In 1803, Thomas Jefferson cut from the Gospels those passages he
thought would best present the ethical teachings of Jesus and he arranged them
on the pages of a blank book in his own order of time and subject. He called
the book “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, extracted from the account of
his life and doctrines, as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; being an
abridgment of the New Testament for the use of the Indians, unembarrassed with
matters of fact or faith beyond the level of their comprehension.” Jefferson’s Bible,
as it came to be called, deleted all references to miracles and the divinity of
Jesus. The closing words of Jefferson’s text were these: “There laid they Jesus:
and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.”
This raises for me the question: is a Gospel that
ends with death truly good news? To me, such a Gospel seems unfinished.
There is another kind of Unfinished Gospel and it
is contained in the Bible. It is Mark’s Gospel which ends with Mark 16:8. Verses
9 through 20 are not in any of the early manuscripts of the New Testament. And
the style of the Greek language used in verses 9 through 20 cannot have been
written by the same person who wrote the rest of Mark’s Gospel; the style is too
different.
Many scholars believe that Mark could not have
intended to end his Gospel at verse 8 because it seems like such an
inappropriate ending. There are no appearances recorded of the resurrected
Lord. The women run from the tomb and tell no one what they have seen and
heard. What kind of Gospel is this?
Some scholars think that Mark may have died before
he could complete his Gospel. Others believe that when there was still only a
single manuscript of Mark’s Gospel that the ending of his account of Jesus’
resurrection must have been torn off accidentally, being on the outside of the
scroll.
Otherwise, why would God allow Mark’s Gospel to
remain unfinished? Let’s hold that question in mind. I want to come back and
address it later.
For now, let us look at the end of this unfinished
Gospel as we have it and see what we can learn from it. Listen for God’s word
to you from Mark 16:1-8….
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. 2 And very
early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the
tomb. 3 They had
been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the
entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they
looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been
rolled back. 5 As they
entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the
right side; and they were alarmed. 6 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. 7 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.” 8 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.
I invite you to focus with me on the message of
the young man in the tomb. Mark specifically says that the women saw a young man
dressed in a white robe. Intriguingly, this same phrase, “a young man,” is used
in Mark 14:51. We read that after Jesus
was arrested in the garden, “A young man had followed him, wearing only a linen
tunic over his otherwise naked body.
They seized him, and he left the tunic and ran away naked.”
None of the other Gospels mention this incident.
Many scholars have suggested that this young man was Mark himself. It’s
impossible to prove, but it is a reasonable guess. And it may be this same
young man, in a white linen garment, who was the first to witness the empty
tomb and, perhaps, see the resurrected Jesus.
Now let us look together at the message of this
young man to the women at the tomb. I believe it is the same message that Jesus
has for us today.
The first part of the message is: Do not be alarmed.
We must remember that these women came to the tomb
not expecting resurrection. They were coming to care for a dead body. They
brought spices to anoint Jesus’ body to lessen the smell as the body decomposed.
The Jewish people of that time practiced a two-stage burial. First, they would
wrap the dead body in a shroud filled with spices. Then, after the body
decomposed, they would bury the bones in an ossuary, a bone box. Thus, these
women came to Jesus’ tomb at sunrise on a Sunday morning, a work day in the
Roman Empire, to complete phase one of the burial.
Along the way, they discussed the problem of
rolling the stone aside from the entrance to the tomb. This was an exceedingly
great stone, one that could not be moved by the women alone, but would require
the help of several men. Thus, the women must have been hoping to find someone
along the way who would help them.
But then, something completely disorienting
happened. They arrived at the tomb and found the stone already rolled aside.
Then even more disorienting, instead of finding the dead body of their
thirty-three-year-old teacher, they found the live body of a young man. This
was so disorienting to the women that they were amazed, astonished, alarmed.
I wonder, have you had anything happen to you in
your life that you found deeply disorienting? Death is like that. When we lose someone
that we love through death, it seems almost unreal. Grief wraps us in a bubble
that almost seems to suffocate us at times.
However, death is not the only disorienting
experience we go through as human beings. Losing a job can fill us with a great
sense of dislocation and disorientation. We hardly know where we are or how to
proceed with life.
Divorce can have the same effect. Suddenly the
spouse we counted on for a significant part of our lives can no longer be
depended upon. Our whole family structure is changed. Multiple relationships in
our lives are affected.
In all these disorienting experiences of our
lives, I believe God’s message to us is the same one that the young man gave to
the women on that first Easter morning: do
not be alarmed.
You may ask, well how can I not be alarmed,
considering what I am going through? That is an honest question, and it may
take us a while to process the hope that God offers us. After all, it took the
women at the tomb a while to process what was going on. Remember, at first,
they fled from the tomb in fear and trembling. They found it hard to implement
the young man’s command: do not be alarmed. But as the other Gospels tell us,
these same fearful women later came to faith when they met the living Jesus.
The same thing can happen for each one of us.
And that leads us to the second part of the young
man’s message: He has been raised.
It is one word in Greek, but it takes a few words
in English to translate. What a word! In that one word, the whole world is
changed. Not just the world of some women who lived two thousand years ago, but
the history of our world from that time to this, has been changed by that one
word.
I love what William Barclay says about this,
One thing is certain–if
Jesus had not risen from the dead, we would never have heard of him. The
attitude of the women was that they had come to pay the last tribute to a dead
body. The attitude of the disciples was that everything had finished in
tragedy. By far the best proof of the Resurrection is the existence of the
Christian church. Nothing else could have changed sad and despairing men and
women into people radiant with joy and flaming with courage. The Resurrection is the central fact of the
whole Christian faith. Because we believe in the Resurrection certain things
follow.
i.
Jesus is not a figure in a book but a living presence. It
is not enough to study the story of Jesus like the life of any other great
historical figure. We may begin that way but we must end by meeting him.
ii.
Jesus is not a memory but a presence. The dearest memory
fades…. Long since, time would have wiped out the memory of Jesus unless he had
been a living presence forever with us....
iii.
The Christian life is not the life of a man who knows about Jesus, but the life of a man
who knows Jesus. There is all the
difference in the world between knowing
about a person and knowing a
person. Most people know about Queen
Elizabeth or the President of the United States but not so many know them. The greatest scholar in the
world who knows everything about Jesus is less than the humblest Christian who
knows him.
Yes, the resurrection of Jesus changed everything,
and it can change your life today. You can meet Jesus here this morning.
The third thing the young man said to the women at
the tomb also applies to us today. He said to them: Go and tell.
The young man at the tomb commanded the women to
go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus was going ahead of them to
Galilee. Jesus is always going ahead of us. He is always in the lead. Sometimes
it takes traumatic events to get us to realize that we need a leader and
forgiver in our lives. But that is exactly what Jesus offers to us.
What an encouraging message this must have been
for Peter who denied even knowing Jesus on the night of his trial. Jesus wanted
Peter to know that he had not abandoned him. Jesus wanted Peter to know that
forgiveness was possible. Jesus wanted Peter to know that he still had a job
for him to do.
And that is Jesus’ message for each one of us
today. He says that he is going before us. He will lead us and he will never
abandon us. Jesus offers us forgiveness for all the ways we may have failed in
life. And Jesus has a job for us to do. He wants us to share the good news of
his life, his death, and his resurrection with others. Perhaps that is one
reason why God allowed the Gospel of Mark to remain unfinished. Perhaps God
allowed this because he wants us to finish the message in our lives.
In
the mid 1950s, British minister W. E. Sangster noticed some uneasiness in his
throat and a dragging in his leg. When he went to the doctor, he found that he
had an incurable disease that caused progressive muscular atrophy. His muscles would gradually waste away, his voice would
fail, his throat would soon become unable to swallow.
Sangster threw himself into his work in British home missions,
figuring he could still write and he would have even more time for prayer. “Let
me stay in the struggle Lord,” he pleaded. “I don’t mind if I can no longer be
a general, but give me just a regiment to lead.” He wrote articles and books,
and helped organize prayer cells throughout England. “I’m only in the kindergarten
of suffering,” he told people who pitied him.
Gradually, Sangster’s legs became useless. His
voice went completely. But he could still hold a pen, shakily. On Easter
morning, just a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his daughter. In
it, he said, “It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice to
shout, ‘He is risen!’—but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and
not want to shout.”[1]
The final part of the young man’s message to the
women at the tomb was: You will see him.
The young man promised to the women at the tomb that they would see Jesus
again. And this promise was in accord with the promise of Jesus himself. Jesus
had told his disciples that he was going to die and rise again, and he was true
to his word.
Now the way we may see Jesus today may not be exactly
the way that the young man at the tomb saw him. Nor do we often see Jesus today
as the women and other disciples saw Jesus. Nor do we even see Jesus as Paul
saw him.
But there is more to seeing than physical sight.
The word that is used here in Greek means more than that. It means to behold,
to observe. The same word, in other contexts, means to be admitted into the
more immediate presence of God or to attain to a true knowledge of God.
Where might we expect to see Jesus in our world
today? I believe that we can see Jesus in every act of love, every time a
hungry person is fed, or a thirsty person is given something to drink. I
believe we see Jesus in the act of inviting the stranger in, or in the act of
clothing the naked, looking after the sick, or visiting those who are in
prison.
This is not to say that we will not, one day, see
Jesus face to face in all his glory. I believe that we will, one day, see Jesus
in his resurrected body. But we do not have to wait until then to see him in a
spiritual sense.
Phillip Yancey writes,
Every animal on earth has a set of correspondences with
the environment around it, and some of those correspondences far exceed ours.
Humans can perceive only thirty percent of the range of the sun’s light and
1/70th of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy. Many animals
exceed our abilities. Bats detect insects by sonar; pigeons navigate by
magnetic fields; bloodhounds perceive a world of smell unavailable to us.
Perhaps the spiritual or “unseen” world requires an
inbuilt set of correspondences activated only through some sort of spiritual
quickening. “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,”
said Jesus. “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come
from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot
understand them, because they are spiritually discerned,” said Paul. Both
expressions point to a different level of correspondence available only to a
person spiritually alive.[2]
Do you want to see Jesus? Ask him to reveal
himself to you, and you will see him.
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