"To Be Continued..."  San Williams, UPC

Mark 16:1-8 (Easter Sunday)

Much of life amounts to unfinished business.  Let’s say you meet a friend, begin a conversation, the cell phone rings, your kids need you, so you apologize to your friend saying, “To be continued…”  Or a church school class engages in an important discussion, but just as the conversation begins to catch fire, time runs out. The teacher dismisses the class saying, “To be continued.”  Or imagine a therapy session that just begins to uncover information of real significance when the hour expires.  The therapist can only say, “To be continued.”  Well, Mark’s account of the resurrection ends without resolution.  No wonder some have titled Mark’s story, “The Dangling Gospel.” It’s as though Mark gets to the end of his Gospel, abruptly puts down his pen in midsentence, and says to his readers, “To be continued.”

Quite frankly, Mark’s non-ending is what sets his account of the resurrection apart from the accounts in Matthew, Luke and John. Matthew, you recall, brings his Gospel to a glorious climax, in which the disciples are summoned to a mountaintop where the risen Christ commissions them and promises to be with them always, until the end of the age.  Curtain down. Lights up.  Matthew knows how a good story ought to end. 

And so does Luke.  Luke’s resurrection includes the story of dejected disciples meeting the risen Christ on the road to Emmaus.  Then Luke tells about how the risen Christ appeared to all the disciples, explained the scriptures, blessed them, and then ascended into heaven. Luke’s final scene shows joyful disciples singing the equivalent of the Hallelujah Chorus. Now that’s the way a resurrection story ought to be told.

 Likewise, John builds the drama to a powerful conclusion—the risen Christ appears to Mary in the Garden, then later that same evening comes into the room where frightened disciples are huddled in fear, breathes the spirit into them, gives them his peace, and sends them out, forgiven and renewed.  Amen and hallelujah. 

But there are no amens or hallelujahs at the close of Mark’s Gospel. To the contrary, Mark’s account of the resurrection ends in silence, disobedience and fear. The Easter message to the women is brief: Do not be afraid; Jesus was crucified; he was placed here; he is not here now because he has been raised.  Then they receive an Easter commission: Go, tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee; in Galilee they will see him. The women respond by saying nothing to anyone, because they are afraid. What? No shouts of victory over death? No appearances of the risen Christ?  No stirring commissioning of the disciples?  Is this any way to run a resurrection?

Now if you have trouble with Mark’s way of ending his Gospel, you’re not alone. In the early centuries of Christianity, the church couldn’t resist the temptation to clean up Mark’s messy ending. Thus, the church added two alternative endings noted in our Bible as “The shorter ending of Mark,” and “The Longer Ending of Mark.”  Some scholars in the church justified these later attempts to round off Mark’s jagged edges by contending that Mark’s original ending, being the outermost part of the scroll, must have been worn off or broken off. Possibly. Others, though, have suspected that Mark knew exactly what he was doing.  He intentionally left his gospel dangling.

So we have to ask:  Why would Mark end the way he did—with confused, fearful disciples unsure how to act or respond to the news of Jesus' resurrection?  Perhaps because Mark is a realist.  As one pastor put it: “What Mark’s ending lacks in romance, it makes up for in sheer realism.  Isn’t this the world we live in?  No enchanted world of thinly fabricated happily-ever-afters, but a world in which we hold tightly to the promise and fearfully tread our way through a tangle of doubt and amazement. That’s not just a description of the first disciples; that describes us! The resurrection of Jesus, if we grasp its cosmic significance, is bound to leave us like it left the women—confused, dazed, uncomprehending. After all, the resurrection of Jesus signals that God’s New Creation has been launched upon a surprised world.  The promised renewal of all things has begun, and points ahead to the time when the earth will be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the seas.  Easter assures us that Jesus’ prayer for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven was not prayed in vain. Such hope leaves us reeling. We don’t know for sure what to say, or even what to believe.

Wouldn’t it be interesting this morning if we just had an open mic session and invited each of you to come forward to voice the truth of what you believe or can’t believe about the resurrection?  Some might give the predictable Enlightenment response:  Now as modern people we know that the dead don’t rise up from the grave.  Therefore, the resurrection of Jesus is a metaphor for how, after his death, Jesus rose again in the hearts and minds of his disciples.  Others would voice the truncated version of the resurrection that appears on nearly every newspaper obituary page:   Easter means that when we die our souls go to heaven.  Still others, impatient with the whole business, might come forward to say with annoyance, Can’t we just hurry up and get through this resurrection talk so we can go home and watch the Master's Golf tournament?  Of all the Gospel writers, it’s Mark who reads us best.  He knows the world we live in, and he knows that Jesus’ disciples are never immune from ambiguity, doubt, amazement. 

At the conclusion of today’s worship, we’ll sing the rousing "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel’s Messiah—surely an appropriate ending to the Easter story. But I read this week about an unusual recording of the Handel’s Messiah by the Viennese Chorus, one that attempted to convey the fainthearted response to the resurrection depicted in Mark’s Gospel.  Instead of giving a thundering, triumphant, cymbal-crashing rendition, this recording 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 when the singers come to the climax of the Oratorio, the grand “Hallelujah Chorus,” the hesitant style conveys the truth that human beings can see only dimly and hope with longing that God is even now wresting victory from suffering, chaos and captivity.  As music critic Porter Anderson put it, it is almost as if the singers “were in a dream, sometimes sitting bolt upright with the memory of a fine thought—King of Kings—then drifting again…back to a pianissimo of heartbreaking faith..Something here,” Anderson concludes, “aches, longs, needs.” 

Maybe now we’re beginning to hear, in Mark’s ambiguous ending, good news for tentative disciples. For Mark tells us the resurrection story in a way that invites us—doubts and all—to be part of an ongoing drama. Mark refuses to tie the resurrection story up in a neat bow, because he knows the story continues in the lives of his disciples who are willing to follow him into the future without being sure.  To hope, as Paul puts it, in what we have not seen.  To live and work for a Kingdom that is not yet fully established.

The young man in the tomb declared to the bewildered women, “He is not here… he is going ahead of you…you will see him, in Galilee”--and in places we would never have expected. He has gone ahead of us to the refugee camps and urban slums, and wherever people are held captive by grinding poverty, Christ will meet his disciples there.  In places where the hungry ask for food, the dispossessed cry out for justice, that’s where the risen Christ awaits our presence and labor.  Where rivers have been poisoned and the air choked with pollution, there Christ beacons co-workers to help restore the imperiled earth.  Truly, whenever neighbors are loved, compassion is expressed, hospitality offered—there the Kingdom of the risen Christ is breaking in and transforming our world.  Look into your own life.  Are there places where you are storing up resentments, harboring bitterness, or clinging to some unforgiveness?  In these places of brokenness and hurt, Christ waits for us with the offer of new life. 

Friends, Easter is about God’s unfinished business. Don’t despair. Christ is risen.  God’s beautiful new world has broken in upon us.  It’s just that so much remains to be done.

 Oh, I see that my sermon time is up. To be continued…