Good morning and happy Easter! Thank you for being here this morning, thanks for all of the music, and everything that so many people have given to this morning, this celebration of the Great Vigil, one of most beautiful and ancient of liturgies, and all the caffeine that requires!
Those of us who lived a few decades ago may remember a movie from 1984 called The Never-Ending Story.
The main character of The Never-Ending Story is Bastian, a young boy who is bullied by his classmates – he has lost his mother, and his father has been telling him he needs to stop daydreaming and start trying out for the swim team.
One morning on the way to school, Bastian stumbles into a mysterious used bookshop while trying to escape some of those bullies, and the shop owner is reading what he calls a “dangerous” book – and Bastian, when the shopkeeper’s back is turned, he can’t help himself – he borrows the book, he leaves a note that he’ll return it, and he takes it to the attic of his school and starts to read.
The mysterious, “dangerous” book tells the story of a beautiful land that is being swallowed up by an unknown and terrifying threat called the Nothing. All hope lies with a young warrior named Atreyu, and a giant, fluffy, flying creature, a Luck Dragon named Falkor.
Bastian, as he reads, discovers little by little that he is not just a bystander to the story, but that he is part of the story. The characters that he’s reading about start to hear him, and then they start to talk to him, and Bastian learns that he has an important role to play in saving this beautiful and that he thought only existed in his imagination and on the pages of a book.
And the only way that Bastian can save the land is first to accept that he is indeed part of the story – that he’s not just reading it, but he is part of creating the story, a never-ending story, in fact. And I won’t give away more than that, in case you haven’t seen it, but if you want to find out what happens, you’ll need to check out the movie, or the book.
So when I looked at the Gospel reading for this morning, I thought, really??
In every single one of the Gospels, women are the first ones who arrive at the empty tomb. They have remained with Jesus over these last few days, even as the twelve disciples fell away. They walked with Jesus to Golgotha, they stayed with him as he died, they buried him, and now early on Sunday morning, at first light, Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome come to the tomb to anoint him, and they become the first witnesses to the resurrection – Jesus is raised! He is no longer here!
And in Matthew, Luke and John, the women run to tell the rest of the disciples –though in Luke, the disciples don’t believe them, and so Simon Peter has to come see it for himself. But in the Gospel of Mark, today’s Gospel, the women don’t even believe it themselves. And even after a young man dressed in a white robe, presumably a messenger from heaven, perhaps an angel, tells them that Jesus has been raised, that he will meet them in Galilee, just like he said he would, the women are afraid, Mark tells us – they run away and say nothing.
If you do some digging, you’ll find lots of interpretations of this story. Some early writers even added new endings to the Gospel because it seems so awkward and so incomplete. Some commentators interpret the story as – well, the women failed, just like the men have been failing, over and over. Peter denied Christ. Thomas doubted him. James and John argued over who got to sit next to him. Peter, John and James fell asleep in the garden. And there’s Judas…
The women didn’t believe the messenger. They ran away. This perspective points out that we, like the first disciples, the men and the women, are all human, and we all fail at times, and we all need forgiveness.
Other commentators point out – well, of course the women were afraid – they had just
found out Jesus was resurrected. From a mysterious, frightening man in white robes.
One writer suggests that the women realized that if Jesus is back, this discipleship, this difficult call to follow Christ, hasn’t in fact gone away, that our hard, dangerous work is not done yet, and that was overwhelming to them.
Another commentary points out that at that time, women could not be witnesses in legal proceedings – they weren’t considered credible – so perhaps Mary and Mary Magdalene and Salome may have assumed they wouldn’t be believed, so they said nothing.
But then there’s another perspective – I’ll call it the “Never-ending Story” perspective. In this perspective, Mark knew exactly what he was doing by ending the Gospel this way, without resolution or closure.
Mark knows that Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome spread the word. We know they spread the word. The other three Gospels tell us that, for one thing. Their voices were strong and passionate and brave.
And yes, they were also human. And this resurrection, this sudden joyful news that Jesus Christ – their teacher, their fellow traveler, Son of God, Son of Mary, their brother, their friend – is no longer dead, after seeing him die – that is huge, life-changing, unreal, amazing. There’s no right or wrong way to respond, really, to such news.
But here’s the thing: fear isn’t the end of the story. Silence is not the end of the Gospel.
Mary, Mary Magdalene and Salome’s very human response to these cataclysmic events is an invitation for us to step into the story – their temporary silence creates space for us to join the conversation, to be part of the Gospel narrative, then and now.
Mennonite theologian Tim Geddert puts it this way: “Mark’s Gospel says, ‘Yes, happy endings are wonderful. The problem is they let us put down the book with a sigh of relief and say, “Great story!”
“This is a different kind of book,” Geddert says. “You cannot put it down, even if you want to. Whether this book has a good or a bad ending depends on you. For you are still writing it!”
In other words, we are Bastian.
And Mark’s Gospel, and all of the Gospel really, is our Never-ending Story. We are reminded, in this morning’s seemingly incomplete reading, in this story that seems to stop in midair, that we are the next evangelists. That every human being who hears or reads or tells this story becomes part of the story. We’re tasked with stepping into the Gospel, into asking ourselves, where do I fit into this? How can my life tell the story of Jesus’s life? How does my story connect to the stories of the very first, very human followers of Christ, who doubted and questioned and denied and argued and were afraid and also loved, deeply?
That is the joy of Easter, this huge story we are all part of, this story we add to just by being in it. So this reading is perhaps just the right Gospel reading for this early, early morning time between darkness and light. Because the story of Christ is not just pages in a book – it is a living story, it is our story. The story of Easter is not just about Christ’s resurrection – it is about our resurrection. And Easter is not a single day, or a single season – we experience resurrection every day, in moments of renewal, connection, forgiveness, inspiration, in the ways that we see the Gospel emerge in our own lives and the world around us and in the ways we live out the Gospel in our own lives and in the world around us.
Easter is our own Never-Ending Story.
Amen.
Sermon delivered by The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett at the Great Vigil, 6 am, Easter Morning 2024
