The End of the Story

Mark 16:1-8

March 27, 2016 (Easter) • Mount Pleasant UMC

Well, we made it! I arrived here at Mount Pleasant almost nine months ago…and now we have finally given birth. Congratulations, it’s a worship center! Almost three years of exile, lots of wondering and questioning, some who said it would never happen, and changing pastors in the midst of it all—and yet, by God’s grace, here we are, in our renewed worship center. After almost six months of hard work by our contractors, even longer months of work by our Trustees and countless hours spent by Chris and Jenny Kocher as they spearheaded the rebuild, we are grateful and we are here. We made it! I had one of the local pastors this week tell me he moved to town just shortly after this worship center had been condemned, and as we stood in here this week, he said it was the first time since he’d moved to town that we now have full use of the building. Thanks be to God! Now, we can finally settle back in these pews, take a rest and enjoy life, right? Life is good. This is the end of the story. Mount Pleasant is back in business, and the story is over, right? Or has it just begun?

It’s so appropriate that this moment in our church’s history coincides with this day on the church calendar. Over the last six weeks, all throughout Lent, we’ve been walking with Jesus through the last day of his earthly life, through the 24 hours that changed the world, and now we’ve arrived at the end of the story. We began with his last Thursday night, about 6:00 p.m. when he shared a final meal with his disciples, and we followed Jesus as he went to pray at Gethsemane, late in the night. We watched as he was arrested and tried before the religious leaders and the Roman governor, and we saw how he was mocked and beaten and eventually crucified. He hung on the cross from about 9:00 a.m. Friday morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, and then, with a loud shout, Jesus died. As evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, one of the groups that had condemned Jesus to death, asked for his body. Mark says he was a secret disciple, which is why he didn’t speak up when they condemned Jesus. He was only one voice; what difference could he make? Besides, he was “waiting for the kingdom of God” (15:43), and in all likelihood, his hopes were dashed when Jesus just gave in and then died on the cross. Like so many others, he watched his hope and his belief in Jesus as the Messiah drip to the ground as Jesus’ lifeblood drained out of him. Make no mistake, Friday was horrible. Watching Jesus die, for the disciples, was like watching themselves die. The last three years must have been a waste, and when none of them seemed to know what to do, Joseph at least pulls it together enough to ask for Jesus’ body, and to give him a decent burial. He takes it to a nearby tomb he owns, and as Mary Magdalene and another Mary watch, a huge stone is rolled in front of the entrance. That’s it. End of the story. It’s sundown now, on the Sabbath. Jesus is dead. The story is over.

Certainly that’s what those who went to the tomb thought. Nobody went to the tomb early on Sunday morning to see if Jesus had been raised from the dead. The Gospels differ on exactly how many people went to the tomb, but the reason is always the same: they go to finish the burial. Now, I want to give you a sense of what a first-century burial space was like, so let’s go with Pastor Adam Hamilton to Mount Scopus in Jerusalem to take a look at a family burial chamber.

VIDEO: Tomb Overview

So Jesus was buried in Joseph’s family cave, then, and the cave was sealed with a huge rolling stone. The Sabbath began at sundown on Friday, and no one was allowed to work on the Sabbath. So they had buried Jesus quickly, and from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, they waited. What do you think they were feeling and thinking as they waited? This was a Passover Sabbath, a moment of high celebration, but for these disciples, it most likely was a time of despair, sadness, grief, maybe even some fear that those who killed Jesus might come after them next (Hamilton, 24 Hours, pgs. 118-119). I imagine it being very quiet, no one discussing (or even remembering) Jesus’ promise that after three days he would rise again. I mean, there are a lot of strange things that happen in the world, but one thing is sure: dead men don’t rise again.

So, most likely, on Saturday after sundown, the women would have gone to buy the required spices needed for his burial. Normally, the body would have been anointed with oil before burial, but since Jesus had died just before the Sabbath began, there hadn’t been time to do that. Nor had there been the time needed to surround the body with the spices which were used to prevent or cut down on the awful smell which would come as the body decomposed in the hot Mediterranean days. By Sunday morning,  his body has been in the tomb two nights and one day, and they would expect that it’s already begun to decompose (Keener, Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, pg. 183). However, it’s not the smell that is the primary concern of these three women (16:1) as they run to the tomb early that Sunday morning. Mark puts it this way: “Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, ‘Who will roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb?’” (16:2-3).

Many first-century tombs were cut into the hillsides, where the stone is soft, and in order to seal the tomb, a huge round, rolling stone, weighing usually somewhere between one and three tons (Archaeological Study Bible, pg. 1716), was put in front of the entrance. Now, it was easy to close a tomb. The stone would be rolled down a slight slope into a socket, fitting into a groove in the rock beneath. What would not be so easy was to roll it back out of the groove and up a slight incline in order to open the tomb. One or two people might be able to close the tomb, but it would take several strong men to open the tomb. Naturally, these three women who are by themselves wonder how they’re going to be able to do it. Apparently, they are hoping to find a gardener or someone standing nearby who will help them (Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 222).

What they find is something they never expected. All four Gospels tell the story in slightly different ways, but all of them are certain on this one fact: no one expected resurrection. No one. Despite the fact that Jesus himself had told them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered over to human hands. He will be killed, and after three days he will rise” (9:31). He said that more than once, and still, no one expected resurrection. The women on Sunday morning are going to visit a grave to mourn a dead friend, but instead they find an open door and a young man, dressed in a white robe. He’s sitting on the right side, which is a sign of good news in that culture (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 612). And the young man, whom we usually assume is an angel but is not identified as such by Mark, speaks to the women in a typically angelic way: “Don’t be alarmed.” Don’t be afraid. Do not fear! Without them saying anything, he tells them why they think they are here and why they are really here. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here” (16:6). He is risen! They couldn’t begin to comprehend what that meant, and yet what they did know was this: the tomb was empty. Jesus was not there any longer.

Some folks have tried to come up with alternative explanations to the resurrection. If we hold fast to the assumption that dead men don’t rise, if we fail to see the power of God working in this story, then we have to explain why Jesus’ body was missing and why no one has ever found it. Some say the women went to the wrong tomb. In their grief, they got lost and, since the tombs all look somewhat alike (they’re all in caves), they went to a tomb that had not been used yet, was empty, and then they simply made up the story of the young man sitting inside. But if that’s the case, why didn’t the Romans just produce the body? Why didn’t the Romans come forward and say, “Your story is all made up. Here’s the real tomb, and here is his body”? Why did they feel the need to make up a story, as Matthew says they did (Matthew 28:11-15), that said the disciples stole his body? No, had the body still been around, buried in the ground, all the Romans would have had to do was say so, show it, and the story of resurrection would have stopped there. But they didn’t. The couldn’t.

There is another theory called the “swoon theory,” that says Jesus merely passed out on the cross, that he didn’t really die, and that when he was laid out in the cool, dark tomb, he was able to wake up, peel himself out of the tight grave wrappings, get out of the tomb and make his disciples think he had been raised from the dead. Now, I hope that, after we’ve walked through these 24 hours that changed the world, you can realize how improbable this is. Jesus was beaten nearly to death. He had thorns twisted and pressed into his head. He suffered massive blood loss. He was nailed to a cross, nails through his wrists and his ankles. He hung there for six hours, basically unable to breathe, unable to find relief from the pain. Beyond that, John tells us, to make sure he was really dead, the soldiers put a spear into his heart, and out flowed blood and water (John 19:34). These Romans soldiers were experts in death. They would not make a mistake like this. Had they not known for sure he was dead, they would have broken his legs to make sure. And even if they did make a mistake, do we really think Jesus, in the physical state he was in, could have recovered enough in just two nights and a day to, from the inside, move away a stone that weighed between one and three tons? After all he had been through, do we really think his wounds would have been healed enough to fool the disciples? To believe in the swoon theory, you have to discount a whole lot of documented history.

A third theory is that the disciples made it all up. After his death, they got together and they somehow felt Jesus still near them, and they wanted to continue spreading his teachings, so they made it all up—the whole resurrection story was a vast conspiracy led by the disciples. There are a number of problems with this, the first being what I said earlier—the Romans could have stopped this story by producing the body. The second problem is the women. In the first century, women were not considered to be credible witnesses, and yet, in every Gospel account, it is women who go to the tomb first. As John tells it, Peter and John don’t even bother going until Mary Magdalene comes back to tell them that Jesus’ body is missing. And even then, they don’t really know what to think (John 20:1-10). If you were making up a really good story in the first century, one that you wanted to be believed right away, you wouldn’t have women be the primary witnesses, and you wouldn’t have the leaders of the movement clueless about what happened. But the third problem with this theory is the fate of the disciples. History tells us that all of the disciples, except for John, were martyred for their belief in the resurrection. Peter, for one, was crucified upside down because he didn’t believe he was worthy of dying the same way Jesus did. Now tell me, how many people do you know who are willing to die to defend what they know is a lie? The late Charles Colson, who was a powerful member of Richard Nixon’s White House staff and who went to jail because of his part in the Watergate conspiracy, said this: “I know a thing or two about cover-ups and conspiracies: No conspirator willingly dies for what he knows to be untrue—or, in the case of Watergate, even go to jail. The closest men around the president of the United States testified against him to save their own skins. You’re going to tell me the Apostles maintained their story at the cost of their lives? Impossible” (Colson, “Sinking Credibility,” Breakpoint, March 1, 2007). The reality is this: something happened on that first Easter that turned these unschooled, Galilean fishermen into people who would willingly give their lives to defend their faith. As Arthur Conan Doyle put it in his Sherlock Holmes books, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” We may want to try to explain it away, but the only alternative that makes sense is that what these disciples said is true. Jesus really was raised from the dead.

So if that’s the case—then, what does it mean? Not just for then, but for us, in the 21st century, here and now? We’ve been asking that question all along our Lenten journey, as we’ve tried to not just learn facts about the events of that last day, but to understand what they might mean for us. The events of that first Easter call us to do the same. What does it mean for our own lives if Jesus was raised from the dead? First, it means that death is a defeated foe. As I sang earlier, “Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered!” Paul describes death as “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26), because it’s the one we fear the most. It’s the one we can’t do anything about. But Jesus can and did. Jesus faced death, went through it and came out victorious on the other side. Death could not hold him, and the Bible tells us Jesus’ resurrection is a promise of our own (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20). If Jesus was raised, those who believe in him will be raised as well. He came to free us from the fear of death. When Jesus was on the cross, one of his last “words” or was, “It is finished!” (John 19:30). It’s one word in Greek, and it means that everything he came to do was done. Everything was done, finished, complete. For a believer at the moment of death, there is the promise—the guarantee—of resurrection.

And there’s a striking detail in John’s Gospel that is a reminder of that promise. In John 20, we’re told that when Peter and John arrive at the empty tomb, they notice that Jesus’ burial cloth is still lying in the tomb, and the wrap that had been around his head was off to the side, folded up. Now, not only is that an eyewitness detail, and not only does it tell us this wasn’t the work of grave robbers (because grave robbers wouldn’t leave the wrappings nor would they fold them up), but there’s a deeper meaning here that people in the first century would have caught. Jesus, you remember, was a carpenter, and in the first century, there was a custom by which carpenters let the contractor know a job was finished. On a hot day in Galilee, a carpenter would stand back to look at his work and, at the same time, take a nearby towel and wipe the sweat and dirt from his face and hands. After that, he would take the towel and fold it neatly in half, then fold it again. He would set it on the finished work and walk away. When someone came to inspect the work, they would see the folded face towel and understand the carpenter’s message: it is finished. The work is done (Brouwer, The Carpenter’s Cloth, pg. 125). That’s what the folded face cloth in the tomb told them: Jesus has conquered death itself. And if you don’t have to fear death, what else is there to fear?

Second, notice what the young man in the tomb says to the women. After he announces the resurrection, he says, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you’” (16:7). Did you hear that? Tell his disciples…and Peter. Why is Peter singled out? I believe it’s because of Peter’s denial (Garland 614). Peter had failed big time. He had denied even knowing Jesus and he did it three times, one right after the other. He had failed to make good on his promise to follow Jesus even to death. He had always been the assumed leader of the disciples, but when it came to crunch time, Peter couldn’t follow through. So imagine how Peter must have been feeling right then. Imagine how you feel when you let someone down, someone who counted on you, someone who thought they could depend on you. Imagine how it is when you let down the person who means more to you than anything else in this world. Peter needed a word of restoration, even more than the other disciples did. Peter needed a word of hope. So the young man singles Peter out. Tell the disciples…and Peter. Everyone’s welcome back, but especially Peter the denier. He’s still included in the mission.

Peter’s restoration should give us all hope, for every time we mess up, for every time we fail to be who we know we should be, for every time we’ve done what we know is wrong—there is still hope. There is always hope, because of the resurrection. Some of you know that, almost six years ago, a dear friend of mine took his own life. Over the last six years, we’ve discovered more and more about what was going on, and it’s become evident that his life had been spiraling out of control for quite some time. Six years ago, he got to a place where he could see no easy way out. He had betrayed so many people, including his own family, that in his mind, the only escape he had was to end it all. I wish he could have seen down the road and understood how his choices would devastate so many people and further wound already difficult relationships. More than that, I wish he could have understood Peter’s story, that no matter how deep you are in, no matter how many times you have done what you said you would never do, no matter how bad your sin—because of the resurrection, there is always hope. No one is beyond hope. If Peter, who denied even knowing the Son of God, can find hope and restoration, then there is hope for everyone. The resurrection tells us we never need to live without hope again. Thanks be to God!

Finally, notice the end of Mark’s Gospel. Now, I know that in your Bibles, most likely, there are several verses after verse 8, but the oldest and most reliable texts of Mark’s Gospel end at verse 8, which means either the original ending of Mark is lost or Mark intended to finish the story with these words: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (16:8). Now, that’s a strange ending to a story, don’t you think? And early scribes who copied Mark’s Gospel must have thought so, too, which is why so-called “better” endings were written and attached. But what if this is the way Mark intended the story to end? What might that mean for us that the the resurrection is the first event in Mark’s Gospel that the disciples are instructed to go and tell about? Before this, they were repeatedly told to keep quiet, to not tell anyone about what Jesus did. Now, however, they have been told that obedience means proclamation and that secrecy is disobedience (Garland 614). So they go. They run. But Mark says they are afraid at first, so they don’t tell anyone anything. And I think the ending is left the way it is because it’s up to us to finish the story. It’s up to us to be the end of the story. With the women, we, as disciples, are called to go and tell. And that’s the “end” of our story, as well, Mount Pleasant. This worship center is not the end. It’s only a new beginning. It’s a tool; it’s a renewed calling to be Jesus’ disciples and tell others not about our beautiful building but about the savior who died and rose to life. Go…and tell…take the message beyond these walls, offer hope to a broken world, be Jesus in the world now and always. The end of the story is found in what we do with it, in how we make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

We come here, on this Easter Sunday, in this unique point in our history, but the story is the same. Does this event make any difference in our lives? Are you changed because of your encounter with the risen Christ, or do you yawn, nod and walk away from the greatest event in human history? Do we think about the people outside these walls who need this word of hope or are we more concerned about whether or not the ham we have in the oven will burn before we get home? What difference does it make in your life that Jesus is risen? Will you go and tell?

I have been privileged to make several trips to the Holy Land, and in July 2000, we found ourselves at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Sunday morning. The church is the traditional site of Calvary and the empty tomb. There is nothing left there of the original landscape; pieces were taken over the centuries by pilgrims who wanted what we would, today, call a souvenir from this holiest of sites. But there is this massive church built over the traditional site, a church which is shared, not always willingly, by six different Christian traditions. So when you enter the church, you go up a steep set of stairs to what is understood to be the top of Calvary; you can reach down under the altar and touch the remains of the top of the hill. Then, you descend the steps to the place where tradition holds Jesus was laid on the ground prior to his burial. Then you go around the corner to the place where the tomb once was. The tomb is no longer there; the hillside has been carved away, but under this huge dome is a small shine that is supposed to sit on the spot where the tomb once was. Only a few people can go inside at a time, so there is usually a long line waiting. On this particular Sunday, we had been to Calvary, and we had touched the stone where Jesus had been laid, and we were waiting to get into the tomb for a moment of worship, when I glanced up toward the windows that circle the dome. There it was, a bright sunbeam blazing down through the window and shining right on the entrance to the shrine. I snapped this picture, assuming it wouldn’t come to much (it wasn’t digital, so I had no way to know for sure), but the sunbeam, wonderfully enough, came out clearly in the picture. And that picture, and that moment, has reminded me over and over again of the power of the empty tomb to bring light into our darkness. This image reminds me not to take Easter for granted. Death has been defeated. Hope has been restored. Easter reminds us that the worst thing is never the last thing. And that is news worth going and telling. So what will you do with the empty tomb? What will you do with the resurrected Jesus? Will you take him for granted, or will you worship with your life? Will your life, from this moment on, be one that in every moment cries out, “Hallelujah! My Savior lives!”? He is not here—he is risen! His story is not over, nor is ours; it has just begun! Go and tell! Hallelujah!