Living Resurrection—A Sermon from Mark 16:1-8

It is John's gospel that tells us that if all the things that Jesus did while on earth were written down, the whole world wouldn't have been able to hold all the books. Nonetheless, God chose to give us four books, not so that we could hear more stories, but so we could learn different things, sometimes from different versions of the same story. The resurrection story is like that. Four different versions of the story each teach us different aspects of what the resurrection means to us.John's gospel, in telling the resurrection story seems to stress, among other things, how the resurrection leads us to believing in Jesus. "These things were written so that you might believe" the gospel tells us about its own mission, and indeed the post-resurrection stories in John certainly highlight the disciples' journey into faith in the resurrected Jesus. Most paradigmatic for that within the fourth gospel is the story of Thomas. Thomas's story begins when the risen Jesus appears to the disciples who are gathered together—all except Thomas, that is. when Thomas shows up, Jesus has gone, and he finds their story incredulous. He declares that he won't believe it until he sees it for himself—and that is exactly what happens. This whole episode is highlighted by Jesus' declaration to Thomas that there is an even greater blessing in store for those who are able to believe without seeing. It's the gospel's way of acknowledging that what it asks of us, namely belief, isn't easy. But it's important, because believing in Jesus is ultimately the way to truth and the realization of God's mission in our lives and the world.  So John's story of resurrection is all about belief. Luke's account tells a different story. The fundamental story is not a crisis of belief, but of confusion. There's a story of two disciples who are walking to a town called Emmaus, and as they walk, they (unknowingly) meet the resurrected Jesus. Jesus finds them confused and so he painstakingly explains to them everything that had happened, and how the scriptures had described it. In Luke's story, we don't just find belief in the resurrection story, but its within the resurrection that we find understanding. It's the resurrected Jesus who reinterprets the world for us, who explains the way things really are. Everything that before seemed definitive, things like death and power, are reinterpreted and re-understood as we walk with the risen Jesus. We understand in the resurrection.Matthew's version of resurrection is very brief. It culminates with Jesus giving the disciples the great commission. the risen Jesus sends the disciples out. Jesus doesn't just want us to understand his resurrection, but to understand the entire world awaits resurrection, that it all waits to be drawn back into God's mission, back to the way things are really supposed to be. In Matthew, the resurrection isn't just about rewriting the past, it's about rewriting the future. The resurrected Jesus sends us out on his mission.So we believe in the resurrection, we understand the resurrection, and we find our mission in the resurrection. So say John, Luke, and Matthew. But, of course, that leaves Mark.If Mark's version makes you uncomfortable, that's okay.  It has a long history of doing that.Before we can really start into what Mark's story, we have to make a note from textual criticism, not something I usually do overtly from the pulpit. If you notice in Mark 16, between verses 8 and 9 there is probably some sort of a note about how some early manuscripts leave out everything from verses 9. What scholars think happened is that those verses were added, probably late in the second century, by someone who thought that the original ending in verse 8 left too much unsaid. We think that someone added the longer ending so that it would look more like what we read in Matthew and Luke.That may seem somewhat offensive, but I can understand why they would do that, because the earlier, shorter reading is hard to swallow. We don't normally notice how hard this ending is because we typically read the gospels as a blended whole, and fail to pick up on the differences between the four versions. but this is one of those places where the differences are so stark and real that they are worth noticing.  Here is Mark's version:

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8)

