Library
Sunday, April 04, 2010
HE IS GOING ON AHEAD OF YOU
Easter Sunday 2010
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Mark 16: 1 – 8
1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 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.
I’d like to tell you a story.
The story begins a long time ago in a country several thousand miles away.
The Roman Empire was at its strongest. It had conquered most of the western world, and it was cruel and powerful. Part of its land included what we know today as Israel and Palestine. The Jewish people were in pain because of the oppression of Rome. Their tax burden was heavy. They were so angry that some of them had already tried to revolt and had been brutally murdered by the Emperor. Jews were allowed to practice their religion but only under Rome’s very watchful eye. And some of the Jewish leaders seemed to be in collaboration with Rome to keep the peace.
It was one of the hinge times in human history. A child was born to a fourteen year old mother and to a construction worker father who was just a little older. The child seemed, what we might call, precocious as he grew up learning the Jewish scriptures from his father and from attending synagogue regularly every Sabbath. Some of his dearest scriptures were the Psalms, the book of Deuteronomy, and the book of Isaiah and other prophets.
His precociousness, and insight as a young person, astounded his parents and the Jerusalem temple Priests, when he was discovered in the Temple asking the elders some deep and profound questions at the age of twelve. It is the only thing we know about the childhood of this prophet whose Hebrew name was Yeshua, meaning God will save.
He followed in the footsteps of his father and became a builder, a construction worker, probably not with wood as much as with stone, because stone was the primary building material in Israel, then and now. They both probably worked in a town in Galilee four miles from their small village. In that larger town he would have learned about the culture and the arts because the town had a theater and incredible mosaic art.
At about the age of thirty, Yeshua decided to respond to the call he had felt from God most of his life, and he left the region of Galilee to go south sixty miles to the area of Jericho where his cousin John the Baptizer had started a Jewish renewal movement to bring people back to the core of Judaism. He wanted to renew a Judaism that had lost its way and had become a matter of rules and empty rituals.
Yeshua went to his cousin, and when he was baptized he heard a word from God saying that this was God’s beloved son. He was immediately driven by the spirit into the desert, the wilderness, for a kind of vision quest, a time of fasting and discernment to learn about what God needed him to do in this new role.
After that desert time, he went back to the region of Galilee, an area where most of the Jewish revolutionaries and insurrectionists against Rome had come from. He spent the next three years, mostly in an area of about fifteen miles square, going from village to village doing three things: teaching, healing people, and inviting people to a new and deeper relationship with God.
To be in that close relationship would mean that we live by God ways:
- We would treat each person with respect
- We would practice compassion for the least and last and left out
- We would practice kindness and humility
- We would let our words match our deeds
- We would practice forgiveness
- We would deal with other people the way we would want to be dealt with
- We would take time to listen and be present with God, i.e., to pray.
There was very little that was new in these teachings. All of them seemed to be taken from the best of Jewish tradition, but what might have been new and most radical were the words that Yeshua used when he prayed to God.
He did not approach God as a harsh and condemning Judge. He called God, Abba, not just “Father,” but more like “Daddy,” a parent who loves us unconditionally, loves us like there was no one else in the world.
This prophet was not afraid to challenge hypocrisy and self-serving arrogance wherever he saw it, especially in the so called spiritual leaders around him, who were closely watching him.
He had much success in gaining a following in the region of Galilee, but he saw that to make a difference he would have to confront the distorted religion of Jerusalem. So when he went to Jerusalem for the Passover feast, he knew what would happen to him. There He joined several hundred thousand Jewish pilgrims, from across the world, to honor the event in which God rescued God’s people from bondage in Egypt and set them free.
But his fate was sealed and he knew it when he went to the Temple on Palm Sunday and drove the merchants and the cheaters out of the temple with whips, overturning their tables and shouting that God’s house was to be a house of prayer for all people.
He taught each day in the temple to large crowds who listened to him with passion and joy. He taught with authority and he was not like the other teachers. The other teachers tried to trap him with trick questions but he outsmarted them. They captured him on Thursday night, arrested him, brought him to the high priest for a phony trial, took him to the Roman governor and claimed he was stirring up sedition against Rome.
