Crosses, Stones, and Easter Eggs
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham
April 8, 2007
“So (Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome) went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” -Mark 16:8
“For they were afraid.” This is the abrupt ending of the earliest versions of the Gospel of Mark that survive. The eight verses we read earlier constitute the entire account of the resurrection in this earliest telling. There are longer versions of the ending of the Gospel of Mark, but those texts were copied later than this one; and of course the other gospels have more details, but in this, the earliest account, we find no sightings of Jesus after his death, just as we find no story of Jesus in a manger at the beginning of the story that Mark tells us about this remarkable teacher and prophet. The three women, who had come to mourn and to anoint the body of Jesus, know only that the stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty, and a young man has told them to tell the other disciples and go back home to Galilee and their homes where they are assured Jesus will be waiting.
They had good reason to be afraid. Last week we remembered Palm Sunday, the highlight of Jesus’ popularity in Jerusalem, when his followers shouted “Hosanna” as he rode into town on a donkey and everyone waved palm leaves; we used pine boughs, which are native to our area. After that Jesus turned out the money changers in the temple and continued his teaching and healing and celebrated Passover with his disciples. That night, catastrophe struck; Judas turned him over to the authorities and the next day he was crucified. The three women who came to the tomb had also been at the cross. Here’s how Mark tells that part of the story:
[Mark 15:]40 There were also women looking on from a
distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the
younger and of Joses, and Salome. 41 These used to follow him and provided for
him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up
with him to Jerusalem.
We normally hear much more about the men who followed Jesus in these stories, but here only the women are mentioned. Maybe the men had good reason to be afraid, as Peter was when he denied that he knew Jesus. Maybe they would be regarded as conspirators, plotters with Jesus to overthrow the Romans and their supporters. In any case, only the women come to the cross and only the women come to the tomb, and they were in the throes of despair.
The women came to the tomb prepared to mourn and to provide a final measure of respect and dignity for their beloved friend and companion, who had been put in the tomb hastily without proper preparations for permanent burial. They were startled to find that the stone was not in front of the tomb and alarmed to find a young man dressed in white inside the tomb:
[Mark 16:]6 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. 7 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." 8 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
The end? That’s the end? Well, no, actually. Even death is not the end of the story of Jesus. Something endures even beyond the grave. In the original ending of Mark we don’t learn what happens next, but we know for certain that somehow the women got over being so afraid and told the others what they had seen at the empty tomb. We know that they and the other disciples began teaching about the Kingdom of God that Jesus had talked about as being present already among them even in the midst of the oppression they suffered under the Roman Empire. We know that they experienced a new way of being in the world—indeed, they called themselves followers of The Way in the earliest days. What Jesus taught them did not end at the grave.
Exactly what form the resurrection of Jesus took wasn’t reported in the same way by the writers of the gospels in the New Testament. In Luke, Jesus appears as though out of nowhere to two of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, talks with them on their way for several hours and sits down to eat with them, and as suddenly disappears the instant they recognize him. He can pass through walls and locked doors like a ghost, but he can also eat solid food, which no ghost could do. In some accounts, he urges his followers not to touch him or hold him, in others he urges Thomas—doubting Thomas— to touch even the hole in his side to demonstrate that he really is Jesus. Similarly, the early leaders of the church took various positions on whether the resurrection was literally about the body of Jesus or about something else.
The earliest leaders of the church were unable to solve the question of exactly what the resurrection of Jesus meant that first Easter Sunday, but they all agreed and we can also agree that something endured beyond the empty tomb. We here continue to teach—as Jesus taught—that we can be part of a different kind of kingdom, a different way of being in the world—than the one we see before us, the kingdom of force and violence and selfishness. Jesus taught, along with other rabbis, that we must follow the ancient law “[Mark 12:]30 ‘you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.' [and 31…] 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" The earliest followers of Jesus took this teaching to the entire known world and it has survived to this day. That teaching, the heart of what Jesus had to say about the kingdom, survived beyond the tomb. And that teaching is not about a kingdom to be created in the sweet by and by or somewhere up there, but right here and right now; and we, all of us who follow in the spirit of Jesus, have our own parts to play. We are the hands that create the kingdom that survives the tomb.
As Christianity swept into Western Europe, the leaders of the church quite deliberately linked Easter to celebrations of spring already honored by the Saxons among others; the hare had long been a symbol of fertility among these people and, like so many other symbols which tag along with Christian holidays, the hare—our Easter Rabbit—still clings to this holiday as a reminder that Easter is also about spring. And why should they not be linked? Just as the story of the empty tomb came to symbolize the fact that what Jesus taught did not die with his body, so spring brings forth new life, life bursting forth from the apparent deadness of winter, a deadness which might almost be the deadness of a tomb. The Easter egg is yet more ancient and was used as a symbol of fertility by the Greeks and the Romans. Most of you have probably seen chicks being hatched—what a wonderful symbol of spring and rebirth! How dark the inside of the egg must seem as the chick rouses itself and begins pecking away at the shell—the tomb from which it is born. And with what joy does the chick greet this world as the shell is broken, the stone is rolled away, and life begins!
Something survived the tomb. Something survives death. Something remains with us when those we love die. There is new life. We don’t know everything there is to know about what happens after our own death, but we know that we don’t have to be afraid. After the fear at the empty tomb, the women did end up talking about what they had seen, they did remember what Jesus’ presence had meant and what he had taught them, and they went and did likewise. Just so we, in that same spirit of Jesus, may go and do the same.
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