13. Look Who's Not Here!

When the sabbath was over, 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. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Is that any way to end the greatest story ever told? The women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Almost as soon as he wrote it, some folks did not like the way Mark ended his Gospel. In fact, sometime in the early years of the church there were efforts to tidy Mark up a bit. Somebody wrote what is called the “shorter ending” and someone else wrote the “longer ending.” Because those endings appeared in a few early manuscripts they are often still printed in our English Bibles. But we know Mark didn’t write them.[1] Mark ends with verse 8 and it’s a strange verse. The first witnesses of the empty tomb fled in fear and said nothing to anyone.[2] The women who were there ran away and the disciples weren’t even there. That’s what led to my sermon’s title, “Look Who’s Not Here!” Let’s think about that in the text, about who’s not here.

First, the disciples are not here. Three women are there to witness the empty tomb but not any of the twelve disciples. You would think the disciples would be there but they were not. All four gospels agree that the first witnesses of the empty tomb were women. The men were all hiding somewhere. Two thousand years later we still gloss over how radical this is, that in God’s providence the first witnesses to the greatest thing that has ever happened were women, were those whose witness in those days didn’t even legally count. Right from the beginning the resurrection is about God turning the tide on the way things normally are and the way the world thinks things ought to be, from gender to race to just about everything. God is always turning the tide on things.

Furthermore, Mark tells the story in a particularly interesting way. Matthew’s Gospel says there were two women who came to the tomb, Luke’s Gospel says there were three and implies there were more, and John’s Gospel identifies only Mary Magdalene at the tomb.[3] But Mark’s Gospel names three: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.[4] Why three? Because Mark likes to tell the story in parallel and the three women at the empty tomb parallel three disciples who were not there — Peter, James, and John, the inner circle of the twelve disciples. Mark makes it clear throughout the Gospel — and this is what I’ve been preaching about all through Lent — that time after time after time the disciples just didn’t get it. They didn’t see who Jesus was. And they were almost always afraid.

Two weeks ago my sermon looked at the story of Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus. The text said, “Immediately [Bartimaeus] regained his sight and followed [Jesus] on the way.” (Mark 10.52) But just a few verses ahead of that, Mark says, “[The disciples] were on the [way[5]], going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was walking ahead of them … and those who followed were afraid.” Blind Bartimaeus saw with the eyes of faith but the disciples often didn’t see and they were afraid. That’s why the big three, Peter, James, and John, were not at the empty tomb. They were afraid.

Of course, even the three women ran away from the tomb in fear. They heard the good news but they fled in fear and kept silent. That reverses a pattern in Mark. Whenever Jesus healed someone in Mark’s Gospel or cast out an evil spirit, he commanded everyone to keep silent. These three women are commanded to speak and tell the disciples and Peter the good news. But they didn’t. They fled in fear and said nothing to anybody.

But notice this. Because they kept silence the burden of the text shifts from the women in this gospel to the hearers of this gospel.[6] In other words, it shifts to you and me today. This is the power and brilliance of Mark’s ending. It isn’t completed in the text because it needs to be completed by you and me who hear the story. Will we flee and keep silent or will we follow Jesus?

Here’s the good news about those disciples not being there. The first followers of Jesus were not a superhuman bunch. They were afraid. They were blind. They blew it. Even the women. But the good news was still for them, even when they weren’t there or fled from being there. In other words, they were just like us and who among us isn’t afraid at times?

Of cancer, of terror, of raising kids in a world gone crazy? The latest craze in toys, from what I’ve read, is to buy toys like they were in the 1950s and earlier, Tinker Toys, tasseled curtains, and Mother Goose illustrations on bed sheets. One psychologist commented on this and said it’s a way of parents coping with a world they can’t control. Adults who are unable to slow down and control their own lives are trying to exercise some control over their children’s room.[7]

How can we not be afraid, just watching the evening news? Even if the news isn’t all bad, and most of it is bad, the commercials will get you. The drug companies love to advertise on the evening news to sell their products to fix your esophagus or your prostate or your cholesterol or build up your strength during chemo. How can we not be afraid?

