(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on April 21, 2019, Easter Sunday)
Looking in Closets
When I was child, I would
occasionally linger in closets, reaching behind coats, digging past shoes and
boxes and bags, plumbing the room’s depths. Could I touch the back wall? Was it just me, or did it feel cooler behind the coats? Did I feel the prickles of a pine tree,
or was that just a loose clothes hanger jabbing me in the back?
I’m sad to share that in all my
searching I never found Narnia.
Friends of mine have confessed similar quests from their own childhood
with the same result. I imagine
there is an entire generation, if not two or three by now, who can identify
with this experience.
I still remember when I finished
the final book of C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series. I lay on the edge of my bed, restless. It was late afternoon in the summer
after my fourth grade year. With no
more books left to read, no way to enter into the story, I felt empty. Peter, Edmund, Lucy—all the characters
whose adventures I had shared through hundreds of pages had entered into Narnia
for the final time. But I could
not. I was left in the real world.
As If He Were Never There in the First Place
In the oldest copies of the
gospel of Mark, the story ends at verse 8. It is a remarkably unsatisfying ending, leaving us on a
ledge, not giving us the closure we so desire. It’s Easter morning, three days after Jesus’
crucifixion. We go to the empty
tomb. We hear from an anonymous
young man the news that Jesus has been raised and has gone ahead of us to Galilee. Then we turn the page and it’s
blank. That’s it. The end.
Just as unsatisfying as the
nonappearance of the resurrected Jesus is the response of his followers. Before the crucifixion, Jesus’ twelve
disciples all desert him and flee the scene. Here, after the crucifixion, the remaining few who are
faithful hear the news, but instead of sharing it they keep silent out of
fear.
It’s hard not feel sympathy for
the resurrected Jesus, wherever he is in Galilee. He kept telling his followers about the way of love, which
was also the way of the cross: how there would be suffering and even death, but
also how there would resurrection and new life. He even told them that he would meet them again in
Galilee. But as far as we can tell
at this point in the story, his followers have all abandoned him now. There will be no reunion.
One of my students wrote a
reflection on this final scene, and his words struck a poignant chord in
me. This ending, he writes, shows
the loneliness of Jesus. His
disciples have all deserted him, and now he walks around somewhere in Galilee,
but no one knows it. It’s almost
“as if he [were] never [really] there in the first place.”
A Method to Mark’s Madness?
Since the gospel of Mark was
written, readers have been unsatisfied with its ending. The earliest readers added their own
endings to Mark. Two of these
endings still exist. Some Bibles
include them both. These endings
give the story resolution. They
show us the risen Jesus, and they depict the disciples as willing messengers of
the good news.
Today readers still betray
dissatisfaction with the original ending of Mark. They try to make sense of it in various ways. Some have gone so far as to claim that
the writer of Mark actually died before he had a chance to complete the
story. Others claim that he wrote
a more complete ending, but that it was lost.
But there are others who wonder
if perhaps this ending is purposeful.
Perhaps Mark is making a point.
Perhaps Mark writes a non-ending precisely to leave us unsatisfied,
restless. Perhaps Mark wants us to
get up off the bed and start searching in closets, behind coats, past shoes and
boxes, into the depths of our own world.
Perhaps Mark wants us to do what the followers of Jesus fail to do. Perhaps “Go…he is going ahead of you to
Galilee; there you will see him,” is an invitation to the reader, in which “Galilee”
signifies the real world and the good news becomes that the risen Jesus isn’t
found in heaven above but right here in the dirt and darkness of our
world. Perhaps we are invited to
look for the resurrected Jesus in our own lives.
Perhaps for Mark the story has
not ended. Perhaps now it leaves
the page and becomes our story.
Not the End but an Entrance
Did you know that for the first
thousand years of Christian history, Christ-followers who depicted the Easter
event in art rarely depicted Christ on the cross? They showed all the scenes around it, including the last
supper and the Roman soldiers mocking Christ and then later the empty
tomb. But rarely do we do find
Christ on the cross—and when we do, Jesus is clothed and crowned, alive and
reigning from the tree, rather than eyes closed and body sagging.[1]
In the early church, the
proclamation of Easter was not death but paradise—and not paradise as a
heavenly world somewhere else, but as this
world blessed and transfigured by the Spirit of God. In the Sant’Appolinare Nuovo Church in
Ravenna, Italy, which was constructed in the 6th century, there are
26 rectangular mosaics near the ceiling of the nave that tell the story of
Jesus. The tenth picture shows
Simon the Cyrene carrying Jesus’ cross.
The next picture is not Christ on the cross but the scene of the women
at the empty tomb. Other pictures
show the resurrected Christ and an earthly paradise of sheep, doves, shrubs,
still waters, starry skies. The
focus, in other words, was not the death of Jesus. The message was that Christ is alive, and all the world in
him.
Perhaps that is why Mark does not
resolve the end of his story with an appearance of the resurrected Jesus or
belief on the part of his followers.
For Mark, Easter is not a day to celebrate the end of the story. It
is a day when we are invited to enter into
the story. To trust the good news
that God’s love is stronger than death and is redeeming this world at this very
instant, transforming it one moment at a time into paradise, if you could
believe it.
The Story Continues
That summer when I finished the
Narnia series, I wanted so badly for the story to continue. I began looking in closets. I couldn’t help it.
This Easter when we come to the
end of the gospel, what do we do?
Mark leaves us hanging. Is
that the end of the story? Or
could it be an entrance into the
story? Is it an invitation to go
and see the risen Jesus in “Galilee,” which is to say, the everyday world that
Jesus lived and breathed and ministered in. “Galilee” is our world, our lives, the dust and dirt that we
walk in everyday. Would we dare
seek the risen Jesus there?
The gospel is for us wherever we
are. Jesus sought out the sick and
the hurting. Jesus gathered around
tables with the condemned and the rejected. Jesus visited (and often unsettled) the homes of the
privileged and the powerful. And
the message of today is that his love was not a failed experiment or a blip in
history. Rather it is alive,
everyday crucified but everyday risen, insistent on turning this world into the
kingdom of God. It is with us
still.
Today’s scripture leaves me with
a question. When I get to the end
of Mark and close the book and return to my own world, what do I see: death or
life? Do I see only the cross, or
do I see the resurrected Christ? I
wonder if sometimes the good news is better than we allow ourselves to imagine:
heaven on earth, the kingdom come, if we would but trust.
Christ is risen. Christ is with us. Christ’s love is alive, stronger than
any end, insistent on turning this world into the kingdom of God. Come, friends, let us go to Galilee and
seek the risen Christ. Let us
share his never-ending life and follow in his way.
Prayer
Dear Jesus,
Risen and waiting
For us in Galilee:
Make us restless
For glimpses
Of your resurrection.
Draw us
Out of ourselves
And into the never-ending story
Of your love,
From which springs
Heaven on earth,
The kingdom come.
Amen.
[1] Cf. Rita
Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving
Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire
(Boston: Beacon, 2008), ix.
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