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Mark’s account of Easter morning is the one that gets my attention the most. Most scholars will say that the original ending of his Gospel is 16:8 with the cliffhanger of these three women being too afraid to tell anybody that Jesus had been raised from the dead. The oldest copies of Mark’s Gospel that we have end at verse 8 which means the rest of the chapter was added a few decades later apparently after Matthew and Luke put out their Gospels because he seems to be reflecting their endings.
Anyway, Mark ends with this cliff hanger, with these women being too afraid to tell anyone of Jesus’ resurrection. Why were they so afraid? Isn’t this joyful news? The cliff hanger gets even more intense if you read verse 8 in the original Greek with the first century world in mind because some of the words there are describing a particular kind of religious experience. Our translation says the women fled because “terror and amazement had seized them”. The word for terror in the Greek context means trembling fear. They are trembling, shaking. The word for amazement is ekstasis from which we get our words ecstasy and ecstatic which we associate with being very happy with pleasure. But in Mark’s world, ekstasis is like being in a prophetic trance. So, they are trembling and trance-like.
It sounds to me like Mark is very well describing what we see today as the physical manifestations that come over people in old school Pentecostal-type revivals or in Shamanistic rituals from traditional cultures that we see in History Channel documentaries. This sort of thing strikes us as weird and scary, but in Mark’s day these manifestations were common. Prophets and oracles in the Pagan religions in that day would be struck in this way when they delivered their messages from the gods. So, the way Mark is setting things up here it seems like these women have been geared up by some supernatural spirit kind of power to speak a message from the gods and yet they say nothing…to anyone…for they are afraid.
Afraid. This is not the first time in Mark’s Gospel that we hear of people being afraid. Let’s jog our memories with a run through Mark. The first time we hear of people being afraid is when we find Jesus and his disciples out in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus was asleep on a pillow in the back of the back. A windstorm came up and waves started to swamp the boat and it appeared they were going to sink and drown. The Disciples woke Jesus up and accused him of not caring. Jesus got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace. Be still.” A peaceful calm came over the water, not a ripple. The Disciples suddenly became afraid and asked, “Who is this that even the wind and the sea obey him”. Well, he’s the Son of God. Please note there is no mention in Mark’s account of the calming that they were afraid that they were about to drown to death. They became afraid because Jesus did a God thing, something only God could do.
Jogging on, Jesus and the disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee to an area that is very Roman and they came across a demoniac who was possessed by a legion of demons. Yes, that sounds like a legion of Roman soldiers, the most powerful beast for war making known in the ancient world. Well, Jesus cast that legion of demons out of the man into a heard of pigs that stampeded into the sea and drowned and the price of pork that year skyrocketed. The herdsmen ran and told the townspeople and a crowd came and saw that this formerly psychotic and violent man was now sitting calmly, dressed, and in his right mind. They became afraid. Jesus did a God thing and they became afraid.
Next, Jesus and his motley crew crossed back over to a more Jewish area of Galilee. A synagogue leader named Jairus came to Jesus and begged him to come heal his twelve-year-old daughter who was near death. They set out for his house and as they walked through the town square a woman who had suffered a menstrual hemorrhage for twelve years snuck up behind him and touched his robe and suddenly, she was healed both of the hemorrhage and of the associated stigma. When she realized she was healed she, like the women at the tomb, began to tremble and she became afraid. They then arrived at the house of Jairus only to find that the girl had died. But that didn’t stop Jesus. He told Jairus not to be afraid, but to believe and took the parents and a couple of the Disciples and went to her room and raised her from the dead. Oddly, the people didn’t become afraid, but rather were affected with a great ekstasis. Jesus doing God things and people becoming afraid appear to be a pattern. But here, Jesus’ command “Do not fear; only believe,” kept them from becoming afraid. Interesting.
Crossing the 4km-mark here, we rather unremarkably find that King Herod was afraid of John the Baptist because he was an honest, for real prophet who spoke for God. Then, one night Jesus walked on water from shore to his disciples who were in a boat. When they saw him, they became terrified (a different word) because they thought he was a ghost. Yet, Jesus told them, “Take courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.” That sentence “It is I” in Hebrew shortens out to one word, Yahweh, the name for himself that God gave to Moses. God/Jesus got in the boat with them again the sea went calm, without a ripple. Jesus would rather they not be afraid of this God thing he did. His word kept them from becoming afraid. Apparently, only God can calm the fear he causes.
Jogging on (we’re up to 6k now), Jesus and the disciples followed by a great crowd were walking towards Jerusalem, to the fateful event of Jesus death. Jesus is walking ahead of them. For some inexplicable reason the disciples were in a state of amazement and the crowd was afraid. Watching Jesus from behind apparently has this effect. Then, in the midst of this inexplicable state of amazement and mass afraid-ness, Jesus for the second time took the Twelve aside and told them that in Jerusalem he was going to suffer, die, and on the third day be raised.
Then. they arrived in Jerusalem amidst the spectacle of political protest we call the Triumphal Entry. Next day, Jesus cleansed the Temple of the “big business” going on there and iconicly he quoted from Isaiah saying, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for the nations.” The implications of Jesus calling the Temple “My house” were huge. The chief priests and teachers of the law then began to look for a way to kill him because they were afraid of him because the crowds were amazed at him.
