Mark 16:1-8 "The Easter Choice" Scott Hoezee

What did you do to get yourself here this morning? Probably your presence in this sanctuary is the end result of a small battery of normal routines. Before going to bed last night, you perhaps set your alarm. That alarm went off and whether or not you hit the "Snooze" button a time or two, you still got up pretty much when you had planned to do so. Then you made coffee, had breakfast, showered, brushed your teeth, picked out and put on some nice clothes, got in the car, and came over here. For many of you this is a Sunday morning routine you have followed countless times with little or no variation.

Our lives are mostly filled with routines. Few of us are such haphazard folks that we get ourselves ready for work in a completely different way every single day. We depend on doing things in a certain sequence. If our ordinary routines are disrupted, we may well discover that we start to forget things. For instance, ordinarily I never forget my daughter's Monday afternoon piano lesson because getting her to her teacher's house is part of the Monday after-school routine. But when the kids had a Monday off a couple of months ago, our normal patterns were knocked off kilter and so the time for her lesson came and went without either of us thinking about it (until the teacher called to inquire what was going on!). Two weekends ago many of us endured several days without electricity. Suddenly simple things were a challenge and some things couldn't be done at all. You had to think through everything (even as you had to keep shaking your head over your own silliness each time you flipped a dead light switch or plugged in your curling iron and waited for it to come on).

More than we realize, we depend on our routines. Of course, there is such a thing as obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is an extreme dependence on routines. Most of us may not like it when something disrupts our normal patterns, but we are flexible enough to make do. That is not so with obsessive-compulsive folks. I have witnessed sufferers of this disorder who literally become "stuck" when something gets out of place. I once saw a young man, his mouth full of toothpaste, standing frozen at the bathroom sink because the glass he needed to rinse out his mouth had been set on the left side of the faucet instead of the right side where, to his mind, it simply had to be or else he could not move to the next step.

I mention all this because when reading Mark 16 last week, I was struck by the way Jesus' resurrection knocked routines out of whack. Not unlike any one of us, each of the three women who trekked over to Jesus' tomb depended on the stability of life and the correctness of their assumptions about what was what. It begins in verse 1: when the Sabbath was over, they bought spices. When the Sabbath was over. Of course this purchase of spices had to wait a day because the law said you were not allowed to buy anything on the Sabbath.

Think of that: Jesus was in the tomb. These women knew that he had been put there without the requisite burial preparations. Still, taking care of this simply had to wait. The death of Jesus notwithstanding, the Sabbath still had its routines and regulations. One did not simply change those sacred patterns on a whim (and anyway, Jesus wasn't going anywhere!). So I imagine that these women, though sad beyond the telling of it, nevertheless went through their normal Sabbath routines on that day after Jesus died.

So the Sabbath came and went as always. The sun rose, the sun set, and then on the first day of the week the sun rose again at the usual time. Once they could see well enough to walk safely, they bought what was needed at the market and then made their way to the place where they knew Joseph of Arimathea had taken the body of their friend. Again, the world of predictable patterns remained in place for these women. This would not be the first body they had embalmed and it wouldn't be the last. No doubt they had a set protocol for how they would embalm Jesus once they got to the tomb.

Halfway there, however, it occurred to one of them that the last thing they had seen this man Joseph do was roll a large boulder in front of the cave. This was a bit of an "Oops" moment for the women. They had not planned quite right after all. They sensed that even with all three of them shoving and pushing on the rock, it would likely not budge. Heavy rocks require strong arms. That's the way life works. That's the way life has always worked and there was no reason to think that this day would be any different.

But when they got there, the rock had already been shoved aside. Although unexpected, this fact alone did not strike the women as bizarre. Probably they expected to find Joseph of Arimathea back at the tomb and maybe he was already embalming the body. In any event, there is no hint in this text that they entered the now-accessible tomb warily. It looks like they waltzed right in. They did find someone in the tomb but it wasn't Joseph or anyone else they had ever met. In fact, this young man seemed strikingly peculiar. His quirky presence in the tomb elicited a sharp intake of breath from all three women.

