Sermon Easter Sunday 2024 year B

Mark 16. 1-8

Acts 10.34-43

Happy Easter. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the standard greeting between people at this time, or at their slightly later Easter, is Christos Anesti (anaystay) with the reply Alithos (alaythos) Anesti (anaystay) – ‘Christ is risen, Truly, He is Risen.’ It’s a sign of hope and change. It marks moving out of the penitential season of Lent and looking forwards from Easter. But today, part of me is struggling a little bit to leave Lent behind. With conflicts raging all over the world, I’m struggling to see the light of Christ among all the rubble. The Eastern orthodox tradition is the majority religious community in both Russia and Ukraine. I wonder how it might feel to say these words, albeit translated, in those places? Then we come to the conflict in Gaza, a place so close to where Jesus lived, died and rose again. Jerusalem, a holy place for Jews, Muslims and Christians, will be a very different place this year without any pilgrims out side of that region able to go there during Ramadan, Holy Week or Easter. There is something about this conflict that has made me struggle to feel the light of Christ as we have come closer to Easter. Like the women who went to Jesus’ tomb to find his body gone, I think I’m struggling to make sense of it all. Like the ending of this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel, we are all wondering what happens next?

Mark’s resurrection narrative for Easter Sunday is very different to the other gospel stories. Instead of the news of Jesus resurrection being shared by the female and male disciples, no one shares the fact that Jesus has been resurrected. The women who had gone to anoint Jesus’ body after his death witness, not an empty tomb, but someone in the tomb telling them what has happened. Jesus doesn’t appear to Mary in this version of events like in John’s gospel, neither do the women go and share the news of Jesus resurrection with the disciples like in Luke’s gospel. Mark’s gospel seems to leave us with more questions than answers, like a cliff hanger at the end of a TV drama leaving the door open to another series. There has been much debate for centuries on whether Mark did in fact end his gospel here. Some have suggested that he simply died before he finished his account, others that it was just lost. If you look in your Bible, you will find additional verses to this chapter added, but it is made clear that most scholars do not believe these verses are attributed to Mark directly and that the verses just share the narrative from the other gospel writers.

So, the question is, why did Mark end his gospel here with no one sharing the news that Jesus was not dead but had been resurrected? If you read this without knowing the other gospels and the book of Acts, it would leave you wondering how is anyone going to know that Jesus has been resurrected?

What we are given and reminded of in this narrative is the power of Resurrection hope. The man or angel who is in the tomb tells the women, 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. Throughout the gospels Jesus had told them that he would have to suffer and die but that he would come back. Resurrection hope is based on the knowledge of God’s promises to us, it is not hope that is based on the possibility of positive outcomes, it is based on trusting in God and understanding the good things God promises to provide. This is what distinguishes it from ordinary hope, which makes a prediction based on the way things seem to be going. Resurrection hope is not something that is easy to put our faith into whole heartedly because it takes trust in God and that doesn’t mean that everything will always be happy and rosy. Resurrection hope comes with the possibility of hardship, suffering and darkness before the light, we only need to read the psalms to know that God’s people sometimes experience suffering. We therefore must think about hope differently. Maybe hope isn’t something we have or possess. Maybe it’s something we do. Maybe it’s a verb or adverb – could we say, based on the resurrection, Christians aren’t people who have hope, they are people who live hopefully?

I wonder if leaving the end of Mark’s gospel with a suspenseful ending, leaves us, the reader, the community of hearers, with the task of finishing the story with the help of the Holy Spirit? As disciples of Christ, we are being tasked to share the good news of the resurrection and the Christian hope that all will be made right if we put our trust in God.

Imagine a lost Shakespeare play was discovered but with its final act missing. A cast are assembled and it’s their job to perform what is written and faithfully improvise a final act. This final act can’t be just made up. It has to truly follow from what came before. However surprising it might be it has to feel like the same story, the same characters. This example has been used as an analogy for Christian discipleship – we act out, with the guiding of the Holy Spirit, the next act. And that perhaps feels like what Mark might be inviting us to do today through this reading. So, what do we do? What does faithful and hopeful living based on the hope of the resurrection look like today?

Well, it doesn’t expect everything to simply be ok. The resurrection wasn’t simply a happy ending, the early Christians endured much upheaval, uncertainty, and conflict. But it did show that things can be different now and, in the future, that the unexpected can happen and promises can be made on the basis of it.

I’ve been at the school this week and the children were going around their own stations of the cross. At each station we would reflect on a different aspect of the story of Jesus’ last week on earth and use that to reflect on the world around us. At one of the stations, we were looking at a map of the world and reflecting on how not everyone on our planet has enough food to eat, or a safe place to live. That our planet is in danger due to the lack of care we show our planet. I talked to the children about the fact that as Christians we have hope in a better future because we believe that God has provided enough, all we need to do is trust that God has provided, and we therefore don’t need to take more than we need. Doing this requires us to live differently and to work on recognising what we don’t need in our lives and to let these things go. Through this change in our lifestyle, we can live out the resurrection hope of trusting God has provided. 

Living out resurrection hope also means being open to where the spirit might be calling us to repent or think again. A lot of the readings from the gospels, especially the ones the lectionary picks for Holy Week, give us pause because as well as telling us the stories of Jesus’ last moments before his crucifixion, they also can be read in ways which portray Jewish people as the villains of the piece. Stories from the New Testament have been used to condemn Jewish people by blaming them for the death of Jesus. It was only in the 1960’s when Christians made real efforts to overturn centuries of anti-Jewish teaching, that we began to recognise the damage that had been caused and it is important that we continue this work by making sure our attitudes towards Judaism and Jewish people do not slip into antisemitism. It’s also true that Muslim people have suffered from prejudice and abuse due to their faith being used by extremists to wage a war against the western world. Nine eleven saw a massive shift in attitude towards Muslim people, and the belief that they were all terrorists.

Like the end of Marks gospel, it is up to us, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit to finish the story, to change the narrative that pigeonholes these brothers and sisters of faith. Like the women who saw the man in the tomb, we are afraid and sometimes this fear stops us speaking out on behalf of those in the margins. However, as witnesses of God’s love in our lives, we are invited to share this testimony so that others may witness the power of resurrection hope. We know the next part of the story for the disciples, for the early Christians and for us. Despite this gospel ending that feels hopeless, we know that there was more still to come.

Easter is a joyful time but it’s not a neat happy ending. It’s an unexpected rebirth and new beginning. It’s an unexpected and courageous walking forward into the yet still unknown but with trust and confidence that the ways things appear to us now, is not all there is to see, or the way things will always be. Most of all Easter is the time to remember that we are people called to live hopefully, full of hope, on the basis of what God has done and promised still to do.

Amen