And that's it. No gathered disciples meeting with Jesus, not even a pair of disciples who have a conversation with the risen Lord. Instead, Mark tells a story about two who receive the news of the resurrection from an apparent angel, and who go home confused and afraid. Mark leaves us not just astonished at the empty tomb and the announcement of Jesus's resurrection, but astonished at the response of these two witnesses. The Marys are so paralyzed by fear, that they don't even fulfill the mission given to them. This short and tough version is worth listening too, because it tells the truth—we are challenged by resurrection. Perhaps that isn't even about whether or not the women believed or not—don't fear and belief go together more often than we like to admit? Yet the gospel closes seemingly asking us, what will we do with the story? Will we tell and live the resurrection story, or will we just go back to our homes in paralysed fear. the resurrection story isn't passive, just waiting to be believed, but it asks something of us. Ultimately, what we believe about Jesus changes what we must believe about ourselves and the world around us. How we understand Jesus changes the way we understand everything, all of it given new perspective by the resurrection. The mission that Jesus sends us on awaits a response, but it isn't a foregone conclusion. We can still go home, shut the doors, and act as if nothing happened. Perhaps that's what we want to do. The resurrection of Jesus simply doesn't allow us to go along with our lives in a business as usual mode of being. If we find Jesus's teachings such as the sermon on the mount challenging, they become ever more so when we realize that they are issued by the resurrected Jesus. In Revelation, it is from this very position—the resurrected Lord–that Jesus speaks to the churches, commanding them to turn away from idolatry and mediocrity, to abandon the things that pull our love away from him, to embrace suffering and anticipate the recreation of the world in him.  Jesus says all this after announcing himself, saying, "I am the First and the Last, and the Living one. I died and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys to death and Hades." The resurrected Jesus will not be appeased by lukewarm faith, he will not be followed from a distance, halfheartedly. He demands all that we are, and he demands it from the position of being the Resurrected One. And yet, he doesn't demand it as an absent Lord, but as one who is present and who works within to accomplish the mission he gives us. Paul prays that the Ephesians would become aware that the same power that resurrected Jesus works within us. We must learn to live in that place, not just of the awareness of Jesus's resurrection, but aware of our own. We live in the resurrection. We live in the resurrection now, the new world made possible by Jesus's defeat of death and his power to recreate the world is actively at work in us, changing us, restoring his kingdom in us, and calling us to help him restore the world. That is our gospel, or at least our version of Jesus's gospel. The call of Jesus to come and live in the resurrection now, to believe it, to understand ourselves anew in it, and to take on the mission that it sends us on, with the power of the risen Christ working those things into reality within us—that is our witness to the world.  That is our resurrection story. But, hear from Mark this truth: all resurrection stories don't get told. May it not be so with ours.Amen.

