Easter sermon notes Mark 16:1-8

Easter 2015 Mark 16:1-8

Mark’s gospel is like a lot of my sermons, as it stops more than ends. Put differently,  it is open-ended in the extreme as it would go in English as they were afraid, for…It moves out into an indefinite future. What was it like for those first few hours after the tomb had been found empty?  

This story of new life and light happens in the dark, so it may well want the future to be difficult to see, to remain hazy. Women come to honor death but find themselves to be given the message of new life, but they are astonished, frozen in surprise. I tend to think that this is a better literary device than we used to think.Mark is drawing us directly into the resurrection story, and it is an open question about our fear and our capacity to tell this remarkable event. The women are like us.  Jesus not not appear to them at all, as the empty tomb and a  message is all they are given.It must have been a period of alarming uncertainty, half hope, half terror; which of us would really rejoice at that would make us rethink most of what we had taken for granted?

The silence of the women invites curiosity. It invites speech to try to give closure to the open-ended indeterminate ending of Mark’s gospel.Easter is a funeral for Death itself. Silent awe is perhaps a better response than all the shouted alleluias. Maybe better still, we are tasked with providing words and music for Easter in our reception of new life.

Empty tomb empties  the dead hold of the past..Here and now, God holds on to the lives of all the departed - including the lives that have been wasted, violently cut short, damaged by oppression R Williams)  All have worth in his sight. We do not need to freeze at the empty tomb any more than we remain transfixed by the cross alone. Easter makes us all people of the dawn,of a new morning.He is not here. he is not in the place of death, the grave. His lifeless body is no longer to be found. he is out and about, cut loose from this mortal limitation into a new dimension of life.

Some may sing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” on Easter. Perhaps.”In  a recording, a Viennese group, instead of giving a thundering, triumphant, cymbal-crashing rendition, offers a modest, tentative version. When the chorus sings “The glory of the Lord is upon thee,” the word thee is hardly sounded, as if the human creature can scarcely bear the weight of God’s glory.,and in  the grand “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hesitant style conveys the truth that human beings can only dimly see and longingly hope that God is even now wresting victory from suffering, chaos and captivity; a critic writes they go  back to a pianissimo of heartbreaking faith. . . . Something here aches, longs, needs.” Mark would approve. Go back to Galilee and read again. There you will see him, the risen but still hidden Christ, his saving hand extended to all human aching, longing and need.(Thomas Long)

Death does not get the last word;. Life does. the final chapter is not written in a life when death occurs. God seems to open doors much more readily than decisively closing them.R.Williams Perhaps part of the message of Easter is very simply, Be ready to be surprised; try clearing out some of the anxiety and vanity and resentment so as to allow the possibility of a new world to find room in you.Only god can make the tomb a womb of new life. Only God can make life out of death.easter 2015 sermon notes Mark 16:1-8