One of our practices as a community is to carve out space in our shared worship to share with one another where we’ve sensed the Divine. We wonder where God whispers in words and stories and in the pauses and punctuation and spaces between the lines of scripture. And, maybe some of you in the pauses of your lives also ask, where have I encountered God recently? Where is God active in this story?
If we were to ask Jesus’ followers in our text how this past week had gone and where they had encountered God this past week – there likely would be only silence.It had been a brutal stretch of days leading up to that morning when Mary Magdalene and Mary mother of James and Salome took the spices they’d bought, planning to anoint Jesus’ dead body.
We call these days Holy Week now – but they’d been horrendous. Their friend and teacher had been arrested and tortured and killed and this movement was reeling in the wake of trauma: When the authorities took hold of Jesus, some of his followers fought back – one person even cut off a soldier’s ear. Others fled – Mark describes one young guy who’d followed Jesus, took off running stark naked when his linen cloth was grabbed in the frenzy. And others just froze – their hope in the future shattered, their hearts numb. Finally others, like Peter, did what could be called “fawning” – they said and did what needed to be done to appease the powerful and they denied that they even knew this Jesus fellow at all.
But a few folks continued to stay close – Mary Magdalene and the other Mary and Salome watched Jesus on the cross and heard his cry of despair there, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” And when Jesus died, these women heard the Roman soldier say, “Truly this man was God’s son.” and they had also been there when Jesus’ body laid to rest and the tomb covered with a stone.
And so after the day of sabbath rest when no one was working but God, these three women embarked on a new week, with spices in hand, their day’s task to anoint Jesus’ dead body, which lay placed in the tomb, covered by a heavy stone.
If we were to have met Mary and Mary and Salome on their path in the faint light of early morning and asked them, “Where have you encountered God today?” they might not have even answered our question. They likely would’ve just kept walking silently, maybe only whispering to each other about the task they were focused on: “How are we going to get into the tomb? Who will roll away the stone?”
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Early this morning I went to my office to light a candle and sit in the dark stillness before the day began. I have this really cool calendar that I keep pinned to the wall above my desk – it’s full of art for all the Christian liturgical seasons of the year. Its colors and textures and images help me visualize the sacred story that we inhabit and walk through as a church each year.
But this morning when I went to light my candle and sit quietly – the calendar wasn’t on the wall. I had been really excited to turn from the tragedy of holy week to reveal a new calendar page depicting the joy of Easter – but my calendar had fallen off the wall. The nail holding it pinned must have come loose… and all I was left looking at was the cracked, patched and painted-white wall of our rental house.
There was no gleaming image of Jesus for me to contemplate this morning.
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When the women got to the tomb they saw that the stone had been rolled away and a mysterious young man, dressed in white sat there and said what divine messengers always seem to tell scared people, “Don’t be alarmed!” he said, “Don’t be scared! You’re looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here! Look! Look in here! There’s nothing here!”
This announcement remains good news for us today – Jesus has been raised from the dead, the tomb is empty and the risen Christ goes before us. Jesus will meet us and give us life, back in the ordinary beginnings where we first met him, and we’re called to share this joy with others. This news shook the women to their core. They were trembling and bewildered, and they fled in fear from the tomb, and they apparently said nothing to nobody.
And just like that the gospel of Mark abruptly ends. The calendar falls off the wall. The story book slams shut before we even get to meet the resurrected Jesus. This is not like the other gospels where Jesus, raised from the dead, mysteriously appears to the disciples to eat with them and bless them and touch them, before ascending to heaven.
In Mark the jarringly good news of Jesus’ resurrection is dropped into our laps and lives and we’re left with lips stammering to find words and legs quaking to follow with joy and terror back to Galilee to meet Jesus, back to the beginning where we first encountered the Son of God. Because Jesus isn’t in the tomb and because God’s love has broken death’s grip, we are invited to turn to look for and to follow Christ everywhere. We follow Jesus back to the beginning.
It’s as if Mark expects and knows that his readers already know about the resurrection when they’re reading this gospel. There’s almost a smile and a wink within the story, because even though Mark says that the women didn’t say anything to anybody – somehow the word of their testimony got out.
The women ended up sharing with others the miracle of the empty tomb. And we too are witnesses to this empty tomb. The story does not end there but continues with us and our own encounters with the risen Christ. Earlier in Mark Jesus told his disciples that in the moment of crisis they would all desert him and scatter like sheep – but he reminds them that “after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.”
Our hope is not our own stick-to-itiveness through tough times but our hope is in the faithfulness of Jesus to his word and his presence with us. Our hope is the promise that the risen Christ will indeed meet us where has called us to be. So we go back to Galilee, back to the beginning and with joy we meet Jesus there.
What was Jesus like at the beginning of his ministry in Galilee, when this whole movement of love was just first taking off? God’s spirit was with him and he proclaimed good news and healed the sick and ate with sinners and fed the hungry and drove out demonic powers and transformed the livelihoods of those who followed him. So when Jesus calls us back to Galilee to see meet him in all his resurrected glory he is calling us to look for him in the hominess and fishiness, in the craggy hills and the watery depths of our daily lives.
“Jesus is going ahead of you all to Galilee” the women were told.We look for the resurrected Christ at work not in some far-off heaven – but at home. Jesus brings us resurrection life amidst our Google calendars full of doctors appointments and school assignments and work deadlines and get-to-gethers and sports tournaments and therapy sessions and tax-filings and grocery lists and trips to visit the family member who is sick and dying and the friend who just welcomed a new kid.
Jesus brings us resurrection life right here where we live – in our apartments and homes that may be cluttered or clean but where God’s love hovers so close irregardless. Christ’s resurrection is to be found with those whose futures are fractured by poverty with those whose very homes are laid to rubble by war.
Jesus calls us back to the beginning, back to Galilee, telling us we will meet him there. And Galilee was not an imaginary place – but cluster of communities in a region still under Roman rule – and Jesus returned their so that the movement of love he had built up could continue. And whatever Galilee is for you, wherever you find yourselves dwelling right now – God promises to meet you here.
The good news of the resurrection is that it’s OK if it’s been hard to follow Jesus when the going got tough. It’s OK to be scared speechless about climate change or to be anxious if you’ll ever pay off your debt. It’s OK if you have questions about what the resurrection even means or what difference it makes in a world where you see so much death that keeps on happening. It’s OK if the haze of trauma seems near impossible to see through. It’s OK because by the power of the resurrection God in Christ has been faithful and has defeated death and we have reason to hope and rejoice in God’s great love that brings life to all!
“Jesus has been raised, he is not here.” the mysterious messenger of the resurrection told Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, and Salome. And because of Jesus’ resurrection we are free and we don’t have to grind away under the mechanisms of fear any longer. We don’t have to fight with the tools of violence or to flee conflict or to freeze up in complacency or to acquiesce just because it’s easier to keep happy whoever holds the checkbook or the gun.
We are freed by the power of God’s resurrecting love to joyfully follow Jesus and share in his eternal life. Because Jesus has overcome death and risen to life and invites us to meet him and share in that joy right here and now, today this morning, at this camp, and wherever it is we return to later today.
“Where have you seen God recently?” we ask one another. Where is God calling us to look when the calendars of the expected fall off the wall? Where is God calling us to go when the death’s tomb is miraculously empty? What beginning place, what Galilee, has the risen Christ gone ahead of you towards, waiting for you to meet him there again?
Thanks be to God that the gospel of Mark does not end in fear and terror and silence, but it is a story of Jesus’ resurrecting good news that we are a part of, where Jesus bringing life not only to Galilee and to our lives, but to the whole world. Thanks be to God, for Christ is risen!