Christ Church

“Trembling and astonishment had come upon them … for they were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the further aspects of the resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the doctrine of the resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary. The Gospels could not even be written apart from the Resurrection. It is the Resurrection that brings everything into a new light of understanding. It changes everything.

“Be not afraid” is the good news of the Resurrection, after all, in the shorter ending. The word for being afraid is more about a kind of amazement or wonderment. The women were amazed to find “the stone rolled away” and to see “a young man clothed in a long white garment.” He responds to their amazement. “Be not affrighted” – meaning ‘be not amazed’. “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: his risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.” But this only adds to their amazement. They “trembled and were amazed”, literally, they were beside or outside of themselves. Here the word for amazement is ecstasy – ex stasis. The whole scene is about confronting a mystery, the great mystery of the Resurrection.

So what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the resurrection even more strongly. Only in the light of the resurrection does the story of Jesus makes any sense. The resurrection has captured the imaginations of the gospel writers and compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels would never have been written.

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“This is the victory that overcometh the world; even our faith”

There is such a thing as being dead before you are dead. It happens when we give up on what defines us, sing the poor-me’s and succumb to despair. But it is really all about us. That has been the situation it seems to be for quite some time in our churches and our culture. “O ye of little faith,” Jesus upbraids us. One of the homilies in the sixteenth century Book of Homilies is about “liveliness of faith” which is only possible where one confronts a certain deadness of faith. I sense this problem in varying ways when people start talking about things like the Church and Parish dying though without distinguishing between the institutional church and the mystical Church universal, a distinction without which I certainly could not even begin to function. But that kind of talk about death and dying is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We are dead before we are really dead because we have given up on the life of faith. We are dead because we have accepted what is really the world’s way of looking at things.

Numbers matter but they are not everything. And in fact they can become a kind of idolatry; measuring the truth of things quantitatively is an extremely limited and limiting way of thinking and living. It is a problem the Scriptures frequently address. There is even “the sin of David” in taking a census of the Israelites, as if to say that our strength and the truth of our being lies in our numbers. As such it is a denial of God and the truth and power of his life in us. Elijah the Prophet, too, laments in a kind of despair about the condition of Israel, thinking that he is the only one left! God rather drily and strongly reminds him that no, there are far more than he realizes who are faithful, indeed, “seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal” a passage from 1 Kings that Paul recalls in Romans 11.4. The problem, it seems, is perennial. We forget that where two or three are gathered there is Christ also. Our life and our joy are found in the gathering.

To my mind, the Gospel of the Resurrection speaks profoundly to the great question of our age which is about our common humanity. Because of the Resurrection, it is not an exaggeration to say, you are not and do not have to be a robot. You are already a robot, however, if you have succumbed to a kind of technocratic determinism and think that machines can think. In other words, you become a machine precisely because you have given yourself over to a certain kind of reasoning which is limited and limiting. It was interesting to see an article in the Chronicle Herald about a Professor from St. Mary’s talking exactly about the problem of big data and Artificial Intelligence which can only replicate human patterns of behavior but are incapable of mind and therefore ethical reasoning.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

The words of the Prophet Joel provided the critical matrix through which to ponder the mystery of the Passion in Holy Week. They equally carry us into the mystery of the Resurrection at Easter. Why? Because neither the Passion nor the Resurrection can be thought about without each other. The accounts of the Passion can only be written and can only be considered because of the Resurrection. Easter, in a way, signals the great turning of God to us. Only so can there be our turning to him.

The Resurrection is radical new life. The turning is about the hope of transformation, a change in outlook and understanding, a change from death to life. Easter signals the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of good over evil. And that is all God in his eternal turning and all God in his turning to us. Christ goes into darkness of death and death is changed for evermore. “For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.” And this changes everything for us. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above”.

We are no longer to be defined by the dust of death and by our turning to the ground and to the emptiness of ourselves. We are turned to the Risen Christ and find in him the new and radical truth of our humanity. We are turned to God and only then are we alive. Death is swallowed up in life, the Life that has overcome death, which is to say that everything is not nothingness. Nihilism is the philosophy of nothingness, the sense of meaninglessness and the absence of purpose, the philosophy of despair and disappointment. The Resurrection of Christ counters the nihilisms of our world and day. It is all about the turning, the circling around and around of God to God in our humanity and our humanity in God.

We turn to the grave, like Mary Magdalene, seeking a corpse, a dead body, only to find “the stone taken away from the sepulchre”. The empty tomb marks the beginning of a change. She turns and runs to Peter and John with the report that “they have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.” She assumes however that he is dead. It is merely a question of where the body is. Yet she has been set in motion to the other disciples who in turn run to the sepulchre and find it empty. It marks the beginning of a resurrection of the understanding, a new understanding about our humanity.

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“Turn unto the Lord your God”

We turn to God in watching and waiting upon the great mystery of God’s turning to us in the Resurrection to new life. We turn expectantly to look upon the second great act of God. There is the going forth of the Word of God in Creation and now the going forth of the Word of God in Redemption. We turn to God in joy for we behold the transition from darkness to light, from death to life. For his are the times and the seasons. We are turned to Christ, the Alpha and Omega of our very lives.

We turn through the witness of the Scriptures to the story of Creation and to the saving acts of God in the Exodus, to the images of redemption and restoration that shape our understanding of the great mystery of the Resurrection. It is all about our being gathered into the eternal motions of God’s love. We turn to him who turns to us in love.

The renewal of our baptismal vows is an important feature of our Easter vigil. It is about our intentional turning to God in the great circling acts of creation and redemption, in incarnation and passion, in death and resurrection. We turn to face the altar and profess our Christian identity in God as Trinity precisely through the great acts of his Passion and Resurrection, themselves like great circles within the greater circles of Creation and Redemption and all within the greatest circle of divine love in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

On this most holy night, we rejoice in the great redire ad principia that is God’s turning us to himself in his turning to us and all in his great circling. We rejoice in the love which gives itself to us and in so doing gives us life. We only live in him who turns to live in us.

“Turn unto the Lord your God”

Fr. David Curry
Easter Vigil, 2017

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