The Great Dance
Mark 16:1-8
April 12, 2020 – Easter
Matt Goodale
An audio recording of this sermon can be heard on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfseSDoE88Y&t
Our scripture today is from the final chapter of Mark, verses 1-8. Hear the word of the Lord.
“When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” 4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were afraid. 6 And he said to them, “Do not be afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
I’ll just come right out and say what I know everyone is thinking: “what kind of an ending to a story is that? That can’t be it, right? The women run away from the empty tomb afraid? That’s not the Easter morning story I remember.” If you open your Bibles to the end of the gospel of Mark, you’ll notice that the story does go on for twelve more verses after verse 8. These verses tell of the resurrected Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene and the disciples, commissioning them to go forth and spread the good news of his resurrection. However, you might also notice that these verses are bracketed and your Bible should have a note that says these verses do not exist in the earliest manuscripts that we have of the book of Mark. The earliest copies of Mark end with verse 8. They end with the women running from the empty tomb afraid.
Some scholars and theologians say that there’s no way this can be the ending. It must have been a mistake, because Mark, the very first gospel writer couldn’t possibly end his gospel story on such a note. It couldn’t possibly end with the women running away afraid. This book is supposed to be a message of hope and good news! So it can’t end with the first witnesses of the resurrection fleeing the scene, afraid. That doesn’t sound right.
There are other scholars who do indeed believe this is the true ending to Mark’s gospel. They believe that the extra twelve verses were added on by scribes who many generations later had the same thoughts we do: “huh, this can’t possibly be the ending.” And so they added to it using material from Matthew, Luke and John, the other gospel accounts that were circulating at the time. I am of the mind that this is the more likely scenario. I believe that the original gospel of Mark ended with the women fleeing the tomb, afraid of what they had seen and heard. I am persuaded that this is the true ending, not only due to a long list of scholarly reasons I won’t bore you with, but because this ending rings truer with my experience of the world.
Because in this world, there are no clear cut boundaries between hope and fear. As much as we would sometimes like to pretend otherwise, to be hopeful does not mean all our fears and anxieties magically melt away. To be afraid is to be authentically human—we cannot avoid being afraid any more than we can avoid being human. And it is in the midst of being authentically human that these women in our story come into contact with resurrection hope. In my opinion, this story is one of the most beautiful images in scriptures of what hope looks like in the mess of life – this is what it looks like when God’s resurrection hope meets us in our full humanity: fear and hope intermingle, the divine and the human dance together.
The women in our story, who would eventually go on to become the very first preachers of the gospel are Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. These women followed Jesus during his ministry, and they were among those who, in our passage last week, stood at a distance and watched Jesus’ horrific death on the cross. With this trauma still fresh in their minds, they arise very early on the first day of the week, Sunday, to go to the tomb where the body of their Lord, teacher and friend has been laid. As they head towards the tomb, Mark tells us that the sun had risen—an important contrast to the darkness of Jesus’ crucifixion when “the sun’s light failed.” Already as readers we can feel our hope kindling as the sun rises on the horizon, scaring away the shadows of night.
We can imagine the two Mary’s and Salome walk the road to Jesus’ tomb with a sense of heaviness. They are on their way to care for Jesus’ body one last time. They bring spices so that they can anoint his body and perform the necessary burial rites that there was no time to do on Friday night before the Sabbath. The women approach the tomb on a mission, task lists in hand, and hearts full of grief, only to be surprised by hope.
No sooner do they arrive at the tomb, wondering “how will we roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb” that they find it has already been rolled away. Curious, they enter the tomb and find a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and very understandably, the women become afraid. The young man says to them, “Do not be afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See, the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and even Peter that Jesus is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.”
This is the climax to the whole narrative. All fifteen chapters of Mark’s gospel have been building to this point. Throughout these chapters Jesus has hinted to his disciples that he would rise again after dying. And now here we are! Jesus, the man proclaimed by the disciples to be God’s Messiah has risen from the dead, effectively conquering death! This is not only the moment to which Mark’s entire gospel has been pointing, but that all of scripture has been alluding to. This is the crescendo of the whole story and history of Israel. This is it. This is what the Jews have been waiting hundreds and hundreds of years for. In an unexpected moment in history, God defeats death and sin, proving that God is capable of upholding God’s promise to end all suffering and death one day. If God can do it in Jesus, then God can do it in all of us. This is the best news that scripture has to proclaim. This angel’s proclamation that Jesus is risen is the climax, the pinnacle of hope and good news!
And the very next verse that Mark pens is this: “And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The end.
What?? It’s almost as if Mark ran out of time to finish his story and had to scribble down something as quickly as he could. This ending is like that final episode of your favorite TV show that was cancelled and had to wrap things up out of nowhere, leaving loose ends galore and an altogether unsatisfying conclusion. Mark’s ending is like having to leave Disneyland two hours before it actually closes. It’s like dropping your delicious-looking ice cream cone on the side walk when you’re ten steps away from the ice cream stand you just ordered it. It is not the ending we expect; it is altogether unsatisfying. This ending is almost as surprising as the proclamation that Jesus is risen from the dead.
