Mark
16:1-8
There are ancient copies of the gospel of Mark that
finish with an appearance of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalene and then to two
unnamed disciples and then to the whole group except for, of course, Judas;
after which Jesus ascends to heaven and the apostles hit the road to the four
corners of the earth with the good news, miracles trailing in their wake. Some of the earliest copies we have of the
gospel of Mark, however, end where we did today:
“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for
terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they
were afraid.” [Mark 16:8]
As we gather to
remember that day, we do it with flowers and new clothes and candy and organ
music and a choir. We hold egg hunts and
there’s a ham in the oven. The people
who were actually there at the tomb were scared and paralyzed, and the rest of
the disciples were hiding in a locked room back in Jerusalem, trying to figure
out what to do next and if the coast was even clear to get out of town.
Yes, there was good news.
There was the best kind of good news.
There was unbelievably good news, and it was delivered by no one less
than an angel of God. But the initial
announcement didn’t sink in just like that, because they were terrified. “Terrified”: there’s a word that we separate
far too easily from its sister-words “terror”, “terrorist”, and “terrorized”.
The land where those people lived was under the control of a government
that ruled by terror. The Romans killed
people on a regular basis just to keep the locals under control. Crucifixion was popular with the Romans not
only because it was simple and painful and slow, but also because it let them
leave the bodies up as a warning. The
historian Josephus tells how during a rebellion of the Jews against Rome, the
general Titus was allowing the crucifixion of about five hundred people a
day. It may have been an exaggeration,
but he says that they had trouble making enough crosses to keep up with demand.[1]
Do you remember a few months back when a picture came out of Syria
following one of the bombings, a picture of a little boy who had survived
attack after attack that had killed his family?
There was blood running down from his head and he looked more than
halfway to starvation, and when someone found him and carried him out of the
rubble, all he did was stare straight ahead.
Imagine a nation full of such children.
Imagine a nation where they are supposed to be cared for by adults who
have that same look in their eyes: the vacancy, the nothingness, the
just-let-me-alone-to-die blankness. That
was Judea not long after Jesus’ own crucifixion.
Terror wasn’t just the byproduct of the Empire. It was its method and its goal. First you fill people with fear. Then you can make them do whatever you say. Just ask any other gangster-state. Ask the Taliban. Ask the Bolsheviks. Ask ISIS or the Nazis. Pol Pot was especially effective at that in
Cambodia.
That could never happen here, though.
Right?
How much of our current public life is controlled by fear? It may or may not be deliberately created,
this fear. Once it is in the air,
though, it can be manipulated and used by anybody willing to go down that
path. There is the fear of the other,
whoever that might be. It divides the
world into an increasing number of “us”es and “we”s, “they”s and “them”s, “those
people” and “the rest of us”. There’s
the fear that if I don’t get my way, you will get your way, and it will be at
my expense. There’s the fear that
resources are growing less while need is growing greater, so if I don’t get
mine now, you will take it all from me later on. There’s the sense that whoever is a stranger
is by definition dangerous. Trust is
gone. Security is everything, and
security means protection, and protection means weapons. We cannot even talk to one another when
people refer to facts and statistics as “weaponized”.
Good news comes to the disciples and they are so caught up in the terror
of their world that they don’t know what to do with it at first.
“They said nothing to anyone, for they were
afraid.” [Mark 16:8]
Eventually, though, it
did sink in. Jesus was alive. What was that the angel had said?
“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus
of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has
been raised; he is not here.” [Mark 16:6]
The entire Roman system
of rule by terror, epitomized by crucifixion, was ineffective and
bankrupt. It didn’t work. God would not allow that.
“Do not be alarmed.”
Even if you have spent
your entire lifetime being alarmed, you don’t have to live that way. Guess what?
Not everybody is out to get you. Some
folks really are honest. Kindness isn’t
always the bait in a trap. There really
is such a thing as truth.
Not every situation has to be win-lose, and if it is, it is still
possible to be happy for someone else. There’s
an old story (I’m sure you’ve heard it before) of a man who died and was given
a tour of the afterlife. The first stop
was hell, where he saw hungry souls sitting around a big pot of the most
delicious soup anyone had every smelled.
Each soul had been given a spoon, but every spoon had a long, long
handle and when they tried to spin it around to drink the soup would spill off
the spoon and they were facing an eternity of both starvation and
frustration. The next stop was heaven,
and there was a similar pot of the same soup and a similar crowd of souls and
the same utensils. But these souls were
laughing and smiling, because they would lift the soup up for the person across
from them, and someone would lift another spoon to their mouths, and everyone
had enough, and more than enough.
When Jesus rose, the power of sin was broken. The cycle of fear and death was disrupted for
good, forever. The crazy stuff out there
in the world? Sure, it’s real. It has to be faced and it has to be dealt
with, and it takes both wisdom and guts to do it, and anybody who tries to make
a real difference is going to get hurt in some way at some point – physically or
emotionally or economically. But
terrorists only win if they make you live in fear.
I mentioned that someone at some point tacked a longer ending onto the
gospel of Mark. It may have had to do with
that, and put the message in somewhat poetic terms (so don’t go picking up any
copperheads you see on your lawn during an Easter egg hunt). It says to serve the Lord without fear. They killed Jesus, but that didn’t keep him
down, and they haven’t been able to hold him back since.
“And these signs will accompany those who
believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new
tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly
thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they
will recover. So then the Lord Jesus,
after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right
hand of God. And they went out and
proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and
confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it.” [Mark 16:17-20]
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