But there is good news in the disciples not being there at the empty tomb, because the good news of Easter comes even to disciples who are afraid and who have run away and hidden themselves. The good news is not good news just for a few superhuman, super-faithful people. It’s good news for everyone. You don’t have to be a perfect person and the good news is still for you. You don’t have to have God all figured out or all your doubts resolved. The good news is still for you. Even though I would love you all to be part of this church, if you are not already, you don’t have to belong here or to any church and the good news of Easter is still for you. The disciples were not there at the empty tomb and even the women who were ran away. But the good news was still for them and Jesus met them in Galilee. He will meet you in Galilee. That is good news is for you, my friend.

So look who else is not here. Jesus isn’t here. That may be the most amazing thing of all in Mark’s telling of the story. Jesus is not here. Of course, he’s not! He is risen. Jesus is not dead in the grave. He is not even hanging around an empty tomb. He is not even cooped up in this church or any other church. Jesus has gone on ahead to Galilee and disciples will see him there.

We are dangerously blind if we think Jesus is just back in the past somewhere or stuck in the Bible or just sitting around without much to do in the church. In the most profound sense, Jesus is not here. He is out there — that’s where Galilee is — out there in the world, in the future, calling disciples to see him there. But we settle down too easily and forget that Jesus calls us to follow him on the way. To be a disciple is to be on a journey with Jesus.

Douglas John Hall is a systematic theologian, an emeritus professor at McGill University in Montreal. You have probably never heard of him or read his books but his writing has greatly influenced me. Awhile back he was seriously ill with cancer and even after surgery and chemotherapy the outcome was not at all certain.[8] As he faced the real possibility that his own earthly journey would soon come to its end, he wrote about the church and its journey with God. Hall wrote, “Journey is an excellent metaphor for a movement that understands itself … precisely as a people ‘of the way,’ en-route, in transit.… [But] like our parents in the faith, we Christians all too soon exchanged tents for houses, the wilderness for the city. How very settled we have been — and for so long. We’ve practically lost the knack for travel.”

But even though uncertain and fearful in his own personal journey, he added these words: “But the One whom we try to follow when we are attentive to our calling is far ahead of us. He is already facing the dangers of the way we are trying so hard to avoid.”[9] Jesus isn’t here. He’s out there ahead of us, calling us to see him in Galilee and he will be with us if we will go to be with him. We need to move ahead with the eyes of faith and wherever we are, we will see Jesus, often where and when we least expect.

Dr. James H. Billington is the librarian of Congress and a student of Russian history. He happened to be in Moscow for a few remarkable days back in August 1991, during the time when the old Soviet regime was giving way to a new social order. As you may recall, those were tense and dangerous days with power balanced on a razor’s edge. Boris Yeltsin and a small group of defenders occupied the Russian White House and managed to face off an enormous number of tanks and troops poised to attack, to put down the rebellion, and to restore the old guard in the Soviet Union.

Billington says a key role in the resistance was played by the babushkas, the “old women in the church,” as they were often called. Those kerchiefed old women, who had kept the Orthodox Christian church alive during the Communist decades, were the butts of many jokes told over the years by Russians and Westerners alike. Nothing could have seemed more pathetic or irrelevant than they, and they were widely regarded as evidence that religion was close to dying in the Soviet Union.

Yet on the critical night of August 20, 1991, when martial law was declared and people were told to go to their homes, many of those old women disobeyed and went immediately to the place of confrontation. Some of them fed the resisters in a public display of support. Others staffed medical stations, others prayed for a miracle, while still others, astoundingly, climbed up onto the tanks, peered through the slits at the crew-cut men inside, and told them that there were new orders, orders from God: “Thou shalt not kill.” The young men stopped the tanks.

