been defeated, God has not given up.
In Jesus, God has taken on the absolute worst this world can offer—betrayal, abandonment, isolation, suffering and beating, all the way to death—and instead of throwing in the towel, instead of abandoning us to the consequences of our sin, instead of abandoning us to try and fail to live life on our own, Jesus has taken on death for us and defeated it. Life has defeated death.
To celebrate Easter is to look at the brokenness of this world, and dare to believe God is redeeming it.
Easter is about looking at the violence and the abuse and the hunger and the greed, and daring to hope it might be made right. Easter is about looking at fifty-seven hundred deaths from covid in Iowa, five hundred fifty-five covid deaths in our country, 2.8 million in our world, and daring to believe that the God who can roll back one very large gravestone will one day empty all those graves too, to dare to believe death will be swallowed up forever, and every tear wiped away, that the heavenly banquet Isaiah foretold will come to be.
Terror and amazement indeed, because Easter means God is doing something new. God is on the move. Jesus is out of the tomb.
And to this good news, we are witnesses.
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed.