Mark 16: 1-8
Easter Sunday 2006
Every year it gets more dangerous to write your Easter sermon too early. You never know what might happen. In 2003 the bestselling book the Da Vinci Code a fiction book about Jesus and Mary having a child together was published during lent and was on everyone’s mind.
In 2004, on Ash Wednesday the movie The Passion of the Christ was released in the top spot and regained the top spot on Easter weekend 2004.
This year the Gospel of Judas was published in early this month, and a television special by National Geographic aired during lent. It reveals the contents of a text scholars have worked on for some time. It is a text dated much later than the gospels we have in our Bible. It gives us a window into a group of people who believed that salvation came from rejecting the world and human flesh. They were gnostics. Jesus in this gospel attacks the Creator God for making material creation, and believes God is evil for entrapping spiritual entities in physical bodies. In the Gospel of Judas Jesus says that salvation does not come from worshipping God, but from rejecting the world. To receive salvation from the body Jesus asks Judas, his good friend to betray him. There is no crucifixion and no resurrection in the Gospel of Judas.
If you really want to think about what a gnostic world view is like, you have only to look back to Lent 1997, when the Heaven’s Gate cult members took part in the worst mass suicide on U.S. Soil, right here in California in Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego. In March 39 members killed themselves, believeing they were shedding their earthly “containers” to catch a ride on a spaceship trailing the Hale – Bopp Comet. Who says interesting things don’t happen anymore, in the forty days of lent?
Of course, I don’t have to tell a group of Southern Californians that in marketing timing is everything, which brings up the real question for this morning, why is director Ron Howard releasing Da Vinci Code the movie in May? Doesn’t our boy Opie understand the seasons of the church year?
No, I’m just having some Easter fun here, who am I to tell Ron Howard when the best release dates are, he’s doing fine on his own. Actually, I am excited about books and media, and scholarly discoveries which bring people to a place where they are thinking about God. But it can be dangerous, Mr. Applewhite and Ms. Nettles who were the leaders behind the Heaven’s Gate cult, started to think up the idea of Heaven’s Gate in the same year Steven Spielberg’s famous movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released. Many people believe it was that movie which influenced them.
If you had lived at the beginning of the Christian era, the beginning of Christianity, you would have known a lot of groups that looked like, and behaved like, Heaven's Gate. They were not called "cults" in those days, they were called "mystery religions." They believed that the world is essentially evil and beyond redemption. If you wanted to live the "real life", the "good life," then you would get out of here. You would have to leave this life.
The way that you left this life was to be transported to another dimension, to another planet as it were. That was done not by suicide, but primarily by mind-altering drugs, or by other acts such as sensory deprivation, or trances, or ecstatic speaking, in order to effect what all of us at some time or another have experienced, the strange feeling of being outside of your body.
Essential to the "mystery religions" also was the oracle. The oracle was someone who received information about the universe that was denied to other people. It was secret knowledge. The Greek word for knowledge is "gnosis." Therefore these people, in time, became to be known as "gnostics." At one time they came very close to dominating the Church. The earliest struggles in the Church over theology were struggles with the gnostics.
There were many differences between the gnostics and the Christians, but there was one essential difference. Those "mystery religions" talked about how to get out of this world. Christianity talked about how God had come into this world.
In that sense, what we believe is the opposite of what the mystery cults and their modern manifestations believe. They preach that supernatural beings will come and take us to another world. That is the way we will be saved. We preach that God has come into this world to redeem this world. Easter meant that now there is nothing that can prevent God from doing what God intends to do.
The text for this morning is taken from Mark's gospel, the 16th chapter, the first eight verses. That is Mark's resurrection narrative. It is just eight verses long. There are twelve more verses following the eighth verse, but everyone agrees that they have been added on by a nervous editor who didn't think that the gospel would sell if it didn't have a conventionally spectacular ending. So they added resurrection appearances of Jesus, the granting of supernatural powers to the Apostles, and a final scene with divine pronouncements. That is the stuff of popular religion. The last twelve verses of the gospel were pasted on to provide that ending. Even the most conservative biblical scholars agree with that, that the gospel ends with the eighth verse. The eighth verse reads like this: And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.
