Easter Day, Year B | Mark 16:1-8
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 10, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Happy Easter, everyone, and thank you for joining us as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and the promise it brings not simply for us here today but for the entire world.
This year our Gospel readings primarily come from the book of Mark. Mark, likely the first Gospel to take written form, tends to focus more on action and interaction than on narration, as we encountered this morning in his singular account of the resurrection. But what we read wasn’t just the resurrection—it actually appears to have been the original ending to the entire book, where Jesus goes “‘ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So [the women] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”[1]
(Clearly they must have said something to someone; otherwise, none of us would be gathered here today!)
The resurrection, and especially Mark’s abrupt ending, bring up a whole lot of questions—questions and answers that have echoed through history. However, what caught my attention leading up to this morning isn’t actually found in our passage today—nor in the previous chapters with the Triumphal Entry or the crucifixion. This Easter we’ll need to go all the way back to the very first line of this Gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”[2]
“The beginning of the good news.”
Mark announces these words just before introducing us to John baptizing in the wilderness. I’ve always just assumed that they were referring to that first scene with Jesus’ own baptism. But one commentator this week asked the question, what if Mark wasn’t simply using that line to talk about the opening of his story? What if Mark was referring to the entirety of what he wrote?
A book without an ending…the beginning of the good news.
If that’s the case, Mark has left us with at least two things.
First is a promise—a final word spoken by this mysterious young person hiding out in an empty tomb: Jesus “is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” Jesus wasn’t expecting his followers to stay in their unfamiliar—and objectively hostile—locale. They aren’t supposed to camp out in Judea and start a revolutionary commune or build some shrine memorializing their martyred hero. Nor does Mark offer any grand commissioning here, demanding those loyal to God travel beyond the ends of the earth on a sacred mission. Jesus, through this messenger, neither charges them to stay where they are nor directs them to wander far afield. He simply expects them to go home—back to Galilee, where they had all come from in the first place.[3] Back to the familiar. Back to their everyday lives. Their quest, as abruptly concluded as it may have seemed, isn’t at its end. This recent trial and mockery and murder, no matter anyone’s experience of it, is not the end of the world. Dawn is rising over a new landscape, so take everything you’ve seen and heard and lived and learned, and head back home—where you’re tasked to encounter hope and life and Jesus not in something strange and exotic nor towering among the heights of power and prestige but right there in the midst of your own familiar world.
The second thing Mark offers us, then, is a tacit challenge: to write the rest of the story ourselves. If all this has been the beginning of the good news, then what, exactly, is still to come? Where does—or will—this narrative go? Should it all just fade away? Does it simply end with us? Or might this good news go on, even today? Was this tale about Jesus—of healing, teaching, triumph, death, and disrupted expectation—the sum total of God’s work in the world, the culmination and conclusion of any sort of cosmic purpose? Or has it been a seed, a kernel of something completely new readying itself to sprout? Fear may have silenced the women who came to honor Jesus’ body that lonely Sunday morning, but will it silence us? Has God’s Kingdom come to its conclusion in the pages of a book, or might even today still be
“the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”?
[1] Mark 16:-8 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Mark 1:1
[3] See Mark 15:41