He Has Been Raised

[Challenges from plants: Where is Jesus? Didn’t he break bread with the disciples? I’m sure he went fishing with Peter and the others.] Wait, wait! You’re getting the stories all mixed up! This is Mark’s story, and Mark has told it the way Mark wanted to tell it. We know that each of the Gospel writers assures us that Jesus was crucified and then raised, but each of them tells the story a little differently. This is Mark’s story, and Mark tells the story the way his community understood it. Actually, Mark tells his whole story to make sure that we understand what it means to be followers of a risen savior.

Sure, the ending of Mark’s story makes us uncomfortable. The women were too terrified to believe what the angel had told them, and they just ran away? You’re probably thinking, “That’s not what I came to hear on Easter!” Where’s the good news in that? Actually, Mark’s story has a better ending than it might have had. Suppose, for example, that you had heard this story instead:

“When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint Jesus. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. And when they went in, they saw the body of Jesus, just as it had been prepared before the Sabbath. With tears in their eyes, they took the spices, laid them on the body, and went to the disciples to tell them to find someone to roll the stone back. And then they went home.”1

You surely did not come to hear this story!

Even so, perhaps for you Mark’s story still isn’t good news. “He has been raised; he is not here.” Are we really ready to hear that story? Theologian Karl Barth reminded us that the resurrection is actually “a difficult and dark truth,” and a word that we can scarcely tolerate. Indeed, Barth insisted, we are “threatened by resurrection,” because we don’t want to admit that we are imprisoned in this world of sin and death, and that we can’t escape from it through our own efforts. “Admit it,” Barth dared us, “there is no way out of this life…. Nothing, except the possibility of a miracle can help us.” And don’t we resent the fact that we can’t help ourselves, that neither progress, nor evolution, nor hard work, nor adherence to the law, nor even enlightenment, can rescue us? Don’t we think that we are good, self-made, independent people, and that we ought to be able ultimately to rescue ourselves? And yet, we know that whatever paths our brief lives take, they lead inevitably to the brink of death. “He has been raised; he is not here.” The God who raised Jesus also calls out to us. In the depths of our suffering and dying, when we have finally given up any pretense of self-sufficiency, the God who raised Jesus says to us, “Rise up! You are dead, but I call you to live.”2Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, in Patricia Sanchez, Celebration, April 12, 2009, 1-2.Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, in Patricia Sanchez, Celebration, April 12, 2009, 1-2.Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, in Patricia Sanchez, Celebration, April 12, 2009, 1-2.

My brothers and sisters, this is the good news! This is the good news that you came to hear this morning! The resurrection is God’s doing, not ours! He has been raised by God! And we have been raised by God with him! We don’t have to save ourselves! God has fulfilled God’s promises to save us! Didn’t we learn that this Lent and Holy Week? Didn’t we hear about God’s covenants with God’s people? Didn’t we hear God’s promises to the people, that God would love them forever? Didn’t we discover that God is faithful, that God keeps God’s promises – extravagant as they are? Didn’t we discover on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday the unfathomable depth of God’s love for us? Do you remember Jesus’ promises to his friends as they were walking to Jerusalem? In Mark’s telling of the story, Jesus promised them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again” (Mark 10:33-34). And Mark is here to tell us that God has kept God’s promises: Jesus has been raised; he is not here. God has kept God’s promises, and God keeps God’s promises!

To be sure, such evidence that God is truly faithful, such unexpectedly good news can indeed be terrifying and overwhelming, especially if, like these women, you had watched Jesus die on that cross. Would I have reacted differently from Mary Magdelene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome? Probably not. Such unexpected good news can also be incredible. We didn’t have to wait until the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, or the nineteenth-century Darwinists, or the twentieth-century modernists came along to find people who couldn’t believe that God had kept God’s promises. If you think about it, everyone we know about in all the Gospel stories had trouble recognizing Jesus after he was raised, had trouble really believing that he had done what he said he would do, and that he was truly alive again. Civil and religious leaders in the early centuries thought that most people who believed that Jesus had been raised were insane, treasonous, or, at the very least, dangerously misled.

Yes, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome were terrified and overwhelmed. But for Mark it doesn’t matter. Or rather, for Mark, terror and fear are natural reactions. For Mark what matters is that God has kept God’s promises. God has acted. Eventually, perhaps the women must have told Jesus’ friends and disciples. Eventually, no doubt they all did go to Galilee, as the angel had told them to. They all told others, and those others believed them. Paul had an experience of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, and then he began to tell yet others, both Jews and Gentiles. And the message of Jesus’ victory over death, of God’s mighty act, God’s faithfulness, and God’s love spread like wildfire – despite the disdain for it in polite society, and despite the best efforts of the civil authorities to stamp it out. You and I are here because we believe – or perhaps yearn to believe – the testimony of the women who stood by Jesus as he was dying and were the first to hear that he was alive again. We are here, not because we like to hang out with nice people who like good organ music, but because we have heard for ourselves and believed the testimony of someone who told us that God has acted, that God raised Jesus from the dead and conquered sin, death, and evil.

Mark’s story ended with the terror and fear of the faithful women. But that should not be where the story ends for us, because God’s story has not yet ended. Jesus, raised and alive, is still going ahead of us to Galilee. And you and I are now part of God’s story. This parish is now part of God’s story. Our lives, both as individuals and as a parish, witness to God’s faithfulness, God’s love, and God’s mighty actions on our behalf. Can you find yourself in this story? In the fifty days that the church gives us to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, find some time – a few minutes here and there among the alleluias and the lilies – to reflect on your own story. Where has God acted to bring new life out of death and loss? Where have you shared with others your confidence in God’s promises and brought new hope and strength to someone else experiencing death and loss? When has this parish been a place of healing and new life? The God who raised Jesus from the dead is still among us, strengthening, empowering, and loving us. Can you see God at work? Can you see the signs of hope in the ending of Mark’s story? When we feel uncertain and afraid, we can identify with those women, and we can hear again those comforting words: “He has been raised; he is not here.” We can live the resurrection, depend on God’s covenants and promises, believe in Jesus’ own words, rely on the testimony of centuries of the faithful, and anticipate the possibility of new life in Christ, even when we cannot always see it.

I believe the stories of the witnesses to the resurrection. I believe the testimonies of all those believers across time and space who have taught others that Jesus was raised from the dead. And because I believe, I can shout with all those other faithful believers around the world, “Alleluia! Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!”

1. With thanks to J.W. Moore, “Some Things Are Too Good to be True,” in David E. Leininger, Tales for the Pulpit (Lima, OH: CSS Publishing, 2008), 126.

2. Come Holy Spirit: Sermons, in Patricia Sanchez, Celebration, April 12, 2009, 1-2.