Scripture: Mark 16:1-8; John 20:24-27 Series: 2023
An Easter sermon on Mark 16:1-8, the starkest and most hidden resurrection account, which ends abruptly with the women fleeing in terror. Pruitt argues Easter is not a cancellation or covering-over of the cross but its very meaning; faith looks through the cross to the love it reveals, so we must come to tears on Friday to know the joy of Sunday. Drawing on the women who came to anoint the body unwatched and on Jesus’ hidden scars, he warns against masking our woundedness too completely, then proclaims the resurrection as a new bodily world and a new self: you don’t have to be who you were yesterday, you can live unafraid because Christ has won the victory.
Illustrations: private-habits-when-unwatched, easter-dressed-up-vs-private-good-friday, fake-it-after-hard-night, jesus-hidden-scars-thomas, end-of-the-sopranos, mccabe-easter-meaning-of-cross
April 9
Easter
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they could go and anoint Jesus’ dead body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. They were saying to each other, “Who’s going to roll the stone away from the entrance for us?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away. (And it was a very large stone!) Going into the tomb, they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right side; and they were startled. But he said to them, “Don’t be alarmed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He isn’t here. Look, here’s the place where they laid him. Go, tell his disciples, especially Peter, that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.” Overcome with terror and dread, they fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. - Mark 16:1-8
What are the things that you do when nobody is watching. Some of the things may not be super hygienic. Farting, picking your wedgie, nose picking, popping shoulder zits. I mean, some of us do those things in public, but still…
What are the things that you do when nobody is watching. Are you more yourself or less yourself? That is, do you let yourself go or do you discover who you really are.
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome came to the tomb of Jesus when no one was watching. They didn’t do it for the disciples.
There are things that all of us do when we know others are watching. Different ways that we stand and we talk and we act. I think a lot of the Bible and its moral guidelines are to make sure that the distance between how we act alone and how we act with others is very small, but it’s not completely eliminated. How you dress and prepare yourselves for being in public, on Easter Sunday, for example, is based on what you think the perception of others is. Even if you are intentional about not caring, that itself is a presentation to the world. The distance between what we do alone and what we do in public, as well, is seen in the distance between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Easter’s a done up day. We dress to the 9s. We have a flowering cross. We have easter eggs and family meals and familiar songs. Good Friday is a Private affair. There are no Good Friday parties. Some of us worship together. Nobody says, happy Good Friday. How’s your good Friday? Or, nobody at the office or the golf course says, what are ya’ll doing for Good Friday?
Sometimes when we’re hurting, we can put a good face on a situation. You fake it till you make it. This is not pastoral advice. This is just what happens in life. If you have a really hard night. You try not to wear that hard night on your face the next day in everything that you do. Sometimes you can’t hide it, But there’s still a desire when you are wounded to not just show your wounds to everyone who comes by. Beyond the issue of infection is total vulnerability. I think it’s interesting that after the resurrection, when Jesus comes to the disciples and Thomas is doubting what is going on, and Jesus shows him the scars, the scars weren’t evident at first. They weren’t obvious. Jesus wasn’t walking around with these bloody holes in his arms and his side and his feet for all the world to see. He had to point them out. Even Jesus was not a wallowing mass of vulnerability. God does not desire us to be a wallowing mass of vulnerability, but there can be this temptation to cover up our woundedness a little too much. It is the temptation to cover up Good Friday with Easter and claim Easter is something different from Good Friday.
Easter is not a cancellation of the cross. It does not, in any important sense, celebrate anything different from the cross. It is the meaning of the cross. Of course, there are two events: a crucifixion, and, later, a rising from the dead. But these two events are part of a single story with a single meaning…
Faith is not, though, a pair of rose colored spectacles for looking at the cross – as though we could forget that the cross is an instrument of torture and horror. Faith does not gloss over the cross or reinterpret it by wishful thinking. Faith, the celebration of Easter, is a looking further into the cross, seeing in and through it to the mystery of love, which is what it really is. It is not an alternative to the cross. We have to go through Good Friday to Easter. If we have not come to tears on Friday, we shall miss the mysterious joy of Easter.
Mark gives us the starkest view of resurrection. There is no upper room. There is no Emmaus road. There is no ascension. The whole account is hidden. All we have is the testimony of the women who come to clean the body of their rabbi when no one is watching. They tell us of a terrifying angel who says strange words
Don’t be alarmed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He isn’t here. Look, here’s the place where they laid him. Go, tell his disciples
And the women flee in terror. The end. Gospel over.
Later Christians added an ending to line the book up with the other gospels. They wanted to wrap it up in a bow, but Mark has no time for it.
Throughout his Gospel, Mark sticks to the facts. The story builds and builds and builds until right before the Good News is actually shared for the first time. It’s like the end of the Soprano’s and we have to fill in the missing pieces.
But we have the key. It is all there already. We are the ones who were told the Good News that he has been raised! Jesus is alive! Everything that comes after this is secondary to this.
The resurrection offers us a new world that we can live into. There are many questions: what should I do now? How should I live? How should we treat each other? What happens if people hurt me? What is the church? How should it be organized? How should we worship Jesus? How should organize society? How should we reconcile those whoa are apart?
So many questions that we can easily skip over the answer given to us by the angel to the women.
Don’t be alarmed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised. He isn’t here.
Easter is not different from the cross. The old testament is not different from the new. Our life today, though, is different from our life yesterday.
Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia! Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia! Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia! Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!
The resurrection sets the seal on incarnation: it is not that God was man, but that God is man, a human, bodily, animal, alive with the battery life of God. Because this man Jesus carried his obedience and love to the point of excepting destruction (not just the torture of the cross, but death, and ending, a total failure), because of this, he has been raised up beyond death to love, which is the life of God. The resurrection of Jesus was the creation of the new, bodily world, the new way of being human, the new way of being bodily. The risen Jesus did not enter paradise. He is paradise. It is because our bodies share in this bodily life of Christ, it is because we belong to this bodily world, that we conquered death, that we are able to live not for ourselves, but by love, the love that Christ brings to us from God.
You don’t have to be who you were yesterday. You don’t have to live that kind of life. You don’t have to hide who you are. You were created by the God who is love for love. You were created for a purpose. The brokenness of this world makes us stray from that purpose but Christ has won the victory.
The angel says to the women, “Do not be afraid.” This is the Gospel. You can live unafraid.
Let us give thanks for Christ’s freedom this day. Let us live into that freedom from now on.
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the mystery of Easter by which you save us from ourselves and love us into our true selves. May we let go of our path of self-destruction that led to the cross. May we quietly rise up in the early of the morning to follow you as the first evangelists did going to the tomb. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.