The next two times “afraid” shows up along the route, it is again the religious authorities who are afraid. But they are not afraid of God. They are afraid of the crowds who are amazed at the God things that have been happening around Jesus and secondarily, John the Baptist.
Well, back to the women at the tomb. We’ve run 9k to get here. We’ll have 10k in by the time we’re done. I bet you never thought you’d run 10k on Easter morning. Virtual running in a Pandemic they call it. (Actually, the word for afraid turns up ten times in Mark’s Gospel; hence, the 10k analogy.)
If we have learned anything from our fearful jog through Mark, it is that when God acts, a real fear kind of thing comes upon people. Yet, I think we are more like the religious authority types and what they are afraid of when God acts. When we, like the religious authorities, discover that we don’t have control of God-things, but rather God has control over God-things, we get afraid. When God does the miracle healing kind of stuff shaking us lose from our inclination to hang on to hopeless, we get afraid. When we discover that all things, even the wind, the sea, and the demons which all symbolically serve as the agents of Chaos, that all things truly are in the hands of the God who made them, we get afraid. When we discover that God has power even over death such that the futility of death is not the last word in God’s good creation, we get afraid. When we discover that there really is reason to have faith and to hope, we get afraid. When we get a hint that God is more powerful than our innate inclination to resign ourselves to despair because of the futility of sin and death that has invaded God’s good creation, when we get a hint that God is real and we can actually have hope in God to act to save, it scares the Hell out of us (if I might pun it that way).
Let’s consider these three women momentarily. Mark mentions them by name. They are three followers of Jesus who in faith and devotion fearlessly did not desert him like those Twelve men did, the Disciples, who fled for fear of losing their lives due to their association with Jesus. They were even there at his crucifixion to be with him from a distance as he died on the cross. They were Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome. At the end of chapter 15 Mark says that they were among a number of women who followed Jesus and provided for him while he was in Galilee. Every church has women like these who are present at everything and humbly helping with everything. They were faithfully devoted to him.
Yet, even though they knew Jesus had said that in Jerusalem he would suffer and die and on the third day be raised, they apparently weren’t going to the tomb that morning looking for a resurrected Jesus. They were simply looking to anoint his body as was the proper custom. They did not believe that God had power over death. They had resigned themselves to believe, accept, and serve despair and hopelessness rather than to “Fear not, only believe” as Jesus had told Jairus just before he raised his daughter from death. They could not imagine resurrection. Resuscitation is one thing yet resurrection is another.
Other than every hope they had being shattered by Jesus’ death, the biggest problem these women believed they would face that morning was rolling away that stone. It took more than one big, burly man to lever one of those from its locked-in position. It didn’t matter. They were truly devoted to Jesus. They were determined to care for his body no matter what and they would solve that impossible problem when they got there.
Just so you know, that stone covering the entrance to the tomb is symbolic of just how impossible and devastating of a problem death is. They could not roll it away themselves. So also, we cannot simply roll away or overcome death and the suffering and the grief and futility and the unfairness of death on our own. Only God can. Don’t rule him out as they apparently had even after having seen Jesus do all those God things.
Well, they got to the tomb and they found their impossible problem already solved. Somebody had rolled it away. They entered the tomb and there was that inexplicable young man again and now dressed in a white robe. We met him once before when Jesus was arrested. He was dressed in only a linen robe then and as he was fleeing the scene that evening someone grabbed him and only got the robe so that he wound up fleeing the scene naked. The women become alarmed. Their intuition was telling them something is a-foul. The hair on the back of their necks had raised so to speak. He told them to not be alarmed and that Jesus had been raised just as he said he would be and that they needed to go back and tell the others to go to Galilee and Jesus would meet them there.
And so here we are at the end of our 10k jog along the route of being afraid in Mark’s Gospel. These three women flee the tomb. They are trembling and in a state of ecstasis. They say nothing to anyone because they are afraid. What are they afraid of? They are afraid that God really had raised Jesus from the dead. God really had saved the day. God really has power of death. How unimaginably big is our God?
These three women – Mary Magdalen, Mary the mother of James, and Salome – are the first people to be able to proclaim this new reality to everyone, but this heavy stone of fear has made them unimaginably mute. They now know everything about Jesus is truth; indeed, Jesus is the Truth. There is nothing to fear. As Paul says, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:37-39). There is nothing to be afraid of.
How are you this Easter morning? Preoccupied with all the impossibilities? Struck mute with the fear and wonder and the unimaginable bigness of God? A lot of scholars and preachers reflect negatively on these women for their fear and their muteness. But it seems to me that this being afraid comes with the territory when God is active in our lives. It’s okay to be struck dumb and afraid at the awesomeness of God. I would be more concerned if they handled Easter the way we do, mute with nonchalance and if there is any fear, it’s of the crowds; of the rejection we might receive for believing Jesus, the Truth, believing resurrection rather than death, for hoping rather than resigning ourselves to despair. How are you this Easter morning? Amen.