If you’re reading Mark for the first time, this conclusion to the story leaves you turning the page looking for an epilogue thinking, “wait, that’s it?? They run away in fear??” This is surely why scribes later added a more substantial ending to match the other gospels.
We could all think of a more satisfying way to conclude the climax to the whole story of scripture than “they went out and fled from the tomb.” I’m sure we could all think of a better response to the most incredible hope that has ever been proclaimed in human history than to say, “they were afraid.” And yet, this is how Mark decided to end his gospel. And I am grateful for such an ending.
I am grateful for such an ending, because I can easily locate my place in the story alongside the women, hearing the Easter hope proclaimed, and still finding myself to be afraid, trembling and anxious of what I see and experience every day. I turn on the news and find my anxiety growing as I worry for all those affected by COVID-19. Depending on the day, I worry about our finances, I worry about my parent’s health, I worry about whether I am living up to my full potential as a pastor. This past Monday as my wife Meghan was having her thyroid surgically removed, as I was forced to remain at home alone waiting for a call from the doctor to tell me the procedure went well, I was very afraid. As I waited and waited and as the clock slowly ticked an hour past when the surgery was expected to end, I was terrified. Even as I was at home, preparing to preach this week on Easter hope, I found myself very afraid. Even though I trust in God’s providence, even though I trust that resurrection will have the final word and not death, I was very afraid.
Mark does not tell us the exact reason why the women are afraid, but we should be glad Mark does not over-explain. His reticence to tell us why the women reacted the way they did clears a space for us to feel whatever we feel when confronted with the Easter proclamation, without having to shoehorn our response into the usual template of triumphant exuberance. Sometimes we are able to welcome the usual Easter joy and exuberance with unabashed celebration, but other times we are unsure what to do with the hopeful proclamation “he is risen” when life seems to say otherwise.
Perhaps this Easter more than past Easters we feel the tension between the hope proclaimed by the angel at the tomb and the fear felt by the women who fled. Because this Easter we are not gathered together, but must celebrate in our own homes, as we wait out a virus that continues to spread and take lives. This year, perhaps, we resonate more deeply with the women’s fear as we too have moments of being afraid and uncertain of what the next few weeks and months may hold. This year our lives seem to replicate Mark’s gospel as the resurrection hope of Easter is interrupted by the fear and inconvenience of our present circumstances. This year, resurrection hope meets us smack dab in the mess of life, just as it is meant to.
Mark ties no beautiful bow onto the end of his story, because he has lived long enough to know that life does not have a nice beautiful bow tied onto it. Life is messy, just like Mark’s story. There are no clear divisions between hope and fear, between life and death, between redemption and suffering; they are often all wrapped up together in an untidy bow of sorts; they are all colors used to paint the same beautiful work of art; they are all steps that make up this great dance called life.
The incredible message of Mark’s Easter narrative is not that hope overcame fear, but it is that hope exists even in the midst of fear! Mark’s Easter message to us is that hope can be found even and especially in the mess of real life. The good news of Easter is that resurrection hope meets us right where we’re at. In real life, hope and fear dance together, taking turns leading. And yet, even when we let fear take the lead, that does not make resurrection hope any less real.
Because while Mark’s gospel ends with the women fleeing, too afraid to tell anyone of what they saw, we know this is not the end of the story. If it was, then how did Mark and the other disciples ever hear about Jesus’ resurrection? We know that eventually the women became the first preachers of the gospel. But Mark wants us to remember that for a moment, even those first witnesses of the resurrection had doubts, fears and anxieties, much like us. Even these women who saw the empty tomb, who heard “he is risen” directly from the mouth of an angel ran away uncertain and afraid. They were very human. And it is to these women, to these flawed and messy individuals that God chose to first proclaim “he is risen.”
But the angel at the tomb does not only tell the women that Jesus is risen. He tells them, “Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.” The women are beckoned to gather up their sorrow, their shock, and their fear and to take the road to Galilee, where they will be met by the risen one.
Jesus is already going ahead of us. For the women, he went on ahead of them to Galilee. For us he is going on ahead to wherever our fears, our anxieties and our suffering take us. We do not walk this path of life alone. And we do not walk it without hope.
Mark leaves his gospel story open-ended. He does not tell us exactly what the women do after their initial reaction of fear. We know they eventually do as the angel told them, because otherwise there would be no story to tell, there would be no empty tomb to be spoken of. But Mark does not tell us this part of the story. He leaves the ending for us to write. And if we find Mark’s conclusion unsatisfying, then we have already begun to finish the story. If there’s even a small part of us that finds Mark’s ending insufficient, then hope has already begun its work in us. Hope reminds us that fear should not and will not have the final word, though it is a powerful reality now. Hope reminds us that resurrection and renewal is coming. Hope reminds us that Jesus has already gone on ahead of us to Galilee and to wherever else our fears may take us. Jesus’ resurrection hope continues to meet us smack dab in the mess of life. It is in the mess of life that we find the resurrected Jesus. Amen.