So the brightly clad man tells them to not be alarmed only to then go on and alarm them even more by turning their tidy world exactly upside-down. They end up fleeing the tomb--running scared and utterly unable to say a blessed word. Mark tells us they were "trembling and bewildered" and who on earth can blame them?!

Few of us have ever experienced the level of shock these women felt. But even in vastly lesser matters, we know how the unexpected can send us reeling. Maybe your most trusted coworker and confidant betrays you, steps all over you in order to secure a promotion for himself. Perhaps this person's reliability had been a fixture of your world. You depended on this person but suddenly it proved false. Such a situation causes us to exclaim, "I flat out don't know what to say! I feel like the wind was knocked out of me! I don't know what's what anymore! I'm so confused I feel dizzy."

If you have ever been to New York City, then you know that among other things, seasoned New Yorkers are extremely sure of themselves. They are not hesitant, they are very sure-footed, and many of them are take-charge types. But when my wife and I were in the city about six months after the 9/11 attack, we had a conversation with just such a seasoned New Yorker and we asked him what it was like on September 11. And he replied that everyone was confused. No one knew where to go. People just stood around almost as stuck and as frozen as some obsessive-compulsive person whose routine is disrupted.

Something like the 9/11 attack, like the betrayal of a trusted friend, throws us off kilter. We reel from how much our world has changed. For these three women on that first Easter morning, the world-shattering shock was greater still. If the dead can't stay dead, then much of what they knew, or thought they knew, was wrong. And you don't assimilate that kind of information in a minute or two. When your world is altered in significant ways, this will likely cause you to wonder about lots of other things, too. It takes time to sort things out.

What's important to remember for this morning, however, is that when faced with new realities, you have at least three options for how to respond (and it is nearly certain that you will opt for one of these three possibilities). One, you can choose to stay bewildered. You can let this event knock you flat on your back and then you can choose to stay there. You can withdraw into yourself, refuse to talk about anything, refuse to believe anything ever again. You can become a hard-nosed cynic, a sneering figure on the sidelines of life but someone who is basically stuck. You just never get over the shock. Or two, you can engage in world-class denial. You can look at the facts and choose to ignore them. Sure, if such-and-such a thing were true, you'd be forced to revise your whole way of thinking, but it's not true. It never happened. And so you cling to your old ideas by refusing delivery on new ideas. Or a third option is to choose, slowly perhaps, to assimilate this new information. You may get knocked as flat on your back as the next person by this new realization, but eventually you pick yourself up. You embrace this new truth and then go through the long, sometimes painful, process of re-assessing life in the light of this new evidence.

This is the Easter choice. When faced with the incredible proclamation that Jesus rose again from the dead, you can be agnostic and cynical by saying that you don't know what to make of this but then neither are you going to try. Who cares anyway? Or you can deny it. The whole thing is fiction, fantasy, a pious wish but something that never really happened. Or you can move past the shock toward acceptance. But if you are going to accept this truth, you need to let it change you totally.

That's the Easter choice. The problem for most of us is that we are not surprised enough by Easter to realize we face a choice. Easter is a part of the background scenery of our lives. We've never been afraid of Easter, never been bewildered by it. Believing that Jesus rose again from the dead becomes a little like believing the earth is round and that it orbits the sun. Once upon a time people didn't know that. They thought the earth was flat and that the sun orbited the earth. It caused quite a stir when this view had to be revised. But that was a long time ago and now we accept that picture of our solar system without much thought. Sure the world is round and we orbit the sun, but what does that have to do with anything? It doesn't change what I have to do at work tomorrow, does it?

Is that what Easter becomes for us? We believe it happened but then, we've always believed that. So why would it have much of an effect on what we do tomorrow? Easter is no longer shocking for us--it surely does not make us re-evaluate everything else we think we know. And anyway, we're not sure we want to have everything in our lives changed.

As noted earlier, we got here this morning by relying on our daily routines. And you don't have to be obsessive-compulsive to dislike having your routines disrupted. We don't enjoy being knocked off stride. In fact, we avoid it if we can. So we didn't come here today expecting or even much wanting anything to happen that would shake up our world. None of us expects to leave here this morning feeling bewildered enough as to be afraid.

