(~) “Going Ahead of Us”

Reflections on theology, scripture, and public life from the Rev. Larry Greenfield.

“Going Ahead of Us”

It’s all about the choices we make.

Take the dilemma the preacher faces in choosing a text for Easter Sunday.

This year she can go with John’s account of the resurrection of Jesus (John 20: 1-18), which has Mary Magdalene (of all people!) coming to the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea had contributed for Jesus’ burial and finding the stone rolled away, running back to tell the disciples of her discovery, and then returning to the burial site to encounter first a couple of white-attired angels and then the risen Jesus himself.

Or the preacher can select Mark’s account of the resurrection narratives (Mark 16), which has three women (Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome) bringing spices to the tomb to anoint the dead Jesus at sunrise and worrying whom they could enlist to roll back the stone from the cave, only to find that it had already been accomplished and someone (again dressed in white) in the tomb telling them not to be alarmed but rather to go back and tell the disciples that the risen Jesus would meet them in Galilee.

Two stories, with some similar elements to be sure, but really quite different. A choice has to be made.

And if the preacher chooses Mark’s narrative, then she’ll have to make a further decision about whether to stop strictly at verse 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.”) or to add the “shorter ending” (“And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward that same Jesus sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.”)

Again, a difference even here: did the women keep quiet out of fear or did they spill the beans — if ever so “briefly” with Peter and the rest of the disciples? So here too a choice has to be made.

Note: the preacher who follows the lectionary does not have the choice of choosing the “longer ending” to Mark (verses 9 — 20), which recounts still other stories about the resurrection and what followed. That option, thank goodness, is ruled out of bounds.

Suppose the preacher chooses the most economical alternative. Suppose, that is, she stays with the text from the earliest Gospel and eliminates the shorter appendix, which we can assume was added later. Just straight Mark, no chasers.

But still there are choices to make, but this time of interpretation.

Let’s assume that the first six verses can be understood in a mostly straightforward way.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint Jesus. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw someone dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But the person said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. Jesus has been raised and is not here. Look, there is the place they laid the body.

And let’s assume we can receive that the last verse (the eighth) at face value:

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.

But verse seven leaves us with interpretive choices to make:

But go, tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Jesus, just as he told you.

Are we to take this to mean that the risen Jesus has already made his way over to Galilee and is waiting for Peter and the rest of the disciples to meet him there so they will be convinced of his resurrection?

Is that the point of this verse?

If Easter and the Christian faith are primarily about acknowledging and worshiping the resurrected Jesus — now the Christ — that would seem to eliminate any potential question about the meaning of this verse.

The only problem is that this runs counter to the major theme of this Gospel. Why, at the very end of the narrative, would the writer switch themes?

From the very beginning of Mark’s Gospel, the central theme is not Jesus — as central as he is in the narrative — but what Jesus proclaims.

Back on the first Sunday of Lent that central theme was made abundantly clear. Following his baptism by John in the Jordan and his temptation in the wilderness, these are the crucial words:

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the dominion of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1: 14 — 15)

Yes, Jesus plays an absolutely critical role in God’s drama in Mark. But in the end (figuratively and literally), the Gospel is not about Jesus. It is about the dominion or community that God is bringing into history.

Jesus announces that this is already happening. The reign of God is already starting.

So, in light of this reality — this truth that must be seen as good news — the hearers of the message are to repent and believe.

Let’s be clear here — because it bears directly on how we will choose to interpret Mark 16: 7 — Jesus has in mind, as best as scholars can determine, the full realization of God’s reign in the immediate future. He is proclaiming, that is, the parousia, (literally, “presence” or “arrival”): the end of history as we know it, the second coming of Jesus, the ultimate judging of the living and the dead, the complete incarnation of God’s gracious rule.

Throughout the Gospel of Mark Jesus’ invitation is to follow him into that new reality that God is creating.

More than that: by following him — repenting of one’s sin of self-service and believing in the good news about what God is accomplishing — Jesus is inviting the disciples to begin living as though the new community of God was already fully in place.

To be sure, Jesus tells his disciples repeatedly that he would have to suffer and die and then be raised to life again, but all of this was in the service of the full reign of God that was breaking into history ahead of them — and ahead of us.

If this be the case, then verse seven in Mark 16 can’t be primarily about the resurrection of Jesus, although the resurrection is certainly assumed.

No, the three women are to go back to Peter and the disciples to tell them that Jesus is again out ahead of them, that he has gone back to where he started (in Galilee) and there they will find him, there they will see him, as he had promised them earlier.

The resurrection, just as the life and crucifixion, of Jesus is, then, the means to the End (which Jesus had taught was imminent) and the Beginning of the full realization of God’s reign.

* * * * *

What then shall the preacher preach on Easter Sunday, if she chooses Mark over John, and Mark straight rather than with chasers?

A major complication, let’s readily admit, is the miscalculation about the time of Jesus’ second coming and the inauguration of God’s complete reign.

Maybe the timing complication is so serious that she rescinds the decision about preaching from Mark and reverts to the resurrection narrative in John or other texts that support a view that Jesus, after all, is the center of the Gospel, that the resurrection is there to confirm this understanding, and that all that is required of us is believing in the risen Christ. There is certainly plenty in the New Testament to support that view. So it wouldn’t be a cop-out.

But the testimony in Mark cannot be forever or completely put aside. It has its own authority as biblical truth.

The primary problem, however, is not Jesus’ miscalculation about the timing of his second coming, although I don’t want to diminish it for those who read the Bible literally.

The more serious problem, for me and my kind, as well as the biblical literalists, is whether we (the whole lot of us) can believe in the God that Jesus proclaimed — a God who is coming toward us from the future with a dominion that is so radically different from the past we know and the present we experience, a dominion of peace, justice, and most definitively, love.

The choice we have to make is whether we will truly try to follow the now risen Jesus as he leads us toward the future that God is bringing into being, not just in Galilee but across the universe.

Relatively speaking, belief in the resurrection is easy compared to that kind of God-filled future.

The demands on not just our intellect, but even more on our whole way of living, are radically different if we choose to follow Jesus in a Markan manner. For to follow in this way is to commit ourselves to live in severe tension with the world as we know it. It is to risk the ridicule and condemnation by those from whom we normally want admiration and affirmation It is to dare to live in and foster a community of mutual love and care, of justice and peace, of repentance and reconciliation that, quite simply, doesn’t have a lot of credibility in the contemporary world.

It is even more demanding for those who also live in a democratic society, since there isn’t any way of bracketing politics out of their religious devotion, as could those who lived (or live) in states where political power was (or is) held by only the few. To live in a democracy requires persons of faith to be engaged in the political process at every level and about the whole range of contentious issues — all the more so for faithful citizens who follow the Jesus who is “going ahead of us” and leading us into that new world God is creating before us.

Maybe it would be a lot easier just to preach on the resurrection text from the Gospel of John.

It’s all about the choices we make