The Last Word: A Reflection for Easter Sunday 2024

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Or is he? One could be forgiven for feeling a bit confused and let down by the Easter Gospel today, because this year, we get Mark’s telling of the resurrection, which is even less joyful or triumphant than the others. If John’s resurrection narrative reads like a buddy cop romp, with John and Peter tripping over each other in a race to get to the tomb, Mark’s reads more like a European art film, shot in subdued tones and with an ambiguous ending it’s up to us to interpret for ourselves. So, what’s happening here? And what wisdom might Mark’s story have for us today?

First, let’s remind ourselves of the story itself:

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 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. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But 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.” 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 16.1-8)

Much has been said about this passage. There are good reasons in the text for thinking that this could very well have been where Mark chose to end his Gospel. But, it’s so disappointing as an ending that it is widely believed that someone else later on added the remaining verses of the Gospel in an effort to improve it! And (As it happens, the ancients were a lot more sophisticated in their storytelling than people generally assume; we’re more fond of pat stories with nice endings with everything tied up in a bow than they were!) But why here? After all, the resurrection is the single key proclamation of Christianity. No, resurrection, no Christianity. So, why does Mark end on a note of fear, instead of triumph and faith?

I think the key to understanding this ending lies in not letting ourselves be blinded by it. The fear in the final sentence is so strong that it’s given Mark a reputation for being “skeptical” or “pessimistic” about the resurrection of Jesus. But this isn’t fair at all; the fear has simply blinded us as readers to the grand proclamation that has come just before it “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But 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.”

The angel’s message is actually pretty clear: 1. Don’t be afraid. You’re in the right place. 2. Jesus, who was crucified, has been risen. 3. He has gone ahead to Galilee and is waiting for you. 4. Go tell Peter and the disciples all about it. This is as textbook a Gospel resurrection proclamation as there is. We just miss it because the fear and confusion the proclamation induces in the Marys and Salome. As Andrew Marr perfectly sums up the situation:

When we remember this proclamation and let it sink in, we realize that this enigmatic ending is not pessimistic or skeptical about the risen life of Jesus, but it is pessimistic and skeptical about the ability of human beings to come to grips with Jesus’ risen life. (Andrew Marr, Moving and Resting in God’s Desire, 137)

I think there are two sides of this inability of ours to get the resurrection into our hearts and minds. Marr understands it as primarily about the confounding of expectations. As he put it:

The great value of Mark’s blunt proclamation followed by women running off in fear is that it reminds us that the Resurrection is not business as usual; it is the bankruptcy of everything we thought kept us in the business of life.

Whether we like it or not, we are used to ‘business as usual’, ‘the way the world works’ — that is to say, as much as we may long for the Kingdom of God, we are all deeply immersed, entrenched, and accustomed to ‘the kingdoms of this world’, in which might equals right, good news is always for the rich, and good faith is broken as a matter of course. The resurrection of Jesus throws all that off its balance. And therefore, it’s simply not something we can compute. (Which is, in turn, why Christians have spent the past two thousand years failing more than succeeding in living out its promises.)

But there’s a second side to this too, which I touched on a few years ago in a reflection on John’s account of the resurrection. And that is that hope and joy are not easy. They take vulnerability, to risk being disappointed again; they take creativity, to imagine a different and better future. There, I wrote:

[I]t’s an interesting detail in this story that it wasn’t in the mad rush of Peter and the beloved disciple’s belief that the risen Jesus was encountered, but rather in Mary’s wrestling with her grief and confusion. There’s a blessing there for those who mourn. (…For they shall be comforted.)

And so I hope that we can give ourselves permission to allow this process of moving from grief, through confusion, and eventually to joy to play out in our own lives, to allow the Spring to do its important but often frustratingly slow work in our hearts. Whether you’re unable yet to be joyful at a pregnancy after several miscarriages; whether you can’t quite yet believe your cancer is in remission; whether you don’t trust the new relationship that feels too good to be true after a far-too-long exile in the dating wilderness — it isn’t a lack of faith that’s holding you back. It’s your heart doing its job. Joy takes time. You’ll get there. We’ll all get there. And in the meantime, we can know that Christ will meet us where we are.

If we follow the story of Jesus and the disciples on from Easter Sunday, we see a slow transition from fear to confusion, from confusion to faith, and from faith to confidence. This culminates in the coming of the Holy Spirit on the feast of Pentecost, when this ragtag group of fearful men and women are transformed once and for all into the Apostles, who proclaimed the resurrection loudly in the streets, traveled around their known world to spread their message, and challenged political and religious authorities wherever they went.

So, this Easter Sunday, I think the message Mark has for us is that, wherever we’re at, it’s okay. Faith takes time — and trust. Hope takes time — and creativity. Joy takes time — and vulnerability. But whether we truly understand it or not, the resurrection of Jesus offers us a new life. And our mission as Christians, should we choose to accept it, is to explore the breadth and depths of that new life.

Fear and confusion are real. They’re natural when our world is being overturned. But, while they may be the last words of Mark’s Gospel, in the life of faith they are not the last word. And that’s Good News.

Amen.