The message of Easter
Resurrection — not death or violence — gets the final word
What is the Easter story? Mark tells it like this: It’s early on Sunday morning, and the women come to the tomb. They have spices ready to anoint Jesus’ dead body. They worry about who will roll away the stone from the mouth of the tomb. When they arrive, they find the tomb open and empty. Inside there is a young man, dressed in white saying: “Jesus is risen. He is not here.” He encourages them not to be alarmed and to go and tell the others. The women are afraid, and they tell no one. And that’s how the original ending of Mark leaves the story.
None of the other Gospel writers are willing to stop with fear and silence. Matthew, Luke, and John each tell a longer story — they all contain the women telling the disciples and an experience with a risen Jesus. Even in Mark, as the Gospel was copied through the years, scribes added alternative endings.
We can certainly understand not wanting the story to end in silence and fear. No, no, we want to say, no this is not the end. I didn’t put on my Easter best for this! This is not all things bright and beautiful! This is
not hallelujah! They fled? They said nothing? We want a different ending! We want a happy ending! We’ve made it this far, through teachings and gatherings, through prayers and shared meals. We’ve watched as the disciples slept, betrayed and deserted. We watched Jesus die. Fear and silence cannot be the end.
The Gospel of Mark is the story of Jesus making his way from Galilee to Jerusalem — the capital city, the seat of imperial power, the site of religious collaboration with that power. Once in Jerusalem, Jesus refuses to be silent. He shows and shouts an alternative kingdom of compassion and peace, in opposition to the empire’s violence and oppression.
“The King of the Jews,” read the inscription on Jesus’ cross. Surely Pilate intended this as mocking derision, not only of Jesus, but also his accusers. You think you have some power? Look at what Rome can do to your king!
“Your kingdom come on earth,” Jesus prayed and taught and lived. And they killed him for it — for his treason, for his loyalty to the realm of God. They silenced him: executing him and then sealing him in a tomb. The occupying powers killed Jesus on a Roman cross. Violence won.
And so we go, diminished, with the women to the tomb. We go, the silence of death ringing in our ears. We go expecting to find yet more death. The women see the empty tomb. They hear the message: “He has been raised; he is not here.” And they are silent and afraid. How do we react? Do we let violence have the last word? Do we let the empire have its fun and make its jokes — killing those willing to teach and preach and live into an alternative realm of love and justice and peace?
The message of Easter is that death does not have the last word. We know the women didn’t stay silent. If they had, we wouldn’t know about this day and in all likelihood we wouldn’t know about Jesus. He would be one more prophet executed for treason. But we do know this story. We know it because those women were brave enough to break their silence. They were courageous enough to face their fears. We know because we see such bravery, such resurrection potential, lived out even now.
Weeks before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, a student armed with a handgun entered Marshall County High School in Kentucky. He killed two students, and injured 18 others. Media attention briefly flared and then, like every other school shooting, it faded away.
In an interview with NPR, the Kentucky students describe their experiences after hearing the gunshots and running for their lives: “All of us head into that room and assume the normal lockdown position that we’ve been trained to do. File into the corner, turn off all the lights, make sure it’s locked.” They were locked in a tomb of silence. Many of them stayed that way — terrified and silent.
But then, when they saw and heard the Parkland students something shifted. One Kentucky student said: “They started speaking out. And I mean, look what it did. Now something has changed, for the better. And, I thought that maybe I could do it, too. Maybe I could be part of the change”
This is the resurrection story — a story that is never finished — a story that never resolves the tension but rather invites us into the tension, into the change, into the new life. It is a story that is told again and again.
When Linda Brown’s parents in Topeka, Kan., agreed to join the NAACP’s lawsuit to desegregate Topeka schools, they didn’t know how it would turn out. They just knew they wanted a more just world with more opportunities for their daughter. When the college students in 1955 started sitting in at lunch counters, they didn’t know how it would turn out. And it wasn’t clear even six or seven years later what would happen. The ending hadn’t been written.
The good news of the Gospel is that the resurrection story — the story of new life breaking through the midst of deep despair — is never finished. The ending is left unwritten because we must do our part. We cannot let violence and fear silence us!
Each spring, as seeds push from the ground, as new life comes from what was dead, we hear the challenging story again and must decide if we will let the violence silence us and therefore bury us, or if we will rise again to raise our voices and our actions.
Resurrection, not violence, must have the last word.
Amen.