1
EASTER DAY
Hereford Cathedral
Mark 16: 1-8
5th April 2015
Victory, triumph, gladness, praise, thanksgiving:
some of the words we’ve already heard in this
service. What a contrast those words are to the
mood at the end of our Gospel reading.
“They fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement
had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone,
for they were afraid.”
It’s mysterious and puzzling that Mark’s Gospel ends
there – and indeed a number of other endings have
been added in some translations of the bible – but as
notes in my own bible put it, “Most reliable early
manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not
have” the extra verses.
St Mark’s Gospel finishes abruptly as the three
women who had gone to Jesus’ tomb fled.
But it is important to remember that all those to
whom Jesus appeared are seen to be initially in a
negative mood.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus are sad and
disillusioned; Mary Magdalene is distraught; the
disciples in the upper room are afraid and living
behind closed doors; Thomas is in doubt.
Document1
2
Initially, the impact of the empty tomb was not
joyful; it was fearful.
So, although there are those who say that the ending
of Mark’s Gospel was lost and that really he would
surely have ended on a positive note, it isn’t
surprising that her ended it as he did.
As Rowan Williams has written, “What is to my mind
most persuasive about the empty tomb story is the
oddity, the unexpectedness of it. There is a blank at
the end of the story, and we are invited to fill it
ourselves.”
And the clue to how we fill it comes in our Gospel
reading itself when the angel at the tomb says,
“Jesus is not here, he is risen. He is going ahead of
you into Galilee. There you will see him just as he
told you.”
The two Marys and Salome approached the tomb to
anoint Jesus’ body. Their worry as they approach is
that the body of Jesus may be all too secure – that
the large stone blocking the entrance to the tomb
may be too much for them, and so prevent access to
the body they have come to anoint.
But they actually have the opposite problem – Jesus
is not available because his dead body is locked
away behind a barrier; on the contrary the stone is
removed and he has already moved on.
Document1
3
To Galilee, the setting of Jesus’ early ministry, so to
be told to go to Galilee is to be told to go back into
the world, where they are promised he has gone
ahead of them.
Jesus’ disciples must have wondered what on earth
lay ahead, but they gradually realised that whatever
they faced they could have hope when things felt
hopeless, courage when they wanted to run away,
and strength to be open and vulnerable.
The way St Mark ends his Gospel has a really
contemporary challenge to it. It’s up to us to
provide the ending, or the sequel to what St Mark
writes.
Like the two Marys and Salome, our natural instinct
may be simply to treasure the past, to seek to anoint
what has already happened, but like the Marys and
Salome, we can hear that Jesus has actually risen
and gone ahead into Galilee – a bit scary, but
exciting too as we join him there, sent out from the
church to live as Christians in the world.
So the kind of fear we may feel in the face of the
resurrection is the fear which is filled with
expectation, hope and confidence.
Let me end with a poem which I believe can help us
to allow the past to nourish our present and our
future. It is called “Joseph of Arimathea’s Easter”:
Joseph who took Jesus’ body down from the cross to
Document1
4
its burial place and had to learn that Jesus was not
just about past memories but about the future too.
+Richard
01/04/2015
Words: 656
Document1