Preached Marrch 23, 2008, Easter Sunday at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC at the sunrise service.
Mark 16:1-8
Dedicated to my wife Betsy; and always to the glory of God.
Years ago in Disneyland there was an attraction called Circle-vision which showed movies on a 360 degree screen. Before the show, a host would point out to the audience the state flags that were hung on the walls. One by one they were lit up to see if the audience could identify it, and to welcome anyone who was visiting from that state. After awhile, the light would shine on a very unusual flag covered with strange symbols, and the host would say “and what state is this?” Silence. “This flag,” he said, “is for the state of confusion.”
The state of confusion: what a terrible place to be. We don’t like confusion. We want to know where we are and where we are going. Confusion is not something that we can settle into for very long.
The gospel according to Mark, like all ancient writings, was copied by hand in order to be reproduced and circulated, and we have several copies from early centuries. The ending of the gospel presents us with a puzzle. The women come to the empty tomb, where they learn from an angelic messenger that Jesus isn’t there, that he has risen. He tells them to “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.” Then, Mark tells us, “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.”
That’s how the gospel ends in the earliest manuscripts. No appearance of the risen Jesus. Nothing about the women ever speaking up. No further mention of the disciples, who fled when Jesus was arrested in the garden and haven’t been seen since, except for Peter who followed long enough to deny that he ever knew Jesus. Mark just ends with the message of Easter being proclaimed to these women, and them fleeing the tomb in terror and amazement, not saying a thing.
That’s not a comfortable ending. If that ending showed up in Hollywood, the studio would make a new one. And, in a way, that’s just what happened. When we read manuscripts that come from later decades and centuries, another paragraph follows the confusing ending we just heard. In this ending, the risen Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, to two disciples on a country road, and to the eleven disciples gathered at a table, which is kind of a summary of the stories from the other gospels. We can’t go back and discover exactly why the extra ending began to appear in copies of Mark, but a prevailing theory, the one that makes most sense to me, is that someone was too uncomfortable with the confusion caused by that ending. What was the risen Jesus like? What did he say and do? How do we explain what happened? And, if the women were afraid to speak, then how did anyone learn their story in the first place?
Someone wanted a cleaner ending, and we may want a cleaner ending. We may want Easter to just make sense, to have clear applications for our lives. But there us a danger to oversimplifying our lives. Life is too complex and unpredictable to be boiled down to easy lessons, or simplistic definitions right and wrong, good and bad. I think we need Mark’s telling of the Easter story because it leaves us in the state of confusion. It leaves us in that tension of not being able to understand exactly what Easter means, not knowing exactly what we are supposed to feel, or think, or do about it. And that’s ok. There is a blessing in the state of confusion.
The psychologist M. Scott Peck, who wrote that great book The Road Less Traveled, and many others, remembered people who would come to him for counseling, and when he asked them what was troubling them, they would say “I’m confused!”
Scott would say “congratulations, that’s wonderful!”
That’s not really what you want to hear from your counselor.
“It’s not wonderful – it’s terrible! I don’t know what my life has meant, or what I’m supposed to do next. The things I thought were important haven’t worked out and I have nothing to hold on to anymore. I’m confused, and it is painful and difficult!”
Then Scott would say something like this: “life is confusing. The fact that you recognize your confusion is a blessing, because it is spurring you to the important work of spiritual growth and discovering who you should be.”
When we try to shoot past the complex questions and issues of life and just get to an answer that feels comfortable, or a plan that doesn’t ask too much of us, then we have missed the blessing.
I remember Gilda Radner, from the first years of Saturday Night Live - the sketches she did with Bill Murray, Dan Akroyd, and the rest. She was not only fall-down funny, but just full of warmth and light. When she was just two years married to Gene Wilder she was diagnosed with cancer, and during her illness she wrote a book about her life. At the end of the book she wrote this: “I wanted a perfect ending, so I sat down to write the book with the ending in place before there even was an ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. My life…is about not knowing, having to change.” She wrote that life was “delicious ambiguity.”[1] I think God can work with that.
Dick Howser played baseball in the major leagues and went on to manage the Yankees and the Royals. His wife Nancy used to say “it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” I remember learning that myself as a child. And Dick would say to her, “that’s very nice, but in the real world, you’ve got to win.”
Then he got two brain tumors, and had to resign from baseball, and life wasn’t so certain anymore. Looking back, Dick and Nancy saw that the real world had taught them “blessed are those who believe in themselves for theirs is the kingdom of success. But two tumors taught him that “the gospel of self-sufficiency needs to move over and give room to divine dependence.”[2]
The events of good Friday and Easter morning, the death of Jesus and his resurrection, break apart the easy answers we knew before and leave us in a state of confusion. What will happen next, we wonder, as the women leave the tomb, speaking to no one?
But the answer is right here. The conclusion to Mark’s gospel answers that question, not with words printed on the page, but in the very act of our reading and hearing it at all. We wonder if they were ever able to share their story, but we are hearing their story, which means that they must have told it, and it means that you and I are a part of it. We are the answer to Mark’s cliffhanger, because here we are, on Easter Sunday, and now we are a part of the story. We must wonder what will come next for us.
Saint John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople in the 4th century, invited people to be a part of Easter in this way:
“Whoever you are, come, celebrate this shining happening, this festival of life.
Let everybody, therefore, crowd into the exhilaration of our savior.
You the first and you the last, equally heaped with blessings.
You the rich and you the poor, celebrate together.
You the careful and you the careless, enjoy this day of days.
You who have kept the fast and you that have broken it, be happy this day.
The table is loaded. Feast on it like princes, because no one need fear death, for our savior himself has died and set us free. He confronted death in his own person and blasted it to nothing.
Poor death, where is your sting? Poor hell, where is your triumph?
Christ steps out of the tomb and you are reduced to nothing.
Christ rises and the angels are wild with delight.
Christ rises and life is set free.
Christ rises and the graves are emptied of dead.”[3]
[1] Gilda Radner, It’s Always Something, 1989, page 190.
[2] Quoted by Dr. Richard Wing, sermon titled “The Fifty-first State”
[3] Quoted by Rev. James Wallace on Interfaith Voices radio program, March 19, 2008.
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