April 8, 2012 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:30 a.m. | Easter Sunday

Something Happened

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 118:1–2, 14–24
Isaiah 25:6–9
Mark 16:1–8

“He is not here.”

Mark 16:6 (NRSV)

Speak, Jesus, Word of God.
It’s your turn to speak. Alleluia.
Against the orders of hate
you bring us the law of love.
In the face of so many lies
you are the truth out loud.
Amid so much news of death
you have the word of life.
After so many false promises, frustrated hopes,
you have, Lord Jesus, the last word,
and we have put our trust in you. Alleluia.

Brazilian bishop Pedro Casaldaliga
From the prayer anthology Bread of Tomorrow

This is the fourteenth Easter Sunday for me here at Fourth Presbyterian Church. Over the years I have deepened in my appreciation of how we as a congregation observe this High Holy Day in the Christian calendar. I’ll never forget my first Easter here, Easter Sunday in 1998. I was amazed at the crowds of people who were flocking into church for the Easter services. I was so amazed I actually went out and took photos of people lining the streets around the block around the church. I took them so I could send them home to Scotland because I wasn’t sure that people would believe me that people actually lined up and queued in order to get into a church. I called my dad that afternoon and said I’m going to send you the photos as proof of what I’m telling you.

Of course it’s not just the volume of attendance that is important, although I do appreciate your presence this morning. I believe that in our own way here at Fourth Church we strive to honor God, whom we worship in this beautiful sanctuary, using these beautiful flowers, the music, our voices joined together, the hospitality that we show to each other, and more than that, how we go forward into the future after Easter. How we commit to living in the world as Easter people, committed to lives of faith, hope, and love.

So welcome to all who are gathered for worship this Easter day. I know we see many of you each Sunday, and I’m grateful for that. I know that for some of you, you attend Fourth Church on an occasional basis. And I know that there are some out there who will be shocked at how gray my hair is because it’s been a year since you’ve seen me! Let me assure you all that I and my colleagues want to celebrate your presence here on this day as we join with the whole church of Jesus Christ as we encounter the central mystery of our faith: the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is my fourteenth Easter at Fourth Church. This week would also have been my fourteenth consecutive Opening Day at Wrigley Field with the Cubs except that some godless bureaucrat somewhere decided that Opening Day this year would be on Maundy Thursday, so my run was broken because we had services here at Fourth Church. It was not just me; it’s not just a personal complaint. My heart went out to all those good North Side Catholics who had given up beer for Lent and had to endure a dry Opening Day. I know you’re not all Cubs fans, I’m well aware of that, but those of you who are would know that it was a familiar Opening Day story of the Cubs snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I hope it doesn’t stretch it too much to suggest that Easter is kind of like the church’s Opening Day. When the stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty, the victory of God overcomes the almost certain defeat that has been plotted against Jesus by the forces of empire and religious oppression.

And yet the text that drives our reflections this morning offers some challenges to we who gather, the faithful eager to sing the hallelujahs, to proclaim “Christ is risen indeed” and then go off for a nice brunch.

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” is Emily Dickinson’s famous poetic admonishment. In many ways we might call Mark’s telling of the gospel, particularly the narrative of the resurrection, a “slant” telling. Scholars of the New Testament are almost in complete agreement that Mark’s Gospel is the first of the Gospels to be written; although it comes second in the New Testament canon, chronologically it was first. And it was in all likelihood known by those who wrote the other Gospels, certainly Matthew, and Luke, and probably John. There’s also a general consensus among scholars that Mark’s Gospel ends at the point that our reading ended today, at verse 8. If you look in your Bibles, you’ll see additional endings. Scholars believe that they were added later on. That being the case, Mark’s Gospel which begins with the proclamation of “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ” ends with the words “for they were afraid.” So not for Mark are elaborate descriptions of resurrection appearances by the risen Jesus on that first Easter. Not for Mark are locked rooms or beachside barbeques or visits with the disciples over supper. Mark offers a stark, mysterious, and incomplete narrative of the first Easter. The protagonists are women, women who have been followers of Jesus, who witnessed the crucifixion on Friday and come back on Sunday to tend the body. Because they are women, they have little standing in the society of that time and that culture. Their testimony would have been disregarded by the authorities.

And then there is this mysterious young man who has all the hallmarks of a God messenger, or angel, as we know them. No sign in Mark’s Gospel of Jesus except that he is not here, that he is “going ahead to Galilee” with the result of the women encountering this experience of “terror and amazement.” Barbara Lundblad, a fine New Testament scholar, translates these words as “trauma and ecstasy.” She writes further that this story leaves us, the readers, wondering and longing for more. We, the readers, are looking for that icon of our psychosocial age: closure.

