April 15, 2006
Romans 6: 3-11 + Mark 16: 1-7
Eight verses tell the whole story in Mark’s typical style: quick, to the point, embracing the whole spectrum of human emotion from despair to fear from hesitation to joy. It takes Mark only four words to embrace the whole divine activity from abandonment to the fulfillment of Covenant promise freeing from sin everyone from Adam till today.
Four short words, easy to miss because we know the story: easy to miss because of the characters, easy to miss because of the intense emotion and the drama, easy to miss because they state a fact that is so obvious.
If we hear them this night with the dullness of twenty centuries, we shall miss the radical reversal of eternity they hold for us. If we hear them with the complacency and filter them with the casual way we relate to the Holy in this post-Christian Western world, we shall miss the explosive experience these words had on those women. That angelic proclamation in all its simplicity is what has kept us so busy for the past 90 minutes and kept us so focused these last forty days. Those words transformed the grief of those women and changed the whole reality of creation.
HE IS NOT HERE!
“Of course not.” we think. “We know that.” And so, we trivialize the power of the resurrection. But these words are not trivial. They may not be dismissed because we know the story. They are the story! The story is not just that there was an empty tomb, that the one crucified cannot to be found among the dead, nor that somehow a great stone was rolled back. These words will not be dismissed because heaven and earth were turned upside down by them, and nothing is the same ever again. These words say as much about us as they do about an empty tomb. They also say as much about God as every other word Mark has written before them.
It takes no degree in theology, no dogmatic apology, nor any kind of orthodox amplification to get the point. No stone was too big and no tomb too secure to hold or restrain the Messiah of God. Even the power of death cannot stop the purposes of God. Simply put, Christ who was crucified and was buried is not where the world expected him to stay. The message is simple and unmistakable: four words. HE IS NOT HERE.
With those words, we tell the whole story of what God has planned and is doing for us. It is nothing short of a new creation. Tonight we witness that new creation which like the first began in chaos and darkness. We shall see the water spring to life. Water that once threatened us is now water that will cleanse us. We have just proclaimed a new Adam who has risen by the breath of God’s Spirit. But we are not witnesses who stand to watch, we are witnesses who have been a part of it, for we are of this new creation. You who are soon to step into the waters of Baptism will rise into this new creation with hearts and lives made new by love; born again in Spirit and in Truth.
This is new creation. Should any come looking among the dead for those who have been born in this new creation, lived in it with faith, and died in it by baptism: the same will be said of them that was said of Christ: “They are not here.” “They have risen.”