Roll Away
Mark 16:1-8

April 16, 2006


Now that Pope Benedict XVI has mentioned The DaVinci Code and The Gospel of Judas in one breath in his Good Friday sermon, I guess I can too. It is not a bad thing to hear the debates raging about the subtleties of faith over such books and discoveries. When Dale Brown received the British Book of the Year Award in 2005, his words upon reaching the podium were: “For the record, it’s a work of fiction.” The just released Gnostic gospel is intriguing, but after years of looking for the missing link in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, few people except the media and perhaps National Geographic are convinced this new ancient book has anything to tell us about real Christianity.

What is more intriguing is the last word in the Gospel of Mark. It is a Greek word, “gar,” a conjunctive particle that is usually translated as “for, because.” “Gar” normally is at the beginning of the sentence, but here it dangles at the very end and frankly it doesn’t make for good grammar or good sense. Most translations fudge somewhat by making it part of a normal subordinate clause, “for they were afraid.” Yet it doesn’t quite fit. The evangelist Mark, one of the geniuses of world literature, left this awkward dangling incomplete word at the very end to let the reader know that it’s not over, that the ends have not been tied together, that we don’t have it down pat about Jesus or the resurrection. We are only beginning.

Nobody sat right down and wrote about the Passion and resurrection of Jesus. More than 30 years elapsed before Mark took pen to hand, but people talked about it endlessly, in great detail and with great relish. The first thing people talked about was the last - the betrayal, trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus - because it was the most vivid and most important. Telling and retelling the story, this was the Gospel, for everything else hinged upon this. The end is the beginning, for what we have been handed down is a Gospel in reverse. Once you have lived through the Passion, go back to the beginning and read the Gospel all over again.

Yet, it is a dangling, odd story, to which it would not be wrong to say, “How can this be?” No appearance of the resurrected Jesus marks the eight concise verses. “He is not here” is the by-word of the eerie conversation with the young man sitting on the tomb. You’ll see him back up in Galilee.

Is there anyone here who is surprised by this, anyone here who did not already know what was going to happen? The young man was sly, waiting for all of us to crowd into the tomb, “He is not here!” Jesus won’t stay put to meet our expectations, an elusive and always surprising person. Do you think someone who has just put death to death would bother hanging around?

The faithful women, doggedly doing what needed to be done, show no sign of joy, just shock and fear. They had evidently forgotten about the heavy detail of the huge stone sealing off the cave tomb. Who will roll away the stone so we can do the dead one dignity? With the stone unanswerably rolled away, they were simply afraid of the resurrection, of death no longer winning.

Is this any way to run a resurrection, having the first witnesses so scared they wouldn’t say anything to anybody? You can’t even complete a sentence, breaking off in the middle as we are all leaning closer to hear more, and there’s nothing but a garble, a holy stuttering. They still thought it was Saturday.

Alan Lewis wrote passionately about the emptiness of Holy Saturday, the day nothing happened, the day no one knew there was going to be a Sunday. Alan Lewis died in 1994, just shy of his 50th birthday, making revisions to his book almost to the last day. Saturday was not a day of academic contemplation, but a real day of dealing with what actually is, what might have been and what might be.

Saturday was the Sabbath day of rest, so nothing could be done but think, and there were two unthinkable conclusions one was forced to draw. That “either Jesus had never been God’s love and power enfleshed” - that he had been a pretender to Messiah-hood, as there had been others. Or worse, that this had been “God’s last, best effort against the tyrants, that sin’s hatred and the power of death had proved impregnable against the fragile flower of grace incarnate.” What else can you say on Saturday?

Many prefer those conclusions, never move beyond their dark end. No longer is it taboo to denounce faith as a failed and naive adventure of the undisciplined mind. Some even believe such conclusions make them sound intelligent, and they are right, for we are fools, and our wisdom sounds like foolishness. But foolishly, radically, daringly is our seriously non-conformist act to worship together, knowing that despite “the lonely godforsakenness of his dying and the hellish godlessness of his burial” God still has more light and truth to reveal to us next morning.

He is not here. Get you up to Galilee where Jesus began his ministry after John the Baptist was imprisoned. Get back to Galilee where the Gospel begins and read it all over again for the second time, and you won’t believe what you see.

When you hear Jesus is healing the sick and the lame, it’s not some magic skill, but the power of God working through him to stymie the tentacles of death. Doctors, nurses, psychologists, counselors, friends, all use God’s power now to heal. When Jesus feeds the five thousand, stills the storm, walks on water, these are not miracles, but demonstrations that God’s power pushes you to embrace the impossible possibilities and create life where there once was nothing but death’s smell. You don’t have to walk on water to give water to a nation, or you don’t have to still the storm to help people reconstruct their lives and their city after a hurricane.

When you hear Jesus teaching parables, these stories don’t solve your problems, but change your eyesight, for they are never about being a good religious person, but how you get used to the light in the kingdom of God. You hear Jesus arguing with the Pharisees and you know he’s not allowing any ideas live that kill our relationship with God and with one another. Don’t drop the ball Jesus has handed to you. The church is meant to nurture us in living with no holds barred, not to lure you into a holy way of death.

And when you get back to this week, the waving of palms, the intimacy of a last meal, the insanity of betrayal and arrest, the mob that wanted Barabbas and the deadly violence of Golgotha, the god-awful emptiness of Saturday, then you know that God defeats death not by brute power - we humans have tried that too much already - but by weakness, and you and I have plenty of that to spare.

We have shown up looking for Jesus this morning, but thank God, our desire to possess Jesus is foiled, for He is not here! He has gone on to Galilee. Running into the fearful untalkative women, you know it’s not over, because when you are resurrected, there are no words complete enough to describe the power of God holding you.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan