Were You There… When He Arose - Mark 16:1-8

                

What does Easter mean to you? That’s a question that was asked of me this week and it made me think. Easter’s about resurrection and new life, it’s about renewal and restoration with God, it’s about hope and grace, it’s about the gift of forgiveness from our sins, and for me it also includes a certain amount of fear due to some of my own history and ways of understanding Jesus and God. For many of us, Easter begins with Palm Sunday, but for me it’s always begun with Jesus raising Lazarus from the grave a few days before that, so Easter is framed with the resurrection of Lazarus and Jesus. In between are lots of ups and downs spiritually and emotionally, lots of pain and uncertainty, and for me, a realization that I’m so much like the people we’ve been looking at the past number of weeks. I experience ups and downs in life and even faith, knowing how undeserving I am of what Jesus went through.

The love and commitment on the part of Jesus to walk that journey of taking all my sin on himself and experiencing the rejection and separation of God so I don’t have to, does scare me because I know that I can never live up to that love and commitment. As Tim Keller writes, “The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.” All I can do is accept his act of love with a grateful heart and try to let that love and commitment shape who I am. Gratefulness and hope is what Easter is for me.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, is the cry of the church on Easter morning!  The cross and the tomb are empty. Jesus was crucified and gave up his life while hung between heaven and earth on that tree, rejected so that we don’t have to experience God’s rejection due to our sin. After Jesus breathed his last breath, everything changed. Mark writes his Gospel to call us to see Jesus, to stand in amazement about who Jesus is. Mark wants us to go “Wow, that’s who Jesus is!” The women who come to anoint Jesus’ body are alarmed at the angel’s presence, but there's the sense that in their alarm, they're also amazed and overwhelmed with wonder at this young man in his white robes and the news he gives them. All these emotions are wrapped together. This is a normal human reaction to encountering the sacred, the unknown, the unexpected. When we first encounter the sacred, the unknown or the unexpected, it can be overwhelming, fear and amazement. These times to open ourselves to the unexpected, the possibilities that the unknown and sacred hold.

G.K. Chesterton describes this scene so well, “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool, not of the evening but of the dawn.”

The young man speaks, "Don't be alarmed, you're looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him!" Where are you looking for Jesus, for hope, for direction in your life? This morning, are you walking to the tomb, the place of hopelessness and endings, looking for hope, for someone who understands you, who understands life? This is why Easter is such good news, because Jesus is risen, he's alive! Jesus' followers have mourned, they've grieved but now hope is given! The resurrection shows us that Jesus really is who he says he is and all his promises are true. Jesus forgave sins, he healed, he raised people from the dead, he encouraged and built them up to be more than they ever thought they could be, he told us that God is our Father and we are his beloved children. All these things we can trust because of Easter.

"But go, tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'" The ones being called to go meet Jesus again are the very ones who abandoned and denied Jesus; the ones afraid and hiding in an upper room are being called into the day to come see the one who gives freedom from fear and courage to move forward confessing their allegiance anew to their rabbi. Jesus is calling you to meet him, no matter what you’ve done, no matter how many times you’ve walked away from him, he invites you to come and follow him, walking with him through life, inviting you to give up your old life so you can have his new life. Repent and believe is all that Jesus calls you to do.

It’s believed that Mark is telling Peter’s story in his Gospel, and so it makes it special that the angel’s encouraging message is not only to the disciples, but especially to Peter. "Tell his disciples and Peter," Peter’s singled out by the angel. Brash bold Peter couldn't live up to his boasts, brave Peter turned out not to be so brave after all and now he cowers in shame and embarrassment. The followers of Jesus are called to go to Galilee to meet him there. They're told to remember what he taught them about himself.

The empty tomb is news that’s not meant to be kept to ourselves. “But go, tell,” The two verbs are command verbs. The angel is talking to the disciples through the women, Peter especially. Jesus is already going ahead of them to the place of his early ministry in Galilee, “there you will see him, just as he told you.” During the Passover meal Jesus had reminded them of what the prophet Zechariah wrote hundreds of years earlier, “I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered,” but right after quoting Zechariah, Jesus goes, “But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” The disciples are the sheep who have been scattered in the painful events of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial; the shepherd is now gathering his scattered sheep, filling them with strength and hope again.

The women walked through the darkness of hopelessness and loss on Friday and Saturday, but now light is beginning to shine through. Just as the sunrise marked the beginning of a new day, this young man in shining white robes offers the light of hope to the women. It's a new day, it’s a new time in history with the resurrection of Jesus; the Holy Spirit is flowing out into the world, soon to be given personally as a gift to those who follow Jesus. It’s new covenant time, when the Law’s no longer simply commandments written on tablets of stone, but the presence of the Holy Spirit in each follower of Jesus.

Jesus' death and resurrection not only brings us freedom from sin and the washing away of the stains and disease of sin that infects us; it's new life and who you’re becoming as a follower of Jesus and child of God, free from your old identity shaped by shame and guilt into a new identity shaped by the image of God you're created in. As you embrace Jesus’ teachings, his life, and his Spirit, you start to look more like Jesus, to act like Jesus, and to even think and love like Jesus.

Jesus' death and resurrection is confirmation of God's deepest love and commitment to you; a sign that God never gives up on you and is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to show you that "neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, not any powers, neither height nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord," as Paul writes in Romans 8.

Mark goes on, "trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." The tomb is empty, the call is to go see Jesus. This is so not what they were expecting. Mark says they were trembling and bewildered, the words used also mean astonished and amazed; the reality of the resurrection is sinking in!

Francis Chan tells us, “By rising from the dead, Jesus proved his power over sin and death. The Father accepted his sacrifice on our behalf, and we are redeemed—restored to a relationship with him.” Through the power of the Holy Spirit, God’s presence is always with us. We’re never alone. We have God’s resurrection power in us. We’re loved. The resurrection reminds us that Jesus’ love gets the final say. That’s the best news ever. Jesus offers us gift upon gift in what he did for us. When we trust in him, we find new life and hope and in response, we’re called to worship and celebrate. At Christmas, we celebrated Jesus’s first coming and we now look forward to his return. During Easter, we celebrate everything Jesus has done for us and look forward to the ways we can gratefully serve him here. Just as the angel told the women to “Go and tell,” we’re also called to go and tell the world about the resurrection and new life found in Jesus.