Who?
Mark 16:1-8
Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "Who?"
It feels like a disconnect, doesn’t it? We’ve got flowers and the new clothes and celebratory music. We’re all ready to proclaim with gusto the good news of the empty tomb and Jesus’ resurrection, only to be met by this halting story filled with uncertainty. Who will roll away the stone? We’re ready to exult, only to be met by the alarm at finding a stranger where a corpse was supposed to be. We’re here to be filled with joy at the prospect of new life only to encounter the terror and amazement of these three women who, we’re told, “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Instead of our bold declaration about the one who is risen indeed, Mark leaves us with a troubled, uncertain, and fearful silence. The disconnect makes you wonder, how did we get from “they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid,” to all of this. How did we get from mute fear to shouts of, “Christ is risen indeed, Alleluia!” And the disconnect leaves us with the uneasy felling feeling that we’ve missed something important. Something essential. We live in a world that is saturated with death. On the one hand that is the very nature of things. All flesh is grass and its beauty is like the flowering field, says the prophet. The grass withers and the flower fades. But it’s more than the cycle of life and death that makes us uneasy. Because there is violent death. Unnatural death. Accidental death like the workmen on a bridge in the middle of the night caught by surprise, and the deliberate and willful taking of life by those making war, creating famine, opening fire on a theater full of unsuspecting people, or simply harassing someone relentlessly until they take their own life. This is the daily body count that humanity regularly inflates with its own deadly deliberation. How can we proclaim the joy of this day after hearing the latest headlines? How can we be expected to lift our voices with cries of ‘Alleluia!’ with tears in our eyes? This is in essence the very practical problem we are met with as this reading opens and the women approach the tomb to anoint their friend’s lifeless body. Who will roll away the stone? The whole point of closing tombs with such stones is that they are not easily moved.
It reminds me of the story about Aron Ralston, the experienced climber and outdoorsman who went hiking alone down Utah’s Blue john Canyon on April 26, 2003. As he climbed over a boulder, it shifted, pinning his right arm against the canyon wall. For five days he tried everything he could think of to set himself free. He had water and food for only a day hike, so he rationed what little he had. As the hours and days passed, he reached into his backpack to get his video camera, and over the course of the next several days he recorded his thoughts and addressed his loved ones. Ralston figured that someone would eventually come across his dead body and deliver the tape to his family. As the fifth night approached, he felt certain he would die that night, probably of hypothermia. To his surprise, however, he survived the night, and in the morning a new idea came to him- a divine revelation, he would later say. He understood what he had to do to free his arm. He knew his knife could never cut through his bones, but realized that if he twisted his body enough, that the boulder and the canyon wall would function as a vise grip until his forearm snapped. After that, he could cut the remaining muscle and nerves. The operation took about an hour. Once free, he rappelled down a 60-foot cliff and walked five miles before finding help. When a National Public Radio interviewer aske him about his decision to take this extreme course of action, he replied: “[Remember there were] six days of considering myself a dead man… The moment when I figured out how I could get free, it was the best idea and the most beautiful experience I will ever have in my life… It was all euphoria and not a bit of horror. It was having my life back after being dead.” For many of us underneath all of this- the flowers, the easter eggs, and all the good food that awaits us-underneath all that surrounds our Easter festivities is something like an 800 pound boulder that has us pinned down, trapped, and certain that all that’s left to do is to make the best of where we are until someone turns up to find the body. The truth is that on this sunny Easter day we may find ourselves a lot closer to the reality that Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome faced than we are to Alleluia. We are simply trying to figure out how we’re every going to move that stone and get ourselves free.
