For most of Christian history, Mark’s gospel received scant attention. Augustine, for example, thought Mark was a pale imitation of Matthew and both Calvin and Luther preferred John’s gospel. The reason for this neglect may have to do with its brevity – it is the shortest gospel and who would deny that it ends abruptly. In fact, to this day many people don’t like the way it ends: “So the women went out and fled from the tomb…and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.” Period. The end. No resurrection appearances, no doubting Thomas to bolster our own doubting faith, no nothing except “They said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.” The Word of the Lord! Thanks be to God! You’ve got to admit that it is an odd way to end a gospel and this is why it has alternative endings added early on by dissatisfied early scribes who wanted some closure. But maybe Mark resisted closure to prod our imaginations and to help us discern how God may be finishing the story in our own lives and in our own time and place. And to understand how this might be the case, we have to circle back and attend to the details of the story, the signage Mark gives us. There is something to be said for brevity. Ernest Hemingway used to end his day of writing by counting every word because he was paid for each word. Well, two key words really count for me as signage in Mark for how God might be finishing our story.
The first is this: Mark tells us that as the women traveled to the tomb “they had been saying” to one another, “who will roll away the stone.” Translated literally it says they kept saying this over and over — “who will roll away the stone,” “who will roll away the stone,” “who will roll away the stone.” The scene would be almost comedic if it were not so tragic. You can imagine them walking early in the morning and one or the other keeps asking the question about the elephant in the room, you know the most obvious problem that is seemingly insoluble, the one that everyone wants to avoid but the one they know they must inevitably face. It seems to me that Presbyterians are particularly good at this. If you go to any meetings in the church or higher governing bodies, there is almost always an elephant the room like loss of members, money, diversity, or homophobia, but people like to talk around the problem rather than dealing with it directly until some brave soul says, “yes folk, but there is an elephant in the room!” Everybody’s got one or more elephants in the room. Yet in the case of the women in our story, some of the elephants are palpable for their absence — the men! Where are those twelve disciples who all said they would never desert Jesus? Well they did betray him and now they are nowhere to be found. And they are the very kind of people – i.e., brawny fisherman – who could have rolled away the stone. So, in effect, the women are on a mission to perform the very thing that they suspect they cannot accomplish alones. And there is a sense in which their seeming impossible mission is parabolic of our collective human situation, for we are all trying to overcome something that we suspect can’t be overcome. You can spin the predicament off in any direction – the perception or reality that we can never be smart enough, not accomplished enough, not talented enough, attractive etc, etc, until you come to the great elephant in the room of the human condition, we’re finite, we’re not God, and someday we’re going to die. Anxiety pervades everything we do and think and feel. So in a very real sense the question of the women gives expression to our collective existential angst about the elephants large and small in our room.
In fact, NIH studies suggest that 25% of us will experience anxiety severe enough to seek professional help. And research shows that it affects women at twice the rate of men, but most also think this disparity reflects the fact that men don’t report anxiety as much as women do. My strong suspicion is men have their own distinctive ways of dealing with anxiety: go to the bar, get lost in some activity like sports, or worse, kick the dog or go to war. Of course, staying busy is a strategy that most of us employ for dealing with anxiety as I suspect it was for the women en route to the tomb. For us moderns, staying busy ironically often means getting in a car and driving in traffic that only increases our stress. Did you know that the average American annually spends 38 hours stuck in traffic? A friend once told me that how you drive and how you deal with traffic, says a lot about your real personality. I assure you that I did not receive this little bit of homespun psychology as good news!
The point is that anxiety pervades everything we do, including our attempts to avoid it. And some of that anxiety is about real threats. It has been said that the Post 9/11 era is unique in that we are now warned not only about specific threats, but advised as to exactly how anxious we should be (code red, orange, or yellow alert). Yet terrorism is not the only focus of anxiety. Most of us, like the women in the gospel story, have faced devastating losses and seeming insurmountable obstacles. So we, like the women in like to find ways to cope, we gather the spices we can and rush busily along without a clue as who will roll away the stone.
I remember a particularly anxious moment I had during Holy Week at my former church. I locked myself in the bathroom in our 19th century church house right before a Holy Week service was about to begin. I was the only one in the building –I had no cell phone – with a 19th century door and cheap, broken 20th century lock that seemed to sense fear when you turned the handle. I realized that fear was not working, so I sat down on the only seat in this tiny bathroom and tried to calm myself and as I did, I realized what an interesting place to be during Holy Week! In fact, the women’s question came to mind: Who will roll away the stone? In fact, I wonder if, for Mark, this question is ironic not only in the sense that it is seemingly insoluble, but also because it is the only question that can also open us to something new, something that we cannot achieve on our own, the possibility of outside help – the possibility that there is a second party to our lives with power to redeem.
So this brings me to the second word that counts as signage in this brief Heminwayesq gospel. When the woman got to the tomb they found that the stone, which was very large, “had already been rolled back” and they hear a surprising announcement, “he has been raised.” But notice that we’re not told, explicitly, WHO rolled the stone back – WHO it was that raised Jesus from the dead. Know I know that getting in to Greek grammar at the end of an Easter sermon might seem a bad strategy but I beg your indulgence for a moment, because as I puzzled over the passive voice of these verbs, I decided to get a consult from my resident Greek Advisor. So as her study is upstairs I went to the bottom of the steps and yelled, “So what about the passive verbs in Mark 16 like ‘had already been rolled back?’” There was a moment of silence and then she yelled back, “it’s the divine passive.” Divine Passive, I thought. This was news to me; I didn’t know there was such a thing. So I made it a little further up the staircase to ask a few more questions – I confess this was starting to feel a little like Moses on Mount Sinai (except it was clear to me that I was talking with my wife and not God), and I began to realize that we were talking about something very special. In using the Divine Passive, Mark reflects a very profound Jewish practice of not naming God out of respect, mystery and awe, out of acknowledgement that this is the holy one who brought the ancient Israelites out of the oppression of Egypt and parted the waters for them to go into the promised land to make is a justice and bountiful land of milk and honey for all people and then brought them home again from Exile. For you see the divine passive, for those with Jewish sensibilities, is a way of reverencing the holy, and it would call to mind that is the very Jewish notion that God is verb. At the burning bush, you will remember that when Moses asks for God’s name God says “I am that I am” or I will be that I will be.” As one Rabbi put it, God is verb and as soon as you try to contain God as a noun, God the verb runs away and becomes a verb again. God, in other words will not be contained by human constructs, nor will God be defined by human sin and oppression or any other obstacle – even crucifixion will not contain God or hold God down. Its important to hear this background music in our Easter story — “the stone had been rolled back” – “he has been raised” — for the Easter promise is that the God who brought liberation from bondage in Egypt, has rolled back the stone from Jesus’ tomb and raised him from the dead. And the risen one is on the loose in this world, going before us, offering us possibilities for renewed, transformed, resurrection life.
And what that means for you and for me is that the stones before us – the seemingly insurmountable obstacles we face in our personal lives, our church life, our civic lives, our national life – can be rolled back, for they do not confine the power of God. The anxieties and threats that we think define us, confine us, tie us up in knots – that disfigure our lives — do not confine the power of God. The risen one goes before us with power to redeem which means that we’re not constrained by our sin, by our beloved evil, for he will not cease forgiving us. We’re not limited by our selfishness – for he keeps expanding the horizons of our vision, merging with the poor and sick and dying. Hear the good news: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised . . . and he is going before you – you will see him, as he told you.” Amen
Roger J. Gench