Hospitality and Restoration: Elisha and the Shunammite Woman

There's an incredible saga hidden in the narratives of the Hebrew Bible that deserves more attention. It begins in 2 Kings 4, and then shows up again in 2 Kings 8. Maybe the whole bit would get more air time if it had a better title, but for now lack of one it's called the story of the Shunammite woman. What a mouthful.The Cracker Barrel of the Ancient Near EastShunem was a small town just off of a major international roadway, known as the Via Maris.  The Via Maris was a major trade route in the Ancient Near East, going from Egypt through Israel up to Damascas (Syria), where it then connected with other routes to Assyria or Babylon.  This was a major pipeline for trade in the ANE, and the people who lived along the route had a chance to profit by the travelers and live in a wider world due to the trade potential. To help you get your bearings, we're talking about a place a good bit north of Samaria, just north of Jezreel (about five miles).  You might remember that in Jezreel there was a royal residence—one that was the site of some infamous moments in the sagas of Ahab and his descendants. (Naboth's vineyard was around Jezreel.) So this town, Shunem, was in a region that we know the prophets were active, but it's away from Elisha's home base in Samaria.  We don't really know where he was going while he was passing through Shunem, but it makes a lot of sense that he needed somewhere to land when he was in this region. This saga that begins in 1 Kings 4 really revolves around this woman who notices the traveling Elisha, and shows him hospitality by giving him some food. Elisha makes a habit of stopping in whenever he travels that way, and over time she recognizes that he is a holy man.  The woman and her husband build a small room on their house for Elisha to stay in when he passes through, and he becomes a regular guest in their home. Hospitality RepaidElisha wants to repay the hospitality, and so he (in an odd, indirect way, I think) asks her how he can repay the favor. Perhaps his royal connections can help them? She responds that she and her husband don't really need anything more than what they have, they are self-sufficient. Elisha continues to ask his servant what should be done, though, and Gehazi (the servant) responds by pointing out that she didn't have any sons, and that her husband was old.Elisha calls her in again, and tells her that in the next year, she would have a son. She wasn't fishing for this offer, and had really become resigned to not having a son, and responds almost angrily. "No my Lord, oh man of God.  Do not lie to your servant."  She doesn't want false hope or empty promises. Things were fine how they were already—no need to interfere, thank you very much. But, things turn out just the way Elisha had said, and that seems like a pretty good ending to a classic miracle story. But, the story goes on.The child grows up, and one day goes to his dad who is working as a harvester, and while he's there he cries out because his head hurts. His dad has him taken to his mother, and the kids sits on her lap until noon, when he dies. So, she takes his body, and she takes it up to Elisha's guest room, and lays it on the bed, and then takes off to go see Elisha. She confronts him bitterly, "Did I ask my lord for a son? Did I not say, 'Do not deceive me?'"Resurrection, Elisha StyleElisha sends his servant to go quickly intervene, by placing Elisha's staff on the corpse. Almost as if she knows that's not enough, the woman insists that Elisha himself go, and so he does, and finds that indeed the attempt to resurrect by proxy didn't work.  So, Elisha himself goes into the room where the body is—his room.  Reading the account, you get the sense that this is a miracle Elisha really has to work for.  He prays, lays himself on the body in a sort of weird CPR, and then he gets up and paces around for a while. He goes up and does it again, and the boy sneezes seven times and comes back to life. Weird story, but in the end Elisha gives the boy back to his mother.The persistence in the story, both of Elisha and the woman, gives me a real feeling of urgency. The story fills with tension, because you get the sense that Elisha has really gotten in over his head, that he's messing with things that are almost outside of his authority, and he might not be able to pull it off. Is Elisha (and by extension, the Lord) just messing with the woman? The stakes are so high, the woman feels betrayed, and Elisha can't give up on making things right. He seems to be insistent here on taking the role God has given him past the limits. Elisha is far from an impersonal passive prophet in this episode, he is deeply invested in this family.RestorationA final episode of the Shunammite saga pops up in 2 Kings 8.  The woman had gotten a tip from Elisha about a famine that would last seven years, and so she takes her whole family and they leave.  Seven years later, they come back, although her lands have been taken over—perhaps by the land-grabbing royal family! She makes her way to the king to appeal for her lands back, and when she gets there she happens to walk in while Gehazi is telling the amazing story of her son's death and resurrection!  The king is so astonished that he immediately orders the woman's lands restored to her, along with anything that's been grown on the land while the family has been away. The way this saga becomes woven into the narrative of the royal family in this last episode is fascinating to me. It's almost like the king realizes here that he had been unknowingly oppressing someone who had been remarkably blessed by the Lord, and he too realizes that he might be in over his head—the power dynamics get flipped because she has an unseen but powerful ally.The whole beautiful story is full of hope, faith, persistence, and hospitality. It's got crazy twists as the woman's fortunes rise with Elisha's coming, and blessing of a baby, then fall when the boy dies. They rise again with the boy's resurrection, then fall when the famine comes. The famine passes away, but the family has lost everything they have, until they are finally restored in an act of surprising justice.  Altogether, the story is something of a vignette of life between the people, the prophet, and the king. I don't know that it's easy to boil it down into "the story means THIS:_______", but it seems to me to be a tale of how one woman gets wrapped up in the prophet's life with the Lord, and how that contrasts with her interactions with the king. The story makes me want to be careful about taking advantage of people. It makes me want to be careful about making promises to people, particularly on God's behalf. It makes me want to work hard to make things right for people, and it gives me hope that hospitality can bring some great, if messy, blessings.Practice Hospitality. It's one of the ways God heals the world.