Yet Mark's gospel ends in bewildered and fearful silence. Lots of people in history have disliked this quirky, non-jubilant ending. This morning we are planning to end with the "Hallelujah" chorus because that is a proper way to conclude a service of joy like this. None of you would much like it if, in a few minutes, I just silently walked out of this room. You'd like it even less if you turned around and saw that Ken and the entire choir had quietly slipped out at some point, leaving the balcony empty such that our service would sputter out with no music at all. In fact, one of you might be so upset that you'd sit down at the grand piano up front here and try to fix things by banging out some joyful music. This is Easter!

That's sort of what someone once did to Mark's gospel. As we have noted before, scholars have now rejected Mark 16:9-20. It appears that someone added those verses years later in an effort to let Mark's gospel end with more of a bang. But near as we can tell, Mark himself let his gospel sputter out with bewildered silence. Maybe this is Mark's way of showing us that this event changes everything, or at least it should. This changes everything and so it's only proper to be dumbstruck by it the way these three women were at first. This changes everything and so in the light of this new reality, we face the same Easter choice these women faced: we can stay stuck and silent, we can deny the whole thing and act as though it never happened, or we can work to accept this new reality and do so in ways that will cause us to re-adjust everything else in our lives accordingly.

Mark lets the shock remain and leaves questions unanswered in order to force the Easter choice onto each one of us. How will you react? What are you going to do with this amazing idea that God does not want the dead to remain dead? And if you believe that, what else in your life should change as a result?

Or put it this way: how long does Easter last for you? Is this a one-shot holiday that is over at midnight (or even sooner, perhaps once the ham is polished off this noon)? Today we face the Easter choice: we either choose to believe this and make it part of our entire life or practically speaking we live as though this never really happened. If we choose to embrace this truth, then we cannot pretend that the rest of our life's routines can proceed unaffected. So tomorrow, or midway through July, or next October on some Thursday afternoon, it is completely legitimate for you to ask yourself how Easter is affecting your life.

You know, on one level it's surprising that in Mark 16 the women do not encounter Jesus. On another level, however, this makes sense: there was no reason for Jesus to hang out near a tomb he no longer needed. He was already way out ahead of the women and the disciples. Jesus was in Galilee, nearly 100 miles north of Jerusalem. What was he doing way up there? Well who knows, but the fact is that God did not raise Jesus from the dead to become a curio, some static display. Jesus was raised by his Father so that he could be set loose in the world. He has gone on ahead of the disciples because that's what resurrection means: he is always up ahead of us, always going out in advance of us. He is alive and so is not under our control the way a corpse would be. He is moving, exuberant with new life and busy at work to bring in the fullness of the kingdom.

Easter means Jesus lives and so he is always already waiting for you each morning when you unlock the door to your office, step into your classroom, hop into your car for the commute to work, or wherever it is you go each day. Jesus is set loose on this world because God knows that there is work to be done. There is still far too much death, far too much diminishment, far too many ways by which corporations, individuals, and governments tend to run roughshod over life in the neverending push for dominance, money, and control.

Jesus is set loose on this world because even in the church our Lord can never be finished in calling us to discipleship. He is never finished challenging us to find creative methods by which we, too, become bearers of life who lift up the downtrodden, encourage the despairing, protect the life of the innocent and helpless. If we want to see Jesus, we have to journey to where he is and join in on what he is already doing. Jesus is set loose on this world and make no mistake, in a world as fractured as this one, this Jesus is as often as not a disturbing, unsettling presence. He does disrupt routines, he does set new agendas, he does call us to alternative ways of living, speaking, working, and witnessing. If Jesus was raised from the dead, then he is even now on the loose in your life and my life and throughout the entire world.

The Easter choice is this: will you or will you not accept that your life cannot be the same if Christ Jesus be raised from the dead? Maybe you came here to church today hoping to find Jesus, and I pray you have found him. But when this service is finished in a few minutes, you need to hear a version of what the angel said to the women, "Jesus is not here. Well, he's not only here. He has gone on ahead of you out into the wider world." Your task is to go out into that world, find where the Lord Jesus is and what he is doing, and then get busy in adjusting your own life and your own routines so that you, too, can live an Easter life right here, right now. Amen.