Mark 16:1-8

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. 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.

One of the rare pleasures of being an aunt or uncle to a young child when you yourself are not a parent is the experience of serving as adult playmate to a niece or nephew old enough to speak. I was once one of these, the adult who would for hours allow herself to be ordered around by a three-year-old. I loved it. My nephew’s name was Raiford, and one of his favorite games was a game called “pretend to be dead.”

The game went like this: I was to stretch out on the floor in the living room, and assume the eyes-shut-hands-folded-lying-in-state position that signified that I was dead. Meanwhile, my little nephew, grinning, watched me from behind a large, stuffed chair. Time passed. Nothing disturbed the peace of my tomb. More time passed. And then, Raiford would steal towards me and with a gleeful voice shout: “Wake up, wake up!”

At which point, I would come alive, spring from my horizontal position and chase him around the room as he shrieked. And then, of course, it would all begin again.

There were times, I recall, when I, newly raised from the dead, chased that small boy around the room, and all was glee and laughter. And there were times when his terror outweighed any glee he was feeling. Those times, he would laugh only for a moment, and then would run terrified from the room, speechless and in tears.

Today I wonder: Was it that he was just tired, a victim of what I as a parent would later call “over-stimulation?” Or was it that he intuitively knew how terrifying it is for us human beings to discover that what we thought was not dead after all?

Mark’s version of the resurrection is unique among the gospels. It starts out with most of the familiar elements of the story: three women who head to Jesus’ tomb early in the morning after the Sabbath to anoint his body. Three women worried about how to move the heavy stone placed in front of the tomb, only to find it has already been moved. Three women entering the tomb, and there finding not the body of Jesus but a young man in a white robe who tells them not to be afraid, who tells them Jesus is risen, and tells them to go and tell Peter and the others. He then tells them to go back to Galilee because thatis where they’ll find him, back where it all started, back where they all came from.

And then the story takes a turn. We’re told that the women are so seized with amazement and terror that they flee from the tomb and say nothing to anyone. And, of course, those who have studied the text of Mark know that this amazement and terror and silence is not changed or softened by later stories in Mark in which the women come to their senses and share what they have experienced with others or encounter the risen Christ at all, for Biblical scholars have demonstrated that this resurrection story is actually the real end of Mark’s gospel.  And so while Matthew, Luke and John all have resurrection stories that paint a picture of the resurrection and where it’s headed. Mark alone ends with no actual sighting of Jesus and no promise that anyone will ever hear anything about it.

Why this ending and not one that more neatly ties things up?

On one level, Mark’s ending emphasizes what my little nephew intuitively knew—that it’s unnerving and, yes, completely terrifying for resurrection to come our way, for someone or something to roll away the stone from the place we had entombed the person or thing we had thought was dead and to raise it up.

But what is perhaps more terrifying is that the resurrected one has “left the building” so to speak, has already gone ahead of us, to Galilee, to the home place, where he will already be at work in our lives, in our live in the lives of our companions and communities.

The women in Mark are then rightfully afraid when this happens to them, and we are rightfully afraid when this happens to us because it puts us in touch with our God, the one who disrupts our judgment about what’s dead in our lives. It puts us in touch with our God whose primary business is resurrection business—raising things up that have been cast down, making new things out of what has grown old, rewriting our lives in ways we ourselves could not have imagined, could not have created ourselves.

And, as Mark’s story tells us, our God loves to do these things close to home, in our hometowns, in our neighborhoods, in our households, in the house of the self, in the hours of the body— in the places where we have grown most accustomed to habit or control, both of which can be their own tombs.

But what else is behind Mark’s abrupt and seemingly unfinished ending?

Some have speculated that the reason any story-teller refuses to craft a more settled and settling ending is that in refusing to do so, he or she is urging us to finish the story in the story of our own lives, in this case, urging us to be the living and enacted word that the terrified, speechless women could not yet be, urging us to do what they could not yet do, do it in our own way.

And so while it’s perfectly natural to run terrified and speechless from the tomb where the stone has been rolled away, from the place the resurrected one has already departed into our lives’ future, in the end, it is up to us to find our own way of being attentive to and internalizing and externalizing the liberating and resurrecting power of God in our lives. It is up to us to us to take it in to ourselves and find the right way to let it out into the world, to let it shine out like a candle in the darkness or sing out like a bell tuned from a deeper place and rung at the right time.

What is the resurrection? One writer has said that “It is the best of life coming from the worst of life.” What Mark’s startling story of the resurrection—what it includes and what it leaves out—would add to this is that God’s resurrection of our lives often uses as a starting point our surprise, our speechlessness, our terror, our loss of control, and our flight.

This, ready or not, is our good news this morning as we say: “Alleluia Christ is Risen, the Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.”

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