Now What?
Mark 16:1-8
March 31, 2024
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICdWObijd3s
If you were here on Thursday night, you heard the end of the story of Jesus’ death. If you weren’t here, that’s OK, you’ll get this quickly. You heard that a man named Joseph got permission from the Roman governor to take Jesus’ body and bury it in a new tomb. Mark tells us that the women watched while that happened. So they know where to go on Sunday morning.
But let’s stick with Joseph for a minute. Mark describes him as being from a place called Arimathea and a member of the council. Every Jewish town had a council, which was the religious and political leadership. But the suggestion is that Joseph is a member of the council in Jerusalem, that body that convinced the Roman authorities to crucify him. That subtly implicates Joseph in Jesus’ death. Mark also describes him as a person who was waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God. He is pious and earnest, but as Mark tells the story, Joseph is not a disciple of Jesus. (Mark’s details are different from those in John’s gospel, by the way.)
Some time earlier, when John the Baptist was executed, his disciples were courageous enough to go to Herod Antipas and ask for his body which they buried. Jesus’ disciples do not have that courage. Joseph is protected by his status and privilege, so he asks.
People executed by crucifixion were not generally buried. Decomposing at the mercy of the elements and scavenging animals was the very last bit of humiliation and degradation that went with crucifixion. So, perhaps Joseph is performing an act of mercy, to spare Jesus and his family that. Or perhaps he wants Jesus dead and buried, conveniently out of sight. In any case, the burial is hurried. Joseph buys a linen cloth, wraps it around the body and puts the body into the rock hewn tomb. He does not attend to any of the usual burial rites. He does not wash or anoint the body. The women observe, but they do not assist. This is more evidence that Joseph is not a disciple.
This is why the women are going to the tomb on Sunday morning, to wash Jesus’ body and anoint it with spices, to give Jesus the dignity of a proper burial.
These women are not from Jerusalem. They are outsiders. They are women. They don’t have the protection of any kind of privilege. They have followed Jesus from Galilee, where Mark says, they used to provide for him. They have been partners in Jesus’ ministry, but silent ones because Mark has not mentioned them, them, until now.
Watching Jesus’ slow suffering death would have been a terrifying agony. They have been traumatized. They’re still feeling that on the way to the tomb. But maybe, they are also starting to feel a tiny bit of relief. They can tell each other that Jesus is no longer suffering, no longer in pain. And they’re relieved of the tension that had been mounting every time he predicted his death. Now instead of being powerless bystanders, watching him die, they can something. They can care for his body and settle into the grief process. Death is awful, but it is known. They can do this. They will do this together.
But we know that’s not what happens. The tomb is empty. There is no body to tend. Some guy is there and he tells them that Jesus is alive and has gone back to Galilee. He says that they should go get the disciples and tell them Jesus will meet them all back at home. It is not what they’re expecting. They’re amazed and terrified. They cannot deal with it. They are afraid, so instead of telling the disciples, they say nothing to nobody.
Fred Craddock says, “This is no way to run a resurrection.”[1]
The male disciples failed Jesus in chapter 14. They all fled when he was arrested. The women stick around longer, then they fail to share the message of resurrection. Mark’s gospel has the most disappointing ending.
Mark knows more. He writes years after the first Easter. He surely knows about Pentecost, about how the first church forms within the Temple in Jerusalem and spreads out from there. He is probably writing to a Christian community in Rome because the gospel has spread that far. He knows more, but he chooses to tell the story from within the point of view of the very first witnesses to Resurrection. They have to decide what to do with this news. And so do we.
They want closure. They want relief from the anxiety of following Jesus, the emotional stretching of caring for people all the time, the financial pressures of paying the bills, because these women were Jesus’ benefactors. Being a disciple is sometimes exhausting. If Jesus is dead, they can come to terms with it and get on with their regular lives.
But if resurrection is true, they won’t get relief. They won’t get closure. If resurrection is true -- and that’s still a big IF -- then they have to reset their own expectations. If resurrection is true, the mission goes on. If resurrection is true, then what now? They have to begin again. They don’t even know what that means yet, so they don’t any anything to anyone.
