Easter Vigil: March 30, 2024

The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings

Romans 6:3-11
Psalm 114
Mark 16:1-8

Tonight, we celebrate Jesus’ Passover from death to life. With Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, we arrive at the place where Jesus was buried and find the stone cover rolled away, the tomb empty. Unlike the other Gospels, Mark gives us no resurrection appearance. There is no earthquake or sudden appearance of angels. There is no bewildered joy. The women who come to the tomb bring spices expecting to anoint

Jesus’ body; instead, they encounter a mysterious man who bids them to not be alarmed and proclaims that the One whom they seek has been risen. He promises them that Jesus will meet them in Galilee and charges the women with proclaiming this good news to the other disciples and to Peter. But Mark leaves us with a cliffhanger of a story – we do not hear about the women telling the others; instead, he tells us that they fled in fear and bewilderment and that they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.

It’s true that the Gospel according to Mark as it is presented in our Bibles contains verses beyond that of our reading tonight. But scholars agree that everything from verse 9 on is a later edition – some suspect it was added out of later Christian’s embarrassment of how Mark’s Gospel ends; some speculate that Mark originally had a final page that concluded this portion of the story that somehow got lost at a very early stage. And some suggest that Mark’s cliffhanger was intentional, that he meant for those who read and heard his account to read themselves into the story line, to become the ending that he skillfully left open. Whatever the case may be, the architects of our lectionary bid us to hold this unfinished story as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection tonight.

Of course, it is also true that more than two-thousand years later, we know that the women finally come out of their fearful silence because today, we continue to tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection. We know that the tomb was found empty, that Jesus does indeed go ahead of his disciples to Galilee and there he charges them to continue the ministry he began. It can be hard not to conflate our tradition and the other Gospels to make Mark’s story a bit more complete. But tonight, I want to invite us to linger in the suspense of Mark’s ending, to linger in amazement and, perhaps, even the fear of discovering the empty tomb.

I suspect, if we take the time to reflect on the last handful of years and the depth of loss we have experienced as a global community, Mark’s Gospel ending might actually provide some sense of comfort – not comfort in the “everything is going to be alright” sort of way, but comfort in the sense that his ending offers the unfiltered and raw truth of the human experiences of loss, grief, confusion, doubt, and mourning. There is a bluntness to Mark’s open-ended conclusion that opens us to places of grief, loss, and pain and the ways in which they expose our collective longing for God’s transforming work in our lives and in the world.

We are left questioning what we ought to do with such an ending. How do we find closure in the midst of such uncertainty? And I wonder if part of the answer to this isn’t actually part of the gift that Mark’s gospel offers us – that healing from the trauma of loss takes time, that it requires we open ourselves to the discomfort of grief, of holding our pain in the sacredness of silence. In Western society, we rush into the cognitive exercises of making sense of the incomprehensible, of mapping out the logic of our tragedies to help us cope with the feelings of displacement, bewilderment, and uncertainty brought about by the changes and chances of this life and this world. We have fallen prey to the lie of the enlightenment, that the center of our existence is found in our intellectual capacities and so, when we are confronted with the empty tomb, we are often caught up in the cycle of trying to make sense if it all, trying to explain the possibility and plausibility of such a reality.

But Mark’s gospel ending gives us permission to let all of that go, to listen to the wounds held in our bodies’ memories and to embrace the emptiness of absence and its attending sorrow.

And in this gift, we can finally come to rest in the truth that our capacity to understand, our capacity to make sense of the nonsensical, is not what accomplishes the resurrection. That work belongs to God alone and its mystery is something to be beheld rather than explained away. In light of this, I wonder what invitation you sense from God tonight? What is your, what is our, invitation at the site of this empty tomb? How might the empty tomb function as a mirror into your life, into our common life?

The women who came to anoint Jesus’ body were left unsettled at the word given them by the mysterious man about Jesus’ resurrection. This word of life was disorienting, throwing the last bit of certainty they held – the finality of death – into a hot mess of inconsistency. All that they thought they knew was shattered in the word of life they received. It would take time for their belief and understanding to catch up to what they witnessed that early morning when they came to the tomb.

Tonight, we do celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and we rightly shout our acclamation of alleluia! But tonight is not about explaining the mystery; it’s not about our feeble attempts to make sense of the empty tomb. Tonight is about beholding the mystery; it’s about holding up our experiences of pain and loss and grief and allowing the word of life, the word of resurrection, to be planted in our hearts so that the leaves of what blossom might be for us leaves of healing. This is the promise God offers us in the sign of the empty tomb, that healing will indeed sprout from seed that is the Word of Life given to us.

“Friend, let this be enough,” says the mystic-poet Angelus Silesius, “if you wish to read beyond, Go and become yourself the writ and yourself the essence.”