Verse eight is a most extraordinary ending. It just ends by saying, they were astonished. Not because of a miracle. They were accustomed to miracles. They used miracles to explain all kinds of things that we today would explain by natural causes. Miracles were not strange to them, they were expected.
What was not expected, what would have brought about the kind of astonishment that the gospel states is grace. Grace is what astonished them. That God, who came into this world to redeem it out of love and was rejected by this world, and yet would continue to love the world. That is the Easter message. That nothing can stop God now from redeeming the world.
Mark tells the story of the Son of God coming into this world in a remote corner of the world, in Galilee, in a town named Nazareth, of which it was said, "Can anything good ever come out of Nazareth?" That is to say, God came to us quietly, humbly, gently, not to overpower us. God came to us like a lover, to woo us. What happened? He was rejected. First, by the authorities. From the very beginning they plotted to do away with Jesus, because they thought he was a troublemaker. Then, by his family. They couldn't understand him. He was an embarrassment to them. Then, by the crowd. They chose Barabbas, whose name means, "son of God," rather than the real Son of God. Then, his disciples. They all fled. On the cross he even wondered if God himself had forsaken him.
The first verse of the Gospel of Mark reads: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The last words of the Gospel come from the Roman Centurion, a witness to the crucifixion: Surely, this was the Son of God.
I think it was Mark Twain who said, "If I were God, I would give the world a good swift kick right in the equator." Twain was talking about punishment for ordinary sins. Yet God reacts to our sin with unconditional love.
They were trembling and afraid because the empty tomb could mean only one thing: God isn't finished yet. They gave up on Jesus. God has not given up on us.
You will notice that Peter is singled out. "Go tell the disciples and Peter." Peter tried the hardest and failed the worst. If I know Peter, which is to say, if Peter is like me, Peter now feels the worst. So the angel tells the women, "Go tell the disciples and be sure you tell Peter. Especially tell Peter that I will not give up on him. I will come and be with him in Galilee."
This scene has a name. It is called the "Rehabilitation of Peter." It appears in several gospels. The Gospel of John has a much more elaborate rehabilitation of Peter. But in Mark, the angel says to the women, "Tell the disciples and Peter I will meet them in Galilee."
In Greek the word "and" can also mean "even." So it can read, "Tell the disciples and even old Peter that I will not abandon him. I am not through with him. They were astonished that the God who had been betrayed would always be faithful to us; that the God who was rejected will never abandon us; that the God who was crucified will give us new life.
My father was a successful bussinessman, and had a good friend, whom he thought he knew well. He was the kind of guy that was able to make decisions without thinking about it, and for whom business is business. He never let emotion enter into making decisions. But one day Dad had lunch with his friend’s son.
Over lunch the son revealed something about the father that Dad hadn't known before. It seems that the son had been in the Army, and he had made a terrible mistake. He had made a terrible mistake. He was given a dishonorable discharge. He said that he knew he had disgraced the family, and that his father would be enraged when he heard about it, and was sure his father would reject him. He also knew that he had to tell his father. So he sent his father a telegram and told him what had happened.
The same day the father sent a telegram back. The telegram read like the message the angel gave to the women. It is almost as brief. There were only three sentences:
The Spanish used to have ne plus ultra engraved on their coins. They were proud of their explorers. They believed that their explorers had gone to the ends of the earth. Ne plus ultra means “there is nothing beyond” meaning that there is nothing beyond what the Spanish had discovered. Then Balboa walked across the mountains of Mexico and saw the vastness of the Pacific ocean, and the Spanish realized that the world was so much greater than they ever imagined. There was so much that they had not yet explored. As a result of that discovery the Spanish coins were recast with the negative omitted, so just the words “plus ultra” remained meaning “more beyond.” This what it means to live in Easter faith, it is discovering a new place over and over, right here in our world, in our daily lives.
Jesus resurrected opens the window of our hearts to a new view, to find fulfillment in our lives and to find experience joy that we have yet to imagine. More beyond. Amen.