The Gospel of Mark does not offer simple closure. His account of the resurrection offers openness, like the open tomb: the entrance is open, the stone is rolled away, he is not here. The well-known English literary critic Frank Kermode, who died just some months ago, gave a series of lectures at Harvard that were made into a book called The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Kermode uses the text of Mark’s Gospel as one of his primary texts in exploring how people interpret texts. He coins a new word in the book; he takes the Greek word for “fulfill”—pleroma—and he makes it into a noun, pleromatistm, people who seek fulfillment. He writes, “We, the readers, are fulfillment people, pleromatists.” As interpreters of texts, not just the Bible texts or books but all different kinds of texts, movies, events, we are interpreters of life and faith. And in that, we’re too often looking for everything to make sense, to fit into a system, any system—whatever system is the one that we choose, but perhaps, most of all, a system that aligns with the prevailing culture, a culture of post-enlightenment scientific rationalism, which itself is rooted in the prevailing ideology of our age. In the phrase of Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, it is “a market society in which everything has its price.”

We do not get that easy system in Mark’s Gospel. So what are we to do then this Easter day with this mysterious open-ended ending? The novelist Joseph Heller famously wrote the novel Catch-22; it’s his most famous. The novel after it wasn’t as popular; it’s titled Something Happened. It’s not popular probably because nothing much happens in it until the end. But that could be a title for Mark’s Gospel, certainly for Mark’s resurrection story—“Something Happened.”

I very much enjoy the writings of Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian journalist who writes regularly in the New Yorker magazine. He wrote a couple years ago an article in which he led off with defining the difference between something that’s a puzzle and something that is a mystery. A puzzle is something that can be solved with more knowledge or information; it fits together. Mystery is qualitatively different from that. Mark’s story, Mark’s Gospel, is not a puzzle to be worked out by getting more information or by finding some secret key that unlocks a meaning for us. It can’t be done by learning enough Greek so that we can engage in fancy acts of translation or interpretation. It is at its very heart in the resurrection story a mystery. Gladwell writes that “mysteries require judgment and assessment of uncertainties.” And we don’t like uncertainty in our rational, scientific world. We like certainty, things that fit the system.

The late William Placher was one of the great doctors of the church, Presbyterian theologian, and teacher. Before he died a premature death just some three or four years ago, he published a new commentary on Mark’s Gospel, and in it there is an extraordinary confession that this great and honest man makes. He writes, “At one point in my life I had persuaded myself that the empty tomb story was a legend that developed after Paul.” He was living into his rational, scientific system at that point. He goes on to write, “I have, however, come to think otherwise. Given that age’s suspicion of the testimony of women, the most plausible explanation for why the women discover the empty tomb is that it happened that way. No one would have invented the story in this form.”

And so we are left with mystery and with wonder. One of my favorite quotes is from an interesting, perhaps odd, little book that was written by Dag Hammarskjöld, who served as the General Secretary of the United Nations in the early sixties. He died also prematurely, in a plane crash. He kept a journal, and that journal has become one of the classics of contemporary spirituality. It’s called Markings. It was jottings and notes that he made to himself as he lived his life. He once wrote, “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.” Wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason. Now as Hammarskjöld knew and lived out in his life, that encounter with wonder, that engagement with the mystical that comes from a different place than reason, is not a get-out for us in life. In fact, it calls us to greater engagement in the real life of the world around us.

I love the writing of Kathy Galloway, Church of Scotland minister and preacher. In one of her Easter sermons she said, “The place of the gospel is never abstract or academic, nor is it theoretical and dogmatic; it is always the place of engagement with the world.” The stone has been rolled away. The tomb is empty. He is not here. God, we might say, is on the loose. And that causes uncertainty. God is on the loose in the world and in your life and my life. The message is that we cannot keep God in a box just as Jesus couldn’t be kept in the tomb by the stone. We cannot hold God to any box that we create of religion or ideology or doctrine. God is on the loose at Easter. And Mark’s telling speaks to the deepest experience of the human condition. Speaks to all who gather this Easter and every Easter who know the great joys of life and the deep, deep sorrows of being human. Who know what it is to be stuck in tombs of our own making and of others. As Janet Morely, British writer, puts it,

When we are all despairing,
when the world is full of grief,
when we see no way ahead
and hope has gone away,
roll back the stone.

Or as Sydney Carter put it in the great hymn “Lord of the Dance”:

They cut me down and I leapt up high,
I am the life that will never, never die.
I’ll live in you, if you’ll live in me.
For am I the Lord of the Dance, said he.

Something happened.

Amen.