Sometime around the end of the last century a well-known black preacher from Chicago was invited to Cuba to participate in a gathering of church leaders from around the globe who were meeting to honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The preacher had been scheduled to preach at the closing worship service. And because he did not speak Spanish, he was assigned a translator, a young woman in her twenties. She was a well-educated Cuban woman, but she had never heard the story of Jesus. She was a member of the Communist party. She had studied Marx and Rousseau, but she had never heard the story of Jesus. Every time she and Wright went anywhere that week, he told her the story of Jesus. About halfway through the week, the translator began to pester him for his manuscript for the sermon- so she could prepare her translation. He told her, “Okay,” and then he told her the story of Jesus. The day before the service she insisted. “I must have your manuscript.” He said, “I can’t give it to you until God gives it to me…” and he continued to tell her the story of Jesus. Finally, that night he gave her the manuscript. But he warned her, “Now, during the sermon, I might say something that is not on that paper.” “Why,” she asked. “Well,” he answered, “What I am trying to do is serve the bread of heaven. The world is hungry for this bread. And in trying to serve the bread of heaven, God will sometimes give me something right out of the oven.” She looked at him funny and then he told her the story about Jesus. So, the worship service came, and the preacher began to talk, and everything was going fine. He would say a few lines in English and the young woman would translate them into Spanish. Then he was trying to make a certain point. He was trying to explain that to African Americans, on April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis – it looked like the whole struggle for civil rights in this country was over. The drum major for justice, the one who taught non-violence, the one who preached peace… was dead. And it looked like it was all over. But as he made this point, he was getting blank stares from this mostly non-North American audience. He wondered how to better explain that moment in American history when all the sudden… some bread came out of the oven. He looked over at the translator and said, “Stop looking at the page because what I’m about to say isn’t there.” The translator’s eyes got big as saucers, and she did her best to keep up as he told this story… Not too long ago there was a tour group looking at pictures in an art museum. The group came to a large painting of the devil and Faust playing chess. In Goethe’s story, Faust sells his soul to the devil for fame and power, and in the end the devil drags Faust off to hell. In the painting, Faust has only his king and a few of his other chess pieces left. He is sweating and scared and knows he is beaten. The devil has almost all his chess pieces and is leering at Faust in anticipation. The painting is entitled, “Checkmate.” The group paused at the painting and then moved on. No one noticed that one man stayed to look at the painting. The group moved from one painting to the next and still the young man studied, lost in thought. Then two rooms over and still the young man studied the painting. That’s when they heard his voice ringing through the corridors of the museum. “It’s a lie! It’s a lie! The king has another move!! The king has another move!!’ You see what no one knew was that the young man was a master chess player. And as he looked at the chessboard in the painting, he saw what no one else did. Faust’s king was not check mated; there was a way out. (Now remember, the translator had been interpreting all of this to the audience as the preacher continued.) “Well, the same thing happened that night in April of 1968. When Martin Luther King fell dead, it looked like a checkmate. But just as it looked like it was all over and done, God yelled down from heaven, “It’s a lie! The King has another move!” (And she translated that) He continued, “But it gets better than that. On one Friday afternoon…” (Now, he had been telling this translator about Jesus for a week now) “On a hill outside of Jerusalem, a place called Golgotha, when Jesus bowed his head and breathed his last – it looked like checkmate. All night long- as he lay in that tomb- it looked like checkmate.” (And she translated that) “All day Saturday, it looked like checkmate. All Saturday night, it looked like checkmate. (And she translated that) But early on Sunday morning booming down across the corridors of time, there came a cry from eternity, saying, ‘It’s a lie. It’s a lie. The king has another move!’” (And she translated that.) And then he said, “To people who think their life has no meaning, people who think it’s all over, God has a word for you. The King of Kings and the Lord of Lords always has another move.” At this point people were standing on their chairs and crying and waving their arms. I know, not very Presbyterian. But the preacher noticed that they were no longer looking at him. They were looking at the young woman translator. And then he realized that she was no longer translating his sermon. She was preaching her own! During the course of the sermon, the Spirit of God had moved within her, and this young woman brought up to be an atheist was telling people of the new life available in Jesus.
When we hear that the women that morning who were told that Jesus has risen and were instructed to tell his disciples that he was going ahead of them- when we hear that they then fled instead for terror and amazement had seized them and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid, it’s understandable that we might wonder how this good news ever got out. But you see the King always has another move.
Easter is the day that we proclaim, even in our fear and amazement and wonder at how such things can be that God always has another move. The truth is that we will never be able to move that stone ourselves. We can try and try until we’re as good as dead and exhausted from all our efforts. The good news, friends, the good news of this Easter morning is that we don’t have to move the stone ourselves- or even cut away a part of ourselves to get free- because the stone has already been rolled away.
The stone has been rolled away to reveal the power of God to do in Jesus Christ what we cannot do for ourselves: to bring light out of darkness, hope out of despair, to free us from the boulder of death that has us pinned down so that we might be raised to new life, eternal life. And to proclaim without hesitation, “Alleluia, Christ is risen…”