Here’s a true story I heard on Thursday. Somebody was looking up on Google the famous blessing prayer from the Book of Numbers. I’m sure you’ll know the one:
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.
But the top result wasn’t from a Bible site like Bible Gateway, they only came in second to Amazon, who were selling a print of that text in a picture frame. As a result, the entry read:
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. Usually ships within 2 to 3 days.
When the person shared this, somebody commented:
I do wish more of His promises came with delivery dates and tracking!
Welcome to Easter Sunday, where we celebrate the fact that God’s blessing has shipped within 2 to 3 days! For on the third day, the tomb was empty.
What blessings ship from God to us on Easter Day? There are many! I want to share four with you.
Firstly, a new body:
You may recall that during Holy Week, a woman at Bethany has anointed Jesus’ body with expensive perfume. Jesus says she has anointed his body for burial. You might say the woman did so prematurely, but perhaps prophetically.
Now, along comes this group of women to do what? Exactly the same.[1] The Greek implies they are bringing liquid spices. This is not the same as the solid spices that John tells us Nicodemus used. The women are coming to do what the woman at Bethany had prophetically foretold.
But if the woman at Bethany was early, the women at the tomb are too late! They knew Jesus was physically dead , otherwise they wouldn’t have come. But now, the body isn’t there, because he has risen.
They weren’t expecting that. Three times in Mark’s Gospel Jesus prophesies that he will suffer and die, but be raised from the dead, yet it hadn’t sunk in. It didn’t fit their prior beliefs. They were persuaded not by the divine words of Jesus but by God’s divine action.
Make no mistake, the Resurrection is bodily. This is not about an immortal soul, this is about God raising Jesus’ body from the dead and making it new – even with new powers, as we read in other Gospels such as John.
God is interested in redeeming the physical, the material, the bodily. Our faith is not simply an ethereal, spiritual matter. Resurrection tells us that the whole of creation is on God’s agenda for renewal.
And that’s why our mission is not only to call people to repentance and faith in Christ, it is also to things like healing, social justice, and the renewal of our planet. Everything that God created has been tainted, and everything that God created is up for redemption. The Resurrection assures us of that.
The second blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new family:
Who is ‘Mary the mother of James’ in verse 1?[2] In the previous chapter, among the women at the Cross, is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James’ (15:40), which is then shortened to ‘Mary the mother of Joses’ (15:47). It’s likely that ‘Mary the mother of James’ at the empty tomb is ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’
But here’s the surprising thing. There is only one woman in Mark’s Gospel who is called ‘Mary the mother of Joses and James.’ She appears in chapter 6 verse 3 where she is the mother of Jesus’ brothers. In other words, this is Mary the mother of our Lord herself.
But just as Jesus had said that his true family were those who did his will, so here at the empty tomb Mary herself is discovering that the risen Jesus is indeed making a new family. His new family is the family of believers in him.
We sometimes talk about the church as a family, and that’s absolutely right. We are the family of God, the community of the King, the sign and foretaste of God’s coming kingdom. In our tradition, we may not go in for the hackneyed way that some Christians address one another as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ and that’s fair enough, but that’s what we are. At both baptisms and funerals we refer to the subjects as ‘our sister’ or ‘our brother’, and that is because Jesus creates a new family in the Resurrection.
And his Resurrection will be ours one way. I guess that’s why he told the Sadducees during Holy Week that there would be no marrying and giving in marriage in the life of the age to come. There would be no more need for procreation, because no more would dead people need replacing in the population.
One of my colleagues recently told the circuit staff a story of how he was visiting a residential care home, and he met one resident who was dying for what would be the last time. Before my colleague left, the resident said to him, ‘I expect this will be the last time we see each other.’
He replied, ‘I’ve got news for you! I think you’ll find we’re going to be spending rather a long time together!’
So look around this morning in church. Here are members of your forever family. It’s worth us learning to get on with one another!
The third blessing to ship on Easter Day is a new commission:
Having seen the place where Jesus’ body had been laid, the ‘young man dressed in a white robe’ (verse 5) (which is just a long way of saying ‘angel’) tells the women to ‘Go’ (verse 7). They are to go with the message of the Resurrection.
Hang on – who is to go? The women. In our more egalitarian culture, that detail can pass us by. But this was a society in which women couldn’t even give evidence in a court of law. If you were going to choose witnesses to support your case, you wouldn’t select women. The fact that it’s women who are the first witnesses to the Resurrection is a sign that this is not a cobbled-together fiction.
And we might reflect on all those who still say only men can lead the church because Jesus chose twelve male apostles. He also only chose Jews. It’s apparent here that God doesn’t keep to our social conventions. Anyone and everyone who has encountered the Resurrection and wants to follow Jesus can be witnesses to Jesus.
How many of us feel disqualified from serving Jesus in any significant way? It may be through the disapproval of others. It may be through our own low self-esteem that we disqualify ourselves. We may feel unworthy or unfit. ‘I’ve let God down in the past.’ ‘I don’t have the necessary gifts.’ ‘I’m not strong enough.’
But could it be that in fact our risen Lord is giving us a poke on Easter Day and saying, the only thing that qualifies you is that you’ve encountered me and you want to follow me?
I want to invite you to consider whether there is some call you have been resisting, putting off, or filing away because you don’t think you fit the template. I certainly didn’t think I fitted the right mould to be a minister. I’ve had the odd congregation who have agreed! I still at times live with ‘imposter syndrome.’
But on Easter Day, we can put all that aside. Have we met with the risen Lord? Do we love him? If so, let’s take on a commission.
The fourth and final blessing is a new beginning:
But go, tell his disciples and Peter (verse 7)
says the angel to the women.
The disciples and Peter? Huh? Wasn’t Peter a disciple too, an apostle, even? Why mention him separately?
I’m sure we can guess. Peter is so mortified by his three denials of Jesus that he doesn’t even consider himself a true disciple anymore. He may even have returned to his old profession as a fisherman. It’s all over, especially with Jesus having been executed.
But in God’s economy, the end is not the end unless there is good news. And here we have that hint of what John’s Gospel will tell us in greater detail: that restoration is on the way for Peter. ‘No condemnation now I dread, Jesus and all in him is mine,’ as Charles Wesley wrote.
The new commission that I just spoke of is available to Peter as well. He has a new beginning.
This is after all the Gospel, isn’t it? That our sins and failures don’t have the final word, any more than the sins of those who conspired to have Jesus crucified had the last word. They didn’t. Jesus vacated his grave.
As the late Christian singer Larry Norman put it,
They nailed him to the cross,
They laid him in the ground,
But they should have known
You can’t keep a good man down.[3]
If anyone here thinks they have messed up so badly they can never be valuable to God, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you.
If anyone here thinks they have committed the unforgivable sin, then the Resurrection says, think again. There is a new beginning for you, too.
The grace of God is bigger than our sins and failures. Even the worst of our betrayals of Christ do not have the final word in life: that place belongs to the love and mercy of God.
As a minister, I have heard respected church members privately tell me about the most awful sins they have committed. It has been my privilege to assure them of God’s forgiveness and the certainty that they, like Peter, have a new beginning with Christ. Easter Day is the reason I can do so. We all have a new beginning today.
I can’t conclude today without drawing attention to the theme of the women’s fear that is present in the reading.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ says the angel, but despite his reassurances, the final verse says this:
Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. (Verse 8)
I’m aware that I can give you all the arguments in the world for the joy, hope, and freedom of the Easter faith, but an encounter with almighty resurrection power can still leave us shaking.
And it seems such a strange way to end the Gospel – so much so that others have speculated that the original ending is lost, or have written alternative endings.
But maybe it all indicates that the necessary response is for us to write our own endings in each of our lives. For as Tom Wright has put it,
‘Jesus is risen, and we have a job of work to do.’
[1] This paragraph and the next are influenced by Ian Paul, The women at the empty tomb in Mark 16.
[2] Again, for what follows I am dependent on Ian Paul’s article.
[3] Larry Norman, ‘Why should the devil have all the good music?’, Only Visiting This Planet, MGM Records, 1972.
Big Circumstance 