LOOKING FOR JESUS
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Text: Mark 16:1-8
On that morning, my alarm clock went off before dawn. I suppose you know that that is a rare occurrence, but that day I had a responsibility, a mission, a calling. In an unfamiliar place and at an unfamiliar time, I went “looking for Jesus.” In some one’s beautiful back yard, looking out over a placid pond, ringed with flowering trees, in the early morning chill, a group of hardy souls gathered to hear again the Resurrection story as the sun rose over the village of Granville, Ohio. Before it started raining, we saw the sun rise in glorious red and gold and orange, and, as the rain began to fall, arching the sky behind us was the rainbow of God’s promise. The preacher prayed with the poet
i thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)how should tasting touching hearing seeingu
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
(e. e. cummings)
In that remarkable, enlivening setting, we were doing what always happens when two or three are gathered together in his name. We were looking for Jesus.
No, I don’t mean we were looking for him to come sauntering up the street and join us singing a hymn, not in that literal sense, though I guess I shouldn’t be too quick to eliminate that as a possibility. We were looking for Jesus to come among us, filled with life and love and Easter joy; to dwell in our hearts, filling them with spirit and truth; to touch us where we were broken and wanting and make us whole. We gathered with that mixture of awe and uncertainty, wonder and doubt, joy and fear that must have characterized the women in this morning’s ancient word; they had also coming looking for Jesus, though their search started as a very different mission.
Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome were among the women who “used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee” (Mark 15:41.) For anyone who wants to give women a subordinate place in the ministry of Jesus, here is one of many texts that shows the importance of women to Jesus’ company of followers. Ched Meyers suggests that, “...unlike the male disciples, the [women] understood the vocation of service and hence could endure the cross. In the background throughout the story,” he says, “the women suddenly emerge as the true disciples, offering us a glimmer of hope” (Ched Meyers, “The Last Days of Jesus,” Sojourners Magazine, December 1987.) These women are also named as being at the scene of the crucifixion; the male followers are mostly unaccounted for, having fled in terror, shame and grief for their denial and abandonment of Jesus when he needed them most.
The deed was done. Jesus had preached and prayed and practiced himself right into the hands of the dominant powers. The religious and civil authorities had done their worst. His trial before the High Priest and the Council was a mockery of justice, with trumped up charges, contradictory evidence and the best witnesses money could buy. The trial before Pilate involved more political chicanery with the unwarranted demand for his crucifixion as a seditionist. His real threat was to those who practiced greed, injustice, and oppression at the expense of the poor and sick and needy. In the end, they scraped together enough of a crowd to screech for his death. It was the kind of carnival atmosphere that human beings often turn to when they are beaten down and hopeless, when they find perverse pleasure in someone whose suffering might take their minds off their own and whose torture and death help them to forget their own sorry plight in life.
Having hung on that cross for three hours, he cried out in agony to God and God mercifully took his life, took it into God’s own breaking heart, took it away from the powers that ruled, took it from the crowd that jeered, took it away so swiftly and definitely that the calloused centurion, standing guard at the foot of the cross, uttered in astonishment, “Truly this man was God’s Son” (Mark 15:39.) The scene is sad, achingly sad, devastatingly sad.
The handful of women, who followed him so faithfully in life, followed him to his burial site. Because, these same women, who so clearly understood service, would need to be before dawn on that first morning after the Sabbath, urgently making preparations to be at the tomb at sunrise in order to complete the work of providing a proper burial for their dead friend. On that Sunday, they indeed went looking for Jesus, or what was left of him, so they could anoint his body and say their final, sad farewells. Was it the urgency of their errand or their numbing grief that delayed their wonder as they journeyed that predawn road. Suddenly, one of them asked, “Who will roll away the stone for us...?” Surely this would have crossed the minds of such practical providers before they set off for the tomb, at least, if they had been in their right minds.
Heads bent in grief, huddled together in conversation and consolation, it took a moment for all of them, on their arrival at the tomb, to look up and realize that the heavy stone had already been rolled back. Can you imagine what their thoughts must have been, what wonders and questions and fears must have taken hold of them? What would it have been like to approach the open cave, let alone enter it? Yet there they were, standing inside, confronted by a young man dressed in white, undoubtedly an angelic presence, a messenger from God. What was he saying? They had to shake themselves to make sure they were hearing properly, “...you are looking for Jesus...” Yes, that is what he said, stating the obvious. “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.” The stone ledge was empty and the linen wrap left lying. This was too much, more than their spinning heads and breaking hearts could take in. First, the horrible happenings of Friday, then the long sad Sabbath, now this! They were overwhelmed.
Still, there was more, “...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.” This truly was more than they could assimilate. They fled, trembling with fear, full of amazement and fragmented with terror and “they said nothing to anyone, because...” Here ends the book of Mark, the first of what we have come to call Gospels. In spite of several alternate endings that have been provided over the centuries, the first written account of what started out as the “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God...” (Mark 1:1) ends in terror and uncertainty. There are no lovely stories of post-Resurrection appearances with Jesus tenderly and patiently putting to rest the fears and doubts of the disciples. What are we to make of such a gospel? Where is the good news? We are people who generally prefer our stories to have neat endings that properly tie up all the loose ends, and we don’t mind if those neat endings are also happy endings. After all the tension and drama of Mark’s narrative, we don’t want to be left where we started, looking for Jesus.
Yet this seems to be exactly where we are left, and is it really such bad place to find ourselves? Though scholars argue over whether the writer of Mark intended to end his story here, it is what we have. Maybe the writer himself died before he could finish or got distracted and couldn’t come back to his train of thought or, as so often happens with books and manuscripts, the last page was carelessly marred or accidentally destroyed. We can spend time and energy speculating about what might have happened, if indeed something is missing, or we can turn our attention to looking for Jesus in what we have, in seeking the good news that is given in Mark’s text.
There are at least three ways we can discern good news in this ancient text. First, there is a record of what the young man said to the women at the tomb, “He is risen; he is not here.” The Jesus for whom they came looking was not there. No dead and decaying body lying on a ledge for them to anoint. Their expectations shattered once too often, they fled the tomb in terror, keeping silence. But, obviously, their silence was not forever. Someone told the story - once, and again, and over and over, until it became the greatest story ever told. There is a parallel between the women and the Gerasene demoniac from earlier in Mark’s narrative. While in the throes of his demon possession the man is totally impaired and incapable of hearing good news, let alone sharing it. Once Jesus has commanded the demons to leave the man and he is clothed and in his right mind, the text tells us he does a powerful job of spreading the good news of Jesus, the Christ (Mark 5:1-20.) Eventually, these women must have found themselves in their right minds also, incapable of keeping quiet about the good news that “he is risen,” for we have their story today.
Second, throughout Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ own disciples are as big a challenge to him as the religious and civil authorities who ultimately crucify him. Early on he tells the parable of the sower who sows the seed, most of which fails to bear fruit. From that parable, it seems his disciples are most commonly found among the seed that falls “...on rocky ground, where it…sprang up quickly…And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had nor root, it withered away” (Mark 4:5-6.) Jesus preaches and prays and practices the love of God. Much of his life and ministry are oriented to helping his followers see the coming reign of God, to showing them God’s ways, to bringing them into grace-full communion with God. But they don’t get it. Time and again he goes away from them frustrated. In Mark’s gospel, Simon may be renamed Peter more for the rock like qualities of his head than for the rock like steadiness of his character. Jesus tells them over and over how he must suffer and die in order to bring an end to suffering and death, how he must challenge the dominant powers, the false powers of greed and might and corruption and fear and hatred, in order to establish the true power of love once and for all. But they don’t get it. For them, death is the final enemy that gets the final word; for him, death is the last enemy to be put away before the reign of God can become real on earth. They think they understand. They say they will come with him, but, in the end, they are looking for a different Jesus, one whom it will not be so difficult or costly to follow.
As distant observers, we get to see is the story of these first disciples from a post-Resurrection vantage point. We know that later on many of them did finally get it; they followed Jesus to their own crucifixions and martyrdoms in the name of the God of love and in the process of undoing dominant powers. They came to see that there is no power that overcomes the power of love - that is the truth of the Resurrection. It is not as much some mystical reincarnation of the body that matters as it is the absolute and certain triumph of love. What Mark’s gospel helps us see, as we look for Jesus, is that love does not look like what we expect it to or want it to. It is powerful, amazing and costly in human terms. It may take one a life time to get it and then take one’s life to claim it.
One final way to look at Mark’s uneasy ending is to see it in circular fashion. As Jesus’ ministry began in Galilee, the young man’s instruction is to meet him again in Galilee. In a sense, Jesus’ ministry comes full circle and returns to its roots. It may be an indication that Jesus’ ministry is not finished. It will begin again in the life and ministry of the disciples. It may be that the writer of this Gospel quite deliberately leaves things unresolved because his intention was to challenge his readers, including us, to finish the story for ourselves. Writing some 40 years after Jesus’ death, he must have known how Peter and James and John and Paul as well as the Marys and Salome from that empty tomb on that first Easter had been transformed over time. He must have seen how the power of love had changed their lives and brought them out of their closets of fear and doubt. Maybe he was wrestling with the density of his own faith community, their failure to get the good news, as the old disciples finally had, and he wrote this all out to help them see and understand what it means not only to look for Jesus but to find him and follow him.
I suppose I could have titled this sermon “Looking for Jesus in all the Wrong Places.” For his disciples, and for us, he seems always out ahead, calling us and leading us to new and exciting, frightening and fulfilling places. There is no promise that good news is easy news or that true love is sentimental. Looking for Jesus, honestly and with deep commitment, means risking the radical transformation of our lives. Ched Meyers, again, says that “...the genius of Mark’s ‘incomplete’ ending lies precisely in the fact that it demands a response from the reader. The story of discipleship continues, and we cannot remain mere spectators.” He asks, “Do we Christians believe Mark’s story enough to assume an equally clear stand in this hour? We too are called to row against the storms of class and race oppression (6:48), to ‘give the hungry something to eat’ (6:37), and to preach and cast out demons (3:14ff). It is up to us to carry good news to the ‘mountains’ (11:23) of institutionalized violence and injustice today” (Meyers, op.cit.)
Looking for Jesus will take us places we never imagined, open doors we could not open and roll back stones from tombs we thought we were sealed forever. It will ask us to walk through those openings into rooms and tombs and situations in which our anxieties and fears will be elevated. Looking for Jesus may cost us dearly in human terms, but in the end, my friends, finding Jesus, not sealed in that stone cold tomb but alive, standing by the familiar shores of our daily existence and calling us by name, brings the promise of new life, of eternal life for us all. Amen.