Easter Sunday
March 31, 2024
Mark 16
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
 |
| by Natalie Cincotta, 2021 |
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
I am a planner, and a lover of lists. Any other list-lovers and planners out there? Jenna, our office administrator, and I share this love of lists. In the past months, Jenna and I have been working on developing a better system for keeping track of our shared and respective lists, so that no details fall through the cracks – especially at busy times of year like Holy Week and Easter! We’ve tried a white board, and post-its, and planners, and various online tools. Thankfully there is no lack of organizational aids out there!
You know, I was thinking the women who went to the tomb that first Easter morning could have really benefitted from some of these tools, because they forget some pretty important details. Some things they remember: Mary Magdalene acquires the myrrh, and Salome the aloes. Mary the mother of James decides when and where they will meet, and they are on their way to do the job they hadn’t been able to do when Jesus died, because it was the sabbath. Check, check, check, they’re good to go, right? As they are walking along by the dim light of the rising sun, Mary Magdalene suddenly turns to the other Mary and says, “You figured out the stone situation, right?”
Mary looks startled. “What, you mean how we’re moving it? Um, no, that was Salome’s job.” Salome says, “No, no, I ground the aloe and mixed it with the myrrh. I was not on stone duty.” Mary Magdalene says, “Well it wasn’t on my list!” Salome, always one to strive for excellence, but admittedly fragile because of the grief of the past days, begins to fret, tearing up. “Well, what are we going to do, then? Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” Mary, mother of James agrees: “That stone is very large, and surely too heavy for us to move ourselves!” Mary Magdalene, always eager to solve a problem, is also finding the emotion of the past days to overwhelm her. But she scans her brain for something, anything, that might help them know what to do. How could they have let this detail in their planning for this morning fall through the cracks?? This is not good.
Suddenly, Mary stops. Salome, blinded by her tears, runs into Mary’s back, and the other Mary gasps. There, before them is the tomb, and that big ol’ stone that had caused them to fret. But their worry is for naught, for the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.
I just love this detail, which only Mark includes in his telling of the resurrection. “[The women] had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’” Maybe I love it because this is exactly the sort of thing I’m always trying to prevent – letting some major detail fall through the cracks. I get it, ladies. I feel you. Add to it the load of grief that they are carrying – remember, these women stayed with Jesus to the bitter end on Friday, all the way to seeing where he was laid. They had followed him and provided for him in Galilee and traveled with him to Jerusalem. They were devoted disciples who refused to leave him, and I can’t imagine their raw grief on that morning. It’s no wonder they forgot to figure out about the stone…
During the Lenten season, we have been engaging with the theme, A Seed of Joy. I admit, I don’t see a lot of joy in Mark’s Easter story! There is grief, and worry, and alarm, and astonishment, and terror and amazement… but no joy. In fact, Mark ends his Gospel by telling us that the women didn’t even tell anyone what they had seen, because they were so afraid! We don’t even get to see the risen Christ in this story! So, where is the joy?
Maybe that is also why I’m so drawn in by that large, seemingly immovable stone. After six weeks of daily and intentional prayer and reflection about joy… I still sometimes feel like joy is blocked, indeed like a large stone that I can’t possibly move myself no matter how much planning I do is holding back joy, and it can’t find a way out. We might as well ask ourselves: “Who will move that big stone – that stone that would keep us in a joyless place of death, that would keep us from the new life that Jesus promises and died to give us? Who will unblock my joy?”
And here, my friends, is where I think Mark does give us some joy. Because the women fretted, and worried, and wondered how that stone could ever be moved, and what did they find? That they needn’t worry, because they were not in charge of moving that stone all by themselves. In faithfulness and devotion, they showed up to find that God could do that work. Indeed, that God had done that work.
So I ask you on this Easter Sunday: do you resonate with this? Do you, too, find something heavy or large blocking your ability to experience joy, and new life? Do you feel like the task of moving that thing is insurmountable, even out of your control or ability?
And then this: is it possible that God could do that, or is doing it for you?
Well, I’m sure you know what I think: the answer is yes, God could, and is! Yet it can be hard to see or even believe it sometimes. It is kind of an unbelievable story, isn’t it – this story we come here each year to proclaim and hear about a man who loved and taught even the weak and the outcasts, who then suffered and died at the hands of a hostile government, who was buried, but, who refused to stay dead, who left behind him an empty tomb and a promise for a future of newness and life. Even the women who witnessed it firsthand had a hard time wrapping their heads around it.
And yet… unbelievable as it is, have we not seen it happen ourselves, in our own lives? Not with these exact details, of course, but do we not all have stories of times we struggled and worked and tried all by ourselves to make something happen, all to no avail, and it was only when we stepped back and let God intervene that we found that rock moved, and a new opportunity emerge? I know I have fought like the hell of those three days in the tomb to make things happen, things I thought were right. I know I have wept bitter tears when I couldn’t bring it about myself. And, I know I have been amazed when God gently came beside me in these moments and said, “Here, let me,” and moved aside that big ol’ stone, and showed me a different way, something I wouldn’t have believed in my grief, a way that did bring about a newness of life which that ol’ stone wouldn’t let me see. God doesn’t let us off the hook, mind you – we are a part of this story of resurrection and new life, and partners with God, who equips us for the work ahead – but the responsibility to bring about this hopeful future is not ours alone. God does that with and for us.
It doesn’t always happen in the way we hoped or imagined – in fact, it seldom does. But then again, who would have expected God’s own Son, the Messiah, to be murdered and then risen from the dead? Even though Jesus said explicitly three different times that this would happen, they still didn’t expect or believe it! But I reckon, if we could put away our fret about how we will move aside those big stones, even put aside our careful planning for a moment (with apologies to my fellow list-lovers) and let God step in, we might just find an unexpected pathway to hope, to joy, and to a new life we couldn’t possibly have expected or accomplished on our own.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Let us pray… God of resurrection and new life, we get so concerned with the stones, the barriers that block our way, thinking we have to move them ourselves. Embolden us to trust that you can make a way out of no way, possibility out of endings, and even life out of death. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment