Easter Sunday, 5 April 2015, Corton Denham, Weston Bampfylde
I imagine that you don't spend very much time thinking about Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. Understandably - they are obscure characters from a very old story. But if you could stop to think about them for a moment now, I wonder how you picture these women in your mind's eye: these early-morning visitors to the tomb of the crucified Jesus.
I see them as quite dishevelled and anxious and tearful. They’d probably hardly slept since the day before Jesus’ trial, when they’d trawled around Jerusalem after him, following from Gethsemane to the High Priest’s courtroom to the Emperor Pilate’s palace, through the streets thronging with people shouting abuse as he carried his cross to Golgotha, outside the city gates; later following Joseph of Arimathea to the tomb where they laid Jesus’ body to rest. Then - back at one of their homes probably, these women, tearfully waiting, waiting, nervously preparing the spices they had bought. (And had they just bought them? Had they spent some of the past forty-eight hours scratching together the funds they needed and their search for someone to buy the spices from, at that Passover time?) And then - in the deepest hour of night, an hour no woman ought ever to be out in Jerusalem - starting their journey again back to the tomb, in fear and trembling.
The two Marys and Salome have an undisputed place in history. The first gospel written reports them as being the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They are the ones God chose to explain to the other fearful, anxious, bereaved disciples that Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified, had risen.
I don't know about you, but if I ever needed to find someone to witness for me, I'd be looking for someone respectable, someone with a bit of influence, a professional of some sort. Stood next to an expert theologian or a TV historian or a bishop, these three troubled women, all unkempt hair and anxious eyes, look like very unreliable witnesses. Back then, they’d be seen as even less reliable - for they were women - and in the society of the day that meant their perspectives, their insights, their witness, counted for nothing much at all.
Yet, here is one of the strange ironies of the Christian faith, one among many ironies we juggle with at Easter time. God chooses unreliable witnesses to reveal the truth to the world. The people least likely to be listened to by polite society, are precisely the ones who hold the key to real understanding.
Mark’s gospel is full of them. From the wild-haired, wild-eyed, halitosis-mouthed John the Baptist, shouting in the wilderness, to the squabbling rabble of disciples who hardly ever seemed to get what Jesus was about, from the demons who Jesus exorcised to the centurion at the foot of the cross, who each proclaimed his deity with unwavering certainty, Mark provokes us to take their witness seriously. For they, not the scribes and priests and governors, but the ones on the ground who met him, the ones whose eyes he physically opened and whose hearts he left strangely burning, they are the bearers of the strange truth that this Son of Man has come to bring about an irreversible change in the world. And this is good news for so many of us, for most of us, in this beautiful but broken world of his.
This is good news for those who are widely avoided and misunderstood. In the wake of the terrible events of Germanwings Flight 4U9525 one blessing has been the desire to listen more keenly to those who suffer from mental illness, to learn from them what it means to feel suicidal, to value and act on their insights. [2]
And this is good news for those who are pushed around, told what to do by others, despite the harm it does them. In the midst of all the pre-election bluster and posturing about immigration, this week I have learned a lot about the nuances of the issue from the 18-year-old altar server of my friend Mark’s church in Rochdale, Olayinka Olatunde, who is fighting deportation back to Nigeria where her father is waiting to put her through the ritual of female genital mutilation - an operation he insists on, although her sister, then aged eight, bled to death when he had it done to her. [3]
God chooses unreliable witnesses to reveal the truth to the world. This is good news for the poorest and weakest, who know from Mark’s gospel that Jesus goes out of his way to give them a place at his table. It is also good news for the people whose tables are full this Easter, for in the economy of God’s kingdom we can only become fully human when we reach out to others, when we open our hearts to listen, learn, and share together.
And we all know, also, that even the most privileged amongst us still carry wounds - from bad parenting, bullying at school, broken relationships, business and financial failures. Unreliable witnesses, wounded people: when you extend the category in this way, it comes to include most of us, at least some of the time. This is the good news of Jesus from Mark’s strange and wonderful gospel ending, the truncated tale of the women who came looking for him at the tomb.
Mark’s Jesus is fully engaged in the mix and the mess of the real world. As Nick Cave describes it:
Mark took from the mouths of teachers and prophets the jumble of events that comprised Christ's life and fixed these events into some kind of biographical form. He did this with such breathless insistence, such compulsive narrative intensity, that one is reminded of a child recounting some amazing tale, piling fact upon fact, as if the whole world depended upon it - which, of course, to Mark it did. [Mark’s writing inflames] Christ's mission with a dazzling urgency. Mark's Gospel is a clatter of bones, so raw, nervy and lean on information that the narrative aches with the melancholy of absence. Scenes of deep tragedy are treated with such a matter of factness and raw economy they become almost palpable in their unprotected sorrowfulness. [4]
Does that sound like the real world to you? It does to me. Like the world of Jesus, our world at times seems a world of unprotected sorrowfulness - it cannot be neatly ordered, scientifically proven, categorically structured. The best way to understand it is by listening to the tales told by the people on the ground, scenes of deep tragedy treated with matter of factness and raw economy. Authentic accounts. Disjointed stories which we have to work hard to make add up.
The astonishing thing about the story we have heard today is that it is the very last bit of Mark’s gospel. The story ends with the line, ‘Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid’. [5]
There’s no Christmas story in Mark, the reader is confronted first with an adult Jesus thrown out into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. [6] And there are no post-resurrection appearances either. Jesus just disappears from the gospel as suddenly as he arrived.
Some scholars suggest that Mark is sending the reader back to the beginning to start again - that having risen, we are to imagine Jesus again roaming the earth, grappling his demons, coming around again to teach and exorcise and heal, and confront the fallen powers-that-be. We are to imagine that Jesus is still among us, doing these things today. And whilst other gospels have encouraged us to theologise that further, while we have the eyewitness accounts of Jesus ascending to heaven, of him sending the Holy Spirit to empower his disciples, there is a truth in Mark’s direct vision: Jesus still walking the earth, Jesus still befriending the outsiders and bringing them together with the insiders, Jesus still affirming the odd, broken voices of unreliable witnesses like you and me.
The final observation from the last line of Mark is that those three women, tasked by the young man dressed in white at the empty tomb, to tell Peter the news that he had risen, did not do so.
‘Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.’ [7] This has the ring of authenticity to it - wouldn’t you or I do the same in the circumstances? Fearful of the authorities who had executed Jesus, fearful of the strange angelic man who met them at the tomb, confused and astounded at the absence of the body, you can understand them keeping quiet, just as we keep quiet sometimes when an odd or dangerous or difficult truth hits us.
Despite the strangeness of their story, and despite their dishevelled, maddened looks, Mary, Mary and Salome must have found the faith, the strength to open up to witness to Peter eventually - and Peter must have understood, believed them, and went on to spread the word. The fact that we are here today is due in no small part to their having done so.
In a world where we feel driven to stay safe within our own tribe (not least as a general election approaches) the good news of Jesus is that when we open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to others then we are so much more enriched. Let us give thanks for those strangers from scripture whose words have lit our path; let us give thanks for those strangers in life who have challenged and changed us for the better. Let us be encouraged to grapple with the odd or dangerous or difficult truths of life, trusting that though we can’t see him just now, Jesus is here, grappling alongside us.
Notes
[1] This sermon borrows from my talk, Witness, Blue Coat School, Liverpool 4/12/2002
[2] Germanwings flight 4U9525, The Guardian.
[3] Church supports member fearing deportation and FGM, Church Times, 3 Apr 2015
[4] Nick Cave: An Introduction to The Gospel According to Mark, Canongate, 1998.
[5] Mark 16.8.
[6] Mark 1.1-12
[7] Mark 16.8.
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