Sermon: Mark 16:1-8

[ previous | index | next ]

Easter 2006 – Aslan Draws Near

By Charles Rush

April 16, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 4.0Mb) ]

e account in Mark 16:1-8 is the original ending to the story, as a few of you may know. The other endings amended this and included some less ambiguous affirmations--like an earthquake, seeing Jesus himself, the falling down in wonder--that would have suited Hollywood producers for dazzling visual effect.

This ending was deemed inadequate from the very beginning because it is so ambiguous. They are left astonished, in fear, and as yet they have done nothing. But I like the ending for exactly that reason. Whatever the resurrection was, it was a unique event, which means we don't have analogies for it, and which means that this experience must have been lived in incredulity.

You've had those 'deer in the headlight' moments when you realize that the data your sensory input is registering doesn't fit an established pattern and you are in Rorschach territory trying to figure it out.

I read about a guy in the New Yorker who was sailing his boat about 300 miles off the West coast of Africa headed towards the Caribbean. He is out in the deep ocean the boat is clipping along at pretty good speed when he feels this enormous drag on the bottom and the boat comes to a stop, sails still full of wind. He and the mate are running all around the boat looking below, can see nothing. All of a sudden the boat is suddenly released. They drop sails immediately, bring the boat to idle. He straps on tanks, jumps overboard and discovers up on the bow of the boat, imprints from tentacles from a giant squid. He is calculating the size of the boat, the wind speed, and he has one of those holy Mother moments when he realizes that this sea animal must be 3 times larger than any previously discovered squid. Up on deck, he is remembering all those drawings from the British Navy of these super-gigantic sea creatures that he had always presumed were the product of heightened imagination, wondering for the first time if they were actually describing what he just experienced. When he was in that water, realizing the size of the creatures that he could be dealing with, realizing that they might only be a few hundred feet away, he was up out of that water, and never looked at the ocean again the same way. This from a seasoned sailor of many decades.

Sometimes you get these moments of complete reorientation. That is what happened to the disciples. Up to this point, they were resigned. Jesus had been inspirational. He was virtuous. The people loved him. All that was moving, but it was no match for Roman Imperial power. In Roman fashion, they had him arrested, publicly tortured, left to slowly die with the hundreds of other reformers, protestors, revolutionaries and runaway slaves.

There is a deadening, monotonous, predictability to the world that organized power has the last word and there is nothing to be done about it. But in this contest between loveless power and powerless love, in the resurrection the disciples had the resounding affirmation that powerless love is the ultimate word.

As my friend Michael Usey put it. "Easter is about God. It is not about the resuscitation of a dead body. That's revivification, not resurrection. It's not about the “immortality of the soul,” some divine spark that endures after the end. That's Plato, not Jesus. It's about God, not God as an empathetic but ineffective good friend, or some inner experience, but God who creates a way when there was no way, a God who makes war on evil until evil is undone, a God who raises dead Jesus just to show us who's in charge here.

I imagine that it does have something of the awe-inspiring aesthetic splendor to it that those Chinese peasants experienced back in the 50's when an earthquake caused a large boulder to come loose from the side of the mountain. And there, inside the mountain behind that boulder, were a fantastic collection thousand year old artifacts that had been carefully sealed away.

But it is more than that because the deepest message of Easter is that there is a profound, inexorable destiny to the scope of History. God ultimately bends all things towards the Good. The pull of redemption, slow at times, is nevertheless stronger than any of our attempts to stop it. We can stop our ears, close our eyes, we can run away as fast as we can but the pull of redemption and reconciliation is stronger than our resistance.

There is nothing quite as sobering as being caught in a sweeping tidal current when you are being pulled out to sea, away from shore, and you can swim as hard as you want but the rip tide is taking you where it is going, period.

And I think that if we could really step back and see the great sweep of history, it would be much more profound than that. It would look much more like the falls flowing over Victoria.

I am told that during the last recession of the glaciers in our country that is the way that the incredible canyons were formed in Montana. As the glaciers thawed, large lakes were formed in the ice, big lakes as in the size of the Great Lakes. Eventually, one end of the ice would break through and water, millions of gallons of water per minute, poured out onto the plain and cut the wide valleys that today comprise the landscape out there. Hundreds of feet deep, thousands of feet wide. Sometimes I stand out there and wonder if anyone was around to see that great torrent. Over-powering, awe-inspiring, inexorable.

You cannot stop it. You can try but it won't amount to much. God's Goodness will have the last, final, definitive word. We can torture it, we can intellectually reject it, we can try to kill it, but we cannot stop the Goodness and love of God.

That is all the confidence the disciples needed to have their lives turned around. They could endure hardship, set back, even torture and their own deaths, knowing that meaning and goodness would eventually win and they would be redeemed and not lost to ignominy. That is all that hope needs. All that hope needs is to see the first trickle in the ice pack.

C.S. Lewis was pretty close to right in "The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe" in the epic battle between the wicked Queen that has cast a spell on Narnia so that it is perpetually winter without ever being Christmas. At one point, she is riding through the snowy forest, but her tactics of intimidation are losing their effectiveness. All manner of small creatures, leprechauns, faieries, sprites and dwarves that are no longer entirely afraid of her and her soldiers. She can see them traveling out in the open. Occasionally her wolves would corner one and kill it but she keeps seeing more and more.

She is seeing them because the deep winter snow is melting. There is just the beginning of a thaw. One of the children finally stops a leprechaun who is traveling in the open with just a small weapon, no match for the Wicked Queens soldiers and wolves. She asks the leprechaun why he is brave enough to travel out in the open. He points up to a glistening melting branch and says, "It is warming. Aslan is drawing near." And on he goes through the wet snow, through the ice, ever confident that this too shall pass, knowing that the Warm hearted Lion will triumph over the Queen of Winter.

That is the Easter message. The winter of evil and despair is melting. It is still with us to be sure- in some spots it is still deeply frozen- but if you look carefully you can see the first beginning of a thaw. Evil and wantonness, accident and aimlessness will not have the last word. They stay with us, but the inexorable pull of God is towards integration, towards purpose, towards reconciliation and redemption.

Whatever it is that you are facing right now, whatever threat is coming at you from without or from your own basement, don't let it overwhelm you no matter how fierce it might seem. Stay the course, live out of your faith, out of grace, and love, for the Ultimate Word in the great drama of Human existence is God's redemption and that is for you too. Hang in there and don't be afraid. My brothers and sisters, the first bit of thaw has already begun. Amen.