That’s how Mark ends the story. He doesn’t tell us what happens next which leaves many of us with the women at the tomb, wondering how to begin again. Lots of people were uncomfortable with this ending. They agreed with Craddock – that’s no way to run a resurrection, no way to end the story. So beginning as early as the second century, they wrote their own endings, to tidy things up, to offer closure. There are not one but two re-writes included in most Bibles after verse 8. The style of the Greek and the vocabulary tells us that they were not written by Mark.
If we stick with Mark’s actual ending, we may be caught between faith and fear, standing at the intersection of “I believe” and “I am afraid”
As in, “I believe that the way of Jesus has nurtured me and thousands of people before me, and I am afraid that my children and grandchildren will not find faith.”
“I believe that the presentation of the gospel has always changed as necessary to meet the needs of a new time or people, and I am afraid of change.”
“I believe that God is a God of second and third chances, always ready to forgive, to restore, to redeem, and I am afraid that I have used up all of mine.”
Rev. Julie Pennington Russell is pastor of First Baptist Church in Washington D.C. Years ago, she was a pastor in Texas, where she had a friend – a rugged, burly, brilliant guy that Julie said reminded her of the Marlborough Man. He studied at a prestigious university in the Eastern U.S. some years ago, and then he moved to Texas to work on his doctorate. But somewhere along the way he became addicted to cocaine. He tumbled into a dark hole. He lost his family, lost his place in graduate school, lost big pieces of himself. But somehow he washed up on the shores of a good church. And the people of that church put their arms around that man and slowly he started to heal, and eventually, miraculously, even reunited with his wife and children.
Julie and her husband, Tim, had this man and his wife in their home for dinner and the man began to talk about where his life was going. “I want to believe,” he said, “that my best days aren’t behind me, and that my life can still count, can still make a difference for God.” He sat at their table with his head in his hands. “I just can’t help but feel like I’ve blown all of my best chances,” he said. That’s when his wife, whom Julie describes as a “wonderful, Texas flower- child kind of woman,” reached over and took his hands and said, “Baby, you’ve got to take your sticky fingers off that steering wheel. If God could yank Jesus out of a grave, I figure he can make something beautiful out of busted parts.”
Julie says “I tell you what, if I live a hundred and ten years, I don’t expect to hear the gospel better articulated than that.”[2]
Mark knows more than he tells. What he surely knows is that Jesus’ disciples, the discouraged, frightened, traumatized men and women found the courage to begin again. Eventually, they shared the news of resurrection. They were transformed into brave, hopeful, loving bearers of good news who literally put their lives on the line for the same mission Jesus had, the dream of God’s reign on earth. Somehow, Jesus was alive. Somehow, resurrection destroyed the fear and power of death. They trusted resurrection, even without understanding it, and they began again.
This is the way life always is. It changes without our permission, without our understanding. We learn to crawl and then to walk by doing it. You don’t even know what your profession is until you’ve been in it a while. We don’t understand what love is, or courage, until we’ve practiced it for years. As the poet says “We make the road by walking it.”
Or, to put it another way, “you have to keep going.” This is the advice shared in the wonderful children’s book, Finding Winnie – an origin story of “Winnie the Pooh.” Before the popular and plush fictional character ever developed, there was an actual bear. In 1914, Harry Colebourn, a Canadian veterinarian who was on his way to tend horses in World War I, rescued a baby bear. Naming the bear after his hometown of Winnipeg, he called her “Winnie.” In the book, Colebourn’s great-granddaughter narrates the story of a remarkable friendship and a remarkable journey – across continents, through war and conflict, and after the war to the London Zoo, where eventually Winnie the bear made another new friend: a real life boy named Christopher Robin. Reflecting on the twists and turns that led this baby bear to inspire a timeless children’s character, the book says this: “You never know when one story ends and another begins. That’s why you have to keep going.”[3]
I think that Mark would agree, “You never know when one story ends and another begins.” Jesus’ story does not end on the cross. Our story does not end in fearful silence at an empty tomb. The dream of God’s reign is not over. Because love is stronger than death and . . . .Christ is Risen. Christ is risen indeed.
[1] Fred B. Craddock, “And They Said Nothing to Anyone” The Collected Sermons of Fred B. Craddock, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2011), p. 138
[2] “Our First Calling” on Day1 (September 7, 2008) https://day1.org/weeklybroadcast/5d9b820ef71918cdf200269d/our_first_calling
[3]Lindsay Mattick, Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear (New York: Little Brown & Company, 2015).