Unfinished
Mark 16:1-8
Click here to view the full sermon video for Resurrection Sunday, April 4, 2021, entitled "Unfinished."
This past week one of the big stories in the news was about the container ship Ever Given that got wedged horizontally in the Suez Canal blocking one of the world’s most important shipping channels for almost a week. By the time the ship was finally re-floated (that’s the term they used), there were something close to 300 ships waiting for the blocked canal to clear so they get back on course. That’s a bit of what this past year has felt like. Last year, shortly after Lent began, the COVID-19 virus shut everything down and it sort of felt like Lent never ended. We got stuck in a holding pattern waiting for the pandemic to clear so we could get back on course, get back to doing what love doing, get back to seeing friends and sharing meals, and simply spending time together without worrying if we may or may not be an unwitting vector for the spread of this thing that was sending people to the hospital, or worse, to the morgue. We got stuck waiting for an Easter that never seemed to arrive. For the past year, it has felt like the familiar flow of our lives has been blocked like the Suez canal, backing up work and school, holidays and birthdays, vacations and live events; an endless fast from so many of the things that bring us joy and connection. But even as it all came to a grinding halt, there was always the promise that the shut down was temporary, that if we all did our part to keep our distance and wear our masks and sacrificed our personal preference for the love of our neighbor, things would get better. And they are finally starting to. We can see the breaking dawn of a new day. We aren’t there yet, but we are so much closer. We just have to hang on a little longer.
There was no such hope on that first day of the week after Jesus’ crucifixion. The whole thing, including Jesus, had been wrapped up in haste. His body was taken, hastily wrapped in linen without any anointing, placed in a tomb that was definitively sealed shut with stone rolled in front of the entrance. The end. It doesn’t get more final than that. Why the hurry? It wasn’t just the prospect of the impending sabbath that hastened the unceremonious conclusion to Jesus’ story. It was everything that preceded it; the betrayal, abandonment, denial, torture, derision, humiliation and public execution. We do this all the time. The circumstances may differ, but when it all gets to be too much, when the suffering and loss are more than we can bear to acknowledge, we throw it in the nearest hole and seal it shut with the heaviest object we can find just to put an end to it. Game over. Let’s move on.
Only the women weren’t ready to move on. Not yet. They wanted to say goodbye the right way. They wanted to anoint the body. Give it a proper burial. But once the story is over, once the tomb is sealed, how do you unseal it? How do you write a new ending? That’s the question. Who will roll away the stone? Who can possible unwrite the ending? What’s done is done, isn’t it? There is no going back. In one sense that is true. We have not yet begun to fully deal with the ramifications of this past year, with jobs lost, learning forever altered, businesses ruined, not to mention the sheer volume of dead friends, relatives and loved ones from the virus. Even when the ship finally gets re-floated, so to speak. Even when the flow of our lives resumes and the backlog of all that has been deferred starts moving again. We cannot unsee what we have seen this past year. We cannot fully recover what has been lost. Even when we discover the stone already rolled back, what waits for us isn’t what was. What waits for us is everything that is yet to be.
Three days earlier, in the early morning hours when the temple guard came to Gethsemane to seize Jesus and take him to the house of the high priest, Mark shares a peculiar and seemingly randomly inappropriate detail. As all of Jesus’ disciples flee, deserting him to his fate, Mark tells us of a certain young man wearing nothing by a linen cloth. “They caught hold of him,” we are told, “but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” I know, that’s a weird thing to include. Particularly from a gospel that is know for its leanness, its economy. Mark doesn’t tend to waste time on extraneous details. We never get a birth story from him. No shepherds. No angels. No baby Jesus in his golden fleece diaper away in a manger. We don’t get any of that, but we get this instead? Random naked guy fleeing the scene of the crime for no discernible reason? That is until we get here, until we get to the empty tomb. There are no angels here either, just a young man dressed in a white robe. Could it be that the unnamed disciple of Jesus who is stripped of everything as he avoids capture by the temple guard is the very first to return clothed in this white robe, this baptismal garb, in clothes of a martyr, a witness with a message not simply about what God has done in raising Jesus the crucified, but about what has only just begun with his rising. Just when we think the story has reached its end, just when the best we can hope for is a more palatable conclusion to a story that ends in disgrace, God turns the page to reveal that God isn’t nearly done yet. At its heart, resurrection is about just that. It is about God’s ability to re-write even the unhappiest of endings, not to give them a better one, one that smells better and provides proper closure, but declare that with God the work of the Spirit, the life of Jesus that loves us into wholeness is never done, and it can. Not. Be stopped.
It cannot be stopped by the status quo. It cannot be stopped by a pandemic, and shut-downs, and Facetime good-byes, and certainly not by death and all of this world’s death dealing ways. What’s done may be done. But that is never all there is to it. There is no going back, at least not entirely. But listen again to what this young man in white, this witness to the resurrection has to say to the women who are understandably alarmed by what they have found. “Do not be alarmed,” he tells them, “you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; his is not here.” Then he gives them instructions. He tells them where to find him, “go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “he is going back to Galilee.” There is no going back to what was before. There simply isn’t. He is going ahead of you. The risen Christ is always going ahead us to the places we call home, the places where we live our lives. He is going ahead of you to work. He is going ahead of you to school. He is going ahead of you into retirement. He going ahead of you to the place where you get your coffee, or buy your groceries, or meet your friends (even on Zoom). That is where we will see him. That is where we will meet him. That is where he meets us when the best we can hope for is a better ending. In this world that God so loves. Jesus goes ahead of us and meets us and shows us a whole new beginning to a story that remains unfinished. That was the message that first day of resurrection to those who would follow in His Way, and that is the message on this day of resurrection to those who still seek to follow in His Way and want to be his disciples. The story isn’t over. It is never over. Because he is raised from the worst the world can do, we are too. Raised to begin again. Raised to take part in the mission of God to love this world into wholeness. Everything can be stripped from us, leaving us to flee into the night naked and afraid but with the morning we find ourselves clothed and bearing witness to what God’s love has done and what it is still doing. We bear witness to the resurrection in our own lives.
There is no stone that God cannot roll away, no obstacle that the relentless love of God cannot overcome; not the might of any earthly empire, not the finality of death, not even the fear and amazement that might seize us at hearing such a promise. That is the final triumph on this Day of Resurrection. To ordinary ears, the end of the story sounds strange, anti-climactic even. After being given their charge from the young man in the tomb, Mark says the women that day fled and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Really? That’s how it ends?
Of course not. That’s exactly the point. God’s ability to make things new. The love of Christ that tears down the dividing walls. The breath of the Spirit that breaths new life into dry bones. None of it depends on us and neither will it be deterred by us, not even by our sometimes fearful silence. Christ has been raised. The love of God has been set loose in the world to re-write every ending into a new beginning. Whatever comes next, Jesus is going ahead of us. And friends, we will see him there. Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia.