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“…and they said nothing to anyone.”
An odd way to end a Gospel, don’t you
think? In fact, in the Greek it ends with a preposition,
mid-sentence….and everyone knows that a preposition is a
terrible thing to end a sentence with. Mark just leaves us
dangling like a participle, but most scholars agree that’s
where his original Gospel ends. Maybe the last page got lost
in transmission. Maybe the fax machine ran out of
paper or he ran out of time and never finished it.
Maybe the dog ate it. We just don’t know. Over time, others
tried to wrap it up, tie it up, finish it off by adding
other endings. My study Bible has this convoluted footnote
at the end:
The most ancient authorities bring the
book to a close at verse 8. One authority concludes with an
additional verse 9. Others add verses 9-20; a few
authorities insert additional material after verse 14.
And on it goes. That’s why the
traditional symbol for St. Mark is a lion with two
tails—multiple endings, as it were. Whatever the reason, we
know that Mark’s Gospel is unfinished.
1. But we do know that on this morning, the women came
seeking Jesus.
The women came that morning, looking for
Jesus….albeit, a dead Jesus. They came to prepare his body
for burial, and to bury with him their hopes and dreams,
their faith and remembrances, all the love they had to offer
and all the tears they had to shed. They came looking for a
dead Jesus, and the messenger of the morning acknowledged
it: “You seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified.”
But really, what does anybody want with a
crucified Jesus? What does anyone want with a dead Jesus?
Remember the story of the little girl whose cat died, and
trying to comfort her, the mother said, “Oh, honey, don’t
cry. Your kitty is with God now.” The little girl
straightened up a bit and with a quizzical look responded,
“What would God want with a dead cat?”
What does anybody want with a dead Jesus?
If the story ended on Good Friday, if the cross was the
final word, if the stone is still rolled around the entrance
and the silence of the tomb is all that remains, who cares?
Why even bother with a dead Jesus?
Year after year, we come to the dawn of
Easter hoping against hope that the cross is not the end of
the story. Year after year, we come to the tomb looking for
some glimmer of light to signal to us that life does not end
in the darkness of the tomb. Year after year, we come with
just a farthing of faith, wanting to believe that he has in
fact overcome death and the grave, and that because he
lives, we too shall live. We come seeking Jesus, not
crucified, dead and buried, but risen and alive
forevermore.
Over the years, I’ve preached in a
variety of pulpits around the world, and I am always
interested to see what’s on the other side of this piece of
furniture. Lots of clutter, usually—a stained water glass,
crumpled Hall’s wrappers, leftover worship bulletins. Often
there is a clock, to which no one ever pays attention. I
remember preaching in a church with the choir loft directly
behind me and in the pulpit there was a note that said,
“Remember the choir.”
At Metropolitan, our great cathedral
church in the city of Detroit, carved into the stone it
says, “Preach the Word.” At Ann Arbor First, not on the
pulpit but on the back of the door which leads from the
office to the chancel, there is a small plaque that reads,
“Remember the Good News.” But my favorite is a pulpit in
England with a small, hand-painted quotation from the
Gospel, the request of Greek pilgrims coming to the
disciples: “Sir, we would see Jesus.”
And isn’t that why we all come here this morning?
Beyond the lilies and the laughter, the
brass and the baritones, the joy and the jelly beans, don’t
we come here hoping for a glimpse of the Savior, just a
brush with the Risen Christ? We come seeking Jesus.
In his lifetime, Malcolm Muggeridge was
one of the best known British agnostics, a BBC journalist
and hard-nosed reporter. One day he went to the Holy Land to
do a documentary for the BBC, and in the process experienced
his own unexpected encounter with the living Christ. He
became an outspoken witness for the faith and told his own
story in the book Jesus Rediscovered. Looking back,
he wrote:
I feel as though all my life I had been
looking for the light beyond the arc lights, a vista beyond
the furthermost reaches of mortal eyes. How extraordinary
that I should have found it, not in flying up the sun, but
in God coming down to me. All I can say is, as one aging and
singularly unimportant fellow, that I have looked far and
wide and I have found nothing other than this man, this
Jesus and his word, which offers any answers to our tragic
and troubled time.
(Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus
Rediscovered, page 72)
The messenger said, “You seek Jesus who
was crucified. He is not here. He is risen…”
2. “Now go and tell his disciples.”
They came seeking Jesus and they left
with a mission: “Go…tell.” Of course, Mark says they went,
but they didn’t tell. In fact, Mark says, “They said nothing
to anyone.”
Nothing to anyone? How can that be?
It just boggles your mind, doesn’t it? We
just can’t figure out how they could have been through all
this—followed him to the cross, wept through the night of
mourning—and now to come to the tomb and hear this message,
to see the empty tomb and say nothing to anyone? It just
doesn’t make any sense. Why were they so hesitant to tell
the story? How could they keep quiet about what they had
seen? Why were they so slow to share the good news with
others?
We can’t understand it—or can we?
-
We who have heard the
story over and over again
-
We who have sung the
songs and joined in the praise
-
We who have made this
pilgrimage through Holy Week to this Holy Day, and still
say nothing to anyone
I was
on an airplane a while back and subtly glancing across the
aisle, I caught a glimpse of the screen of another
passenger’s laptop. All I could read was the caption:
“Resistivity Imaging.” I had no idea what it meant, so I
did what we all do…I Googled it:
Resistivity Imaging measures variations
in electrical resistance in the ground by applying small
electrical currents through electrodes. Resistivity measures
how strongly a material opposes the flow of electrical
current.
I know nothing about resistivity to
electricity, but I know a whole lot about our resistivity to
evangelism:
We know all about resistivity imaging,
don’t we? But the clear message of Easter is as simple as
this: “Go…tell.”
Lyle Schaller says there are many reasons
for the decline in Methodism in recent decades. Two are
aging demographics and the declining birth rate among
Methodists. If your average age is 60, you aren’t going to
be filling many baby buggies. Others are our inability to
connect with young adults, or our unwillingness to make the
changes necessary to reach the unreached. But he says one of
the key factors in the decline of Methodism is this simple:
we’ve stopped inviting.
-
Stopped telling the
story
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Stopped sharing the
good news
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Saying nothing to
anyone…
When
the clear command of Easter is to “Go…tell.”
Well, as it turned out, they couldn’t keep quiet for long.
Pretty soon, they all started adding
their stories to the end of the Gospel. First Mary said,
“Mark, you can’t just let it end there. Let me tell you
about seeing Jesus on Easter morning.” And then the two
disciples who met him on the Emmaus Road when he made
himself known in the breaking of the bread added their
witness. Then the eleven included their experience in the
upper room, and the story goes on and on, sometimes
exaggerated, sometimes with extra flourishes. But the point
is, the unfinished Gospel is fulfilled in their lives. The
unfinished Gospel is finished in them.
3. And today, the unfinished
Gospel is to be completed in us.
Mark’s unfinished Gospel dares us to pick
up the dangling strand of the story, to step onto the stage
and into the drama, to go and tell the Good News of a living
Savior.
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As long as women
still come to the grave mourning their dead, Easter is
unfinished.
-
As long as there is
one person on this planet who has not been invited to
meet the living Christ, Easter is unfinished.
-
As long as race
divides us and war ravages us, Easter is unfinished.
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And as long as there
is breath in our bodies, we have an unfinished song to
sing and an unfinished story to tell of a Christ …who
was crucified, dead and buried, who descended into hell
and on the Third Day rose from the dead and ascended
into heaven; a Christ who now sits at the right hand of
God the Father, and from thence shall come to judge the
quick and the dead.
The word to the women on that day, and
the word to us today is simple: “Go…tell.” Until God’s
finished kingdom comes and God’s perfected will is done on
earth, even as it is in heaven.
O Risen Christ,
finish then thy new creation,
pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation
perfectly restored in thee.
Changed from glory into glory
till in heaven we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love and praise.
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