The governor was forced, by that charge, to execute him, not by one of the more common forms of death by sword, or by wild animals in an arena, but by the most public, and most humiliating forms of execution, reserved only for insurrectionists; being hung on a cross until he would finally suffocate and die.
His closest followers, including his mother, were there as he died. He was laid in a borrowed tomb and everyone thought that was the end of the story. His friends were devastated. They had denied even knowing him at the end, so they were not only wrestling with the guilt from letting him die alone, but they thought they had wasted the last three years of their lives. “We had hoped…” one of them said. Aren’t those the saddest words we humans can say? We had hoped he would be the one…
They knew it was all over but God had other plans. We strain at the language to talk about “Resurrection.” What is that? It is not the resuscitation of a corpse. It was and is something more mysterious, something not rational. If we only think in rational categories, if you are only able to use the left side of your brain and not the right side and if there is no room for mystery in your world view, Easter will be too much for you.
Something happened, and the gospels do not agree on the details. In some gospels the risen Christ appears suddenly while the doors are locked, while in another gospel he eats a piece of fish and invites his friends to touch his wounds. Yet in another gospel he tells Mary Magdalene not to touch him. Sometimes it is apparent who he is, that is he is easily recognized, and other times he is not recognized, like when he walks twelve miles to Emmaus with friends who do not know who he is until the risen one sits at the table and breaks bread with them and their eyes are opened.
Something happened so that this utterly discouraged and devastated group of friends had their lives so changed that they went on to turn the world upside down and to tell the authorities that they just could not help speaking about what they had seen and experienced. It was a time like no other in history for the Good News to spread. Ironically, because of the Roman Empire, the peace that prevailed allowed them to travel, as well as the excellent Roman roads and the fact that Greek was spoken world-wide and in addition, there was a deep spiritual hunger at work among all peoples.
Their faith and passion prevailed. They invited others to become followers of the Way, and this young, God filled, God intoxicated movement, not only overcame the most powerful force in the world, the empire of Rome, but other empires as well. You and I are now here because we have been drawn to, or we want to be drawn to that Way. The way that says each person is a child of God and each person is to be respected, and that we can live life most fully when we practice these subversive teachings of loving our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves.
The movement now includes one third of all the human beings on our planet and it is still spreading to others because this man, this God filled prophet, was and is the Christ, the Messiah, the one we have been waiting for to give us LIFE.
He is going on ahead of us now, the angel said, in many ways. If we have ever stood at the graveside of a loved one and wept and wondered what lies beyond the grave, we remember that this risen One says to us, “I am going to prepare a place for you and will come again and take you to myself so that where I am you may be also, and I am leaving you with my peace.” I think those are words that we may want to place somewhere in our new columbarium which will have niches for the cremated remains of perhaps a thousand people over many years in the future.
And he is going on ahead of us, as we follow his example, as we do what he invited his boastful and closest friend, Peter, to do after they had eaten charcoal broiled fish together a few days after Easter—feed my sheep, take care of the vulnerable and the poor and the neediest among you. Love one another with your deeds and your words.
Or in different words, we can now be the hands and feet and deeds of Christ himself. We can let this resurrected one work through us.
Last week twelve of our youth and young adults and “regular” adults came back from another mission trip to Belize, Central America where we have been helping to construct a school building there. This must have been our eighth or ninth trip to Belize. We even brought some of the teachers to the US to speak in our worship services a couple of years ago. The preschool in Belize has become a model of preschool education for the entire country of Belize and other teachers and principals come to visit the school to see state of the art education.
Our own youth and college students, who go each year talk about what happens to them and in them, as they fulfill one of the commandments that Christ has given us, realize that you are put on the earth not to be served but to serve. And it is in that service of others that you will find your life long purpose. The pictures on our screen show some of our own workers making a new space where the lives of children can be formed and changed.
We are doing the same on our site as well, making space where people can see the risen Christ in each other, where each person can become more open to the ways of God.
As we do, it is the Risen Christ who is going on ahead of us to prepare the way. He invites us, on this Easter day, to join him and follow him, not just to admire him, but to follow him as he goes ahead of us. Will you promise again, or for the first time, to follow?