Bible Gateway parallel passage
The women hear the news of Jesus and run away scared. The story is left open, and no original ending exists other than that for Mark. Scribes over the years feeling the incompleteness have added their own endings trying to tidy it up a bit, but that is not how Mark wrote it. Why?
Mark was reflecting life, on our lives. We are not tidy; there are no absolutes in
our endings, our beginnings nor our middles.
Life is messy and complicated and God speaks to us in it. Sometimes God scares the crap out of us and
sometimes there are just cliff hangers and you have to decide what to do. Mark
is inviting you to the cliff hanger. Now
what? The three people who knew the
story run home in silence not to tell the story, but wait …. now you know. So what do you do?
In our culture we are drawn to either the grossly horrific –
reality television, or the fairy tales – those love story movies like Sleepless
in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail.
We want assurance that our lives aren’t “as bad as all that”, and we are
not as screwed up as we thought. We also
want assurance that there still is a happy ending for someone, and maybe it
will be me someday.
In telling our own stories we add or delete things depending
on how it makes us sound, or what the point is that we are trying to make. We try to forget things that happened and
gloss up occurrences to remember only the best bits.
This is what Mark knows.
People have not changed their story telling so dramatically in two
thousand years that Mark didn’t recognize those patterns in the stories of his
day. He wants us to pay attention to
this story; he wants to leave space in this story for us, each and every single
one of us, because this is not the story of Jesus alone, or Mary Magdalene, or
Mary the mother of James or Salome. This
is the beginning of our story.
God meets you in your mess; God meets you where you are. Sometimes we are like Mary Magdalene, who has
just watched your best friend be tortured and killed, to be poked and prodded like
a horrific side show attraction. You
have seen him carried into a tomb and struggled to grasp how someone so alive,
so vibrant, so full of love and life, someone who has done only good has
died. How could an innocent man who has
done nothing to hurt anyone physically – just their pride be killed by a
mob. How helpless and how confused she
must have felt when she ran into that angel.
Thirteen years ago today I lost my dad and God gained an
angel. The empty hollow feeling was
there, the anger at God; the struggle to grasp your brain around the hole that
has been ripped into your being was there. I imagine the three women felt very
much like that.
I imagine we have all felt beyond God’s love, beyond hope,
beyond compassion, beyond being touchable by God at some point. Perhaps you were so angry with your situation
that if an angel showed up telling you be not afraid you would punch him and
then ask him what kind of idiot he was.
You were hurt and angry and afraid to figure out how to live in a new
way and then this angel comes all glowing white to tell you what to feel? When my dad died an old car got the sore end of a
crowbar – I am not sure what I would have done to that angel if he showed up
while I was beating up a junker in the junk yard. On a good day I may have run away in fear and
trepidation like Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. On a bad day I probably would have tried to bargain
for my dad and then punched him.
But this is the point - Jesus came for us in those moments,
in these moments. Jesus came to show us
how to live through the pain, to comfort us and let us know we are not alone in
this world, to guide us and challenge us to live up to his standards. Jesus rose from that tomb to share with us
the Holy Spirit so that at any point and time we have direct access to God and
knowledge that God is listening, is there and will help us through it if we can
just allow him enough space in our life.
The challenge Mark leaves us with is not three silent women
walking away from a tomb. The challenge
Mark leaves us with is what are you going to do with the good news? What are you going to do with the precious
and perfect gift of the Holy Spirit? Are
you going to lock it within yourself where it can grow old and moldy and loose its
power or are you going to live it? To
act like a resurrected people? Are you
going to choose to look for God and to see the footprints of the Holy Spirit in
your lives every day or are you going to stare into a dusty empty tomb and
regret what is now not the same? God is
calling us on this resurrection Sunday to live!
To see! To Hear! God is calling us to seek and find and make this our
story. How are you going to do
that? How are you going to be an Easter
people?
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