He Is Here
The morning that shocked Christ's friends into the living faith
Easter Sunday
Mark 16:1-8
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But 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.”
So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
The End?
Mark’s resurrection story is missing everything but “The End.” But that would be two too many words for Mark. The above passage is it. That’s all we get in the original ending of Mark’s gospel in the oldest manuscripts.
Imagine reading that or hearing that and not having thousands of years of Christian history behind us. Imagine reading it before America was a series of colonies founded by pilgrims driven by this story, or before America was the idea of monarchies, or before the European monarchies were even ideas. Imagine reading this story and that ending before even Christianity was a concrete idea.
That’s the listener who Mark was writing for: people who did not live in a cultural Christianity (or cultural post-Christianity, depending on your perspective). Imagine sitting around a tiny house in the Roman empire, invited to a meal by a strange collection of holy fools, and hearing a neighbor you’ve never met reading this out loud. Maybe the reader is a merchant down the road, or a government official, or maybe even a slave. You’ve been sitting in rapt attention as Mark’s “matter of fact” reporting of the gospel events unfolds for sixteen chapters.
Then bam, “They fled from the tomb, and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” The End. Some early Christians were so startled by this that they seem to have added a little bit more to the ending in later manuscripts. If the listener is meant to be jarred up, it’s because the women at the tomb were.
Mark doesn’t even tell us what to do with this information. He just tells us they were shocked and amazed and afraid, totally unprepared for what they saw, just as they had been throughout Jesus’ life. Maybe for us, alive after the long march of time, of history, of ideas like Europe and America have stretched on into 2024, we are no longer shocked and amazed and afraid and found totally unprepared very often, least of all by the gospel. Does this mean this faith is dead? Is this The End of faith?
That’s what the disciples were asking. “Is our faith dead? Because our savior is.” This may have been what the women were still dealing with that Sunday morning. They were going to say goodbye and tend to his dead body, as Marissa Burt eloquently described last week. None of them considered that all that time with Jesus might have been preparation for something realer. That morning, they met that something realer.
A Bar in Chapel Hill
A phrase that always jumps at me in the resurrection story is when the mysterious man in white says, “He’s not here!” This may be for no reason other than there was a bar in Chapel Hill, NC, where I went to college, called He’s Not Here. They’re known for their giant blue cups of cheap beer, a huge courtyard and balcony, and as a place to debrief UNC basketball games (this weekend, we were also in mourning).
Though in a Southern town with a long history of the faithful, Easter did not inspire the name of that bar. The legend is that the bar had a different name at one point, but the bar owner’s ex-wife kept calling the bar all the time looking for him. The owner told his staff to answer “he’s not here,” and they said it so much they eventually just changed the name of the bar. So, while it’s not about Easter, on the other hand, it’s very gospel: God calling us over and over, Jesus knocking at your door, “Oh sinner, why won’t you answer?” Because Joe’s not here, sorry God.
But that Easter morning, “he’s not here” meant something totally different: triumph. He’s not here. He’s busy.
Faith Sparked into Life
John Calvin talked about how there's one type of faith called a “preparing faith.” Calvin says this is an important but ultimately dormant and passive faith. If we have had it in our lives, we are not alone; the disciples had this kind of hibernating faith throughout the whole gospels. They’re walking with Jesus, hearing all these teachings, all these messages about loving one another, all these ideas about a new kingdom, all that. But, according to Calvin, when they followed Jesus in his life, they didn't really have an active faith. They were not yet apostles after all. And what Calvin saw hundreds of years ago and has probably been the case throughout time is that the Church can feel like following Christ can be just about the teachings, or having more faith in church than Jesus. That really we’re just here to share some good, moral ideas.
And maybe that’s all it was for the disciples while Jesus was alive, and maybe that’s all he had become to them on their death. “He was a good, even great teacher, and we’ll miss him.” They learned so much from him. They might have thought he was a savior for a while, but that idea of Jesus died with him on the cross.
It was this morning those many years ago when the spark of Christ from the flint of a big rolled-away stone finally caught the tinder of their “preparing faith,” and they finally knew who they were dealing with all along. This morning, their faith came fully alive along with Jesus Christ, ruling where death once ruled, as they came to understand the shocking, scary, but awe-some reality of new life through him.
This morning, we are also invited to be sparked into a living faith, where we say with the angel, “He’s not here! Hallelujah!” And the whole world is alive with him.
He died so that we might be reconciled to him, dying for our sins that we might know grace. He rose so that we might be reconciled to him, conquering death so that we might know true life. This is the shock, awe, and wonderful fear the women had of that empty tomb—their faith was alive because their Lord was alive. And nothing would be the same.
And while “he’s not there” in that empty tomb, here and now, he is here. Look around wherever you are. Take in the people around you if they are with you as you’re reading. Think of all those who aren’t here with you, but who have loved you into being, and know all of it was a gift from God, and that he was there with you, and he is here with you to this day.
He is here that we might walk with him in a living faith. He is here to shake up and change our world. He is here to take all we’ve been preparing for our whole lives up until this moment and set it into a holy fire.
He’s not there. He is here. And the risen Lord will always be here, now and forever. Hallelujah! Amen.
Great essay!