EASTER SUNDAY – Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16:1-8 – 12 April 2009 – A sermon given by The Rev. Peter A. Munson for St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Boulder, Colorado
Does The Lord Go Ahead of Us?
INTRODUCTION – The women wonder about the stone…
You have just recently seen the man who turned your life around crucified. This man who healed so many people, who interpreted the scriptures in ways that absolutely astonished you, who referred to God with the intimacy of “Abba”, who recently brought Lazarus back to life, who never seemed to freak out even when people were testing him and setting traps for him and trying to kill him… this man who you thought was the Messiah, who you were just starting to understand a little bit… is now gone. Overnight, pretty much – arrested, tortured, crucified, dead, and buried in a tomb – just before the Sabbath came.
What do you do now?
Well, if you are faithful Jew, you observe the Sabbath, from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. And if you are one of the faithful women who got to know Jesus, you start thinking about what you can do. You aren’t going to sit around, because that will just lead to more tears, more grief, more freaking out, more fear about what might happen to you and the other disciples. You need to do something! And you talk amongst yourselves, and you say, “You know, there was such a rush to get him in that tomb, prior to the Sabbath, that we didn’t have time to anoint his body properly for burial. It’s already dark, night has come. Let’s get up first thing tomorrow morning, before the sun even comes up, and go anoint his body.”
And that’s what they did. Before the men ever left the house, the women were up and dressed and had grabbed the spices that they had just bought, and by the time the sun was coming up, they were on their way to the tomb. And then a very real problem struck them right between the eyes. “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? That round stone that is five feet in diameter and over a half a foot thick. There’s a track to roll it on, but we couldn’t budge it in a million years. It would probably take three or four of our strongest men to move it away from the entrance to the tomb, and we have not one man with us. What are we thinking? We probably should turn around, and go get the men.”
And just then, as they approached the tomb, they looked up, and they saw that the stone had already been rolled back.
What do you think they did then? Do you think they had a long discussion, where each of them offered a theory on who had rolled it back? Mark, in typical Mark fashion, next writes, “As they entered the tomb…” Boom! Depending on their heights, they may have lowered their heads a little bit, and then they walked right in to the tomb.
THE ORIGINAL ENDING OF MARK
You heard the rest of the story. They saw a young man dressed in white. They were alarmed. He noticed they were alarmed and told them not to be. (I wonder how well that worked.) He said, “… you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. [And then a practical point] Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; they you will see him, just as he told you.”
So they ran out of the tomb – “fled”, according to Mark, for “terror and amazement had seized them”. That’s quite a combination – terror and amazement. According to Biblical scholars, verse 8 is the original ending of Mark’s gospel. Most people think that someone came along later, still very early in the life of the Church, and added a longer ending. But this is how we think the Gospel originally ended: “… and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
What an ending to the story! Talk about leaving the reader hanging! No wonder someone, very early on, said, “Whoa, what was Mark thinking? He can’t end it there! What about all the people that Jesus appeared to after his resurrection? We’ve got to put that in there!”
THE KEY QUESTION
But I believe the key verse is actually verse 7. “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.”
He is going ahead of you to Galilee.
This is the key question for us, not just on Easter Sunday, but on each and every day of our lives. Do we believe that the Lord is going ahead of us, or not?
If we don’t believe that the Lord goes ahead of us in all that we do… or if we believed it at one time, and now have forgotten that He goes ahead of us, then you and I act in a certain way. You might call it acting as if everything is up to us.
We start to think that moving the stone – which is VERY LARGE – is all up to us.
If we forget that the Lord goes before us, then we think that solving every conflict that we or our children get into is all up to us. Righting every wrong, reconciling every injustice, saving the world is all up to us. And you know what? If it’s all up to us… if you and I have to be responsible for moving every 1000-pound stone by ourselves, then we can get very willful, extremely frustrated, and awfully controlling.
Don’t get me wrong. We are not supposed to sit around being passive people, waiting for God to do everything. That’s not what I’m saying. Then we would have to confess our sins of omission. But to be so willful that we act as if God is not around, that God is not alive and well and doing God’s part – that is also sinful behavior.
We have a really good example of faithfulness in these women who went to the tomb at sunrise, it seems to me. They were taking some action, doing the next faithful thing they could think of, the next thing that God put on their hearts. As they grieved, they thought, “We weren’t expecting Jesus to be crucified. But what can we do now? We will go and anoint his body.” What they forgot, at least for a moment, was that God was doing His part, too. And what a part it was! God had not only moved that stone away, taking care of that troublesome little issue, but had raised Jesus from the dead, too!
If the Lord goes ahead of us and is doing his part, before and while we are doing our part, then that changes everything! For one thing, it means that we are following Him, and not trying to be our own master. For another, it means that things are already being done that we can’t see yet. It’s sort of like trying to find a way out of the darkness, and in your mind, you are just beginning to bore a tunnel out. But the thing is, way before you even realized you were in the darkness, God had already started boring a tunnel to you from the other side. Or, if you prefer Jesus’ own parable, before you ever came to your senses, while you were still lost in a far-off land feeding the pigs, your Heavenly Father was already out looking for you, and making His way toward you. And so you are not nearly as lost as you think, because God has had the search party going for some time. Not only that, He has already told the folks back home to start making preparations for your party, which begins the moment you take your first step back into the house.
Yes, if the Lord goes ahead of us, that changes everything.
If you are starting college in four months, and the Lord is going ahead of you, then he has checked out your dorm room way before you ever move in.
If you are recovering from a divorce or have just lost your job or are grieving the loss of a loved one, and the Lord is going ahead of you, then there is some light and some healing and some new life awaiting you.
If we think that we’re supposed to be taking on a new ministry at St. Ambrose, or you’re getting a glimpse of a new dream for your life, and the Lord is going ahead of you, then that ministry or dream is already closer to becoming reality than you realize.
If you are preparing music for a service, or working on a new liturgy, or in the process of writing a new play or a new book or a new song, and the Lord is going ahead of you, then the Lord has a really good idea of where all that is going, and he’s probably already singing or dancing or smiling at the thought of what kind of ending you are going to come up with.
If you are struggling with a particular person, in the midst of conflict that you would rather not be in, and the Lord is going ahead of you, then you will be given the strength and the wisdom and the guidance to do what you need to do, and say what you need to say, and consider the other person’s point of view as much as your own – and you will make it through.
And think about this for a moment. If the Lord goes before you in life… and in death… and in being raised to new life by God… well then, does that make any difference at all in the way you look at things?
CONCLUSION
This is why, in some ways, the original ending of Mark’s gospel is the very best ending. The story is open-ended, unfinished. What happened to the women? What happened to the disciples? Did they meet up with the risen Lord?
The ending of the story depends on the response of the reader. The ending of the story depends on each person’s response to this question: Does the Lord go ahead of us, or not? Or to put that in another way: Is the Lord alive and well and active and the main force of love and goodness and new life in this world, or not?
If you respond – “No, the Lord does not go ahead of me. It’s all up to me.” – then the story plays out one way, and your life plays out in a certain way.
If you respond – “Yes, the Lord goes ahead of me, and I know that I will see him soon, just as he said.” – then it is an altogether different story, and your life becomes a very different story. Totally, totally different, in fact.