“The attack,” said Billington, “never came, and by dawn of the third day we realized that the tide had turned.”

Then Billington tells a very important part of the story. In skirmishes leading up to those critical days, three young defenders of the White House had been killed. Later, as their funeral procession wound through the streets of Moscow and passed in front of the Russian White House, Boris Yeltsin himself emerged to speak to the parents of the three young men. What he said to them was strikingly significant.

Yeltsin said, “Forgive me, your President, that I was unable to defend and save your sons.”

The news media would never report this because they don’t see with the eyes of faith. But Billington is a Christian and a Russian expert and he understood. “Forgive me,” Billington observed, is what one Russian customarily says to those next to him at the Lord’s table before taking communion. In a time of public grief, Boris Yeltsin, officially an atheist in an officially atheist country, was reciting the familiar language of Christian worship and “was assuming responsibility in a society where none in power had ever accepted responsibility for anything.”[10]

You see, Jesus is neither captive nor limited by anything. Not by political systems or ideologies, not by atheism or by the tomb or by the past or by the church. Not by anything. He’s out there in Galilee, in the world. He was in Moscow on August 20, 1991. He is out there calling forth amazing things we can scarcely imagine. We just need eyes of faith to see what lies hidden in plain sight.

A couple of thousand years ago, by dawn of the third day, a few frightened women began to realize that the tide had turned. Indeed, the tide of all human history turned early on a Sunday morning long ago. And those women eventually did share that crazy, wonderful news with some frightened disciples. And fearful though they were they did get themselves to Galilee and they saw Jesus, and they passed on the crazy good news and ever since, frightened disciples like you and me have been bumping into Jesus on the way, in all the Galilees where we live.

I’m glad you came to church today. But don’t look for Jesus just in here. Look who’s not here. He’s out there where you live, in your homes and marriages and places of business. He’s out there where you live, in your families and neighborhoods and schools. He’s out there where you live, in your suffering and in your joy. Look for him in faith. You will see him and he will be with you. Forever. Alleluia.

[1] The clear conclusion of Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London: United Bible Societies, 1971) 122-126, especially 126.

[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Preaching Easter,” Journal for Preachers 29.3 (2006): 43. Taylor reflects on the unusual ending, a literal translation of which reads, “and nothing to anybody they said, they were afraid for.” [kai« oujdeni« oujde«n ei•pan: e˙fobouvnto ga¿r.] It’s not even very grammatical in New Testament Greek and certainly not in English.

[3] Matthew 28.1: “After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.” Luke 24.10: “Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles.” John 20.1: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”

[4] Mark 16.1: “When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.”

[5] The original Greek words are the same in both verses — en te hodos (e˙n thØv oJdwˆ◊), literally ‘in the way.’ But the NRSV translates it as ‘road’ in Mark 10.32 and as ‘way’ in 10.52. Both are acceptable translations but given the importance Mark places on Jesus’ ‘way’ as the ‘way of the cross,’ it seems best to think of the disciples walking towards Jerusalem as reluctant followers on the ‘way,’ not just on the ‘road.’

[6] Taylor, 45. She credits this insight Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991) 401.

[7] This story is told in John M. Buchanan, “The One We Follow Is Far Ahead,” online, www.fourthchurch.org/, Internet, 19 February 2006. Dr. Buchanan was citing a story that appeared in The Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2006 entitled “Turning back the clock on toys, parents seek vintage comforts” by Michael Hill.

[8] In the previously cited sermon, John Buchanan, a friend of Dr. Hall, described some of the particulars of the theologian’s battle with cancer.

[9] Douglas John Hall, Bound and Free: A Theologian’s Journey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005) 82.

[10] Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) 139-140. Long takes the story from James H. Billington, “The Religious Dimensions of Post-Modern Change,” American Theological Library Association, Summary of Proceedings, 52/1998, 154-155, noting that the account of the babushkas is taken from that essay and comments made in various addresses by Billington.