Sermon for 5 Easter 2022
Much as is the case with a child’s bedroom, or perhaps the flat that you share with your friends or your partner, there has always been a tension in Christian thought between tidiness and the wild and chaotic.
On the one hand, there is a tendency in Christian thought to tidiness: a place for everything and everything in its place. This impulse is especially understandable in the context of a time of great insecurity, danger, or change.
It is easy to look back on the thinkers of previous eras, especially in the Middle Ages, and criticise what seems like an inordinate concern for hierarchy and order, for laws and rules, on the basis that the structure upon which they spend so much time writing and speaking results in constriction and suffocation, injustice and oppression.
But in a world in which there was very little stopping one’s neighbour from running off with all of your worldly possessions other than social norms, and the threat of retaliation and violence, it is easier to see the appeal of a structured society in which not only each person knows their place, their rights and responsibilities, but also the rights and responsibilities of everyone around them.
This desire for tidiness and intricate organisation not only of society but also of knowledge and human understanding of the Divine perhaps sees its apotheosis in the many, many volumes of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, which strives to set out, in ordered fashion, the whole of Christian knowledge and teaching, with all of its consequences for one’s personal life and for the meaning of society as a whole. Aquinas was, without doubt, a genius of the first order and a deeply subtle thinker. But the impulse to fit into one structure all of Christian thought is one that demonstrates a firm faith in the power of neatly ordered thought to speak most truly about who God is, and so about what it is to be a human being.
The impulse for tidiness of thought in Christianity may be traceable in a sense to the Resurrection narratives found in the Gospel of Luke. When the women come to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body as was required, they are met by two men in dazzling white, angels flanking the empty tomb. This gestures directly to the cherubim flanking the empty space atop the Ark of the Covenant, the holy absence that signifies the invisible and transcendent God. Luke draws a straight line between the empty tomb and the Holy of Holies, directing the reader to understand who Jesus is and where he has gone. The meaning of the Resurrection is made plain to the reader who has been prepared to encounter it.
Very different is the account of the Resurrection we heard in Mark’s Gospel this evening. An earlier source thank Luke, Mark’s account describes a scene of disorder and chaos, of bewilderment and fear.
When the women arrive at the tomb, they are met just bya a man who points to the emptiness and sends them away. He tells them Jesus has risen but gives them no tidy explanation of what that means and how it should shape their lives. This text represents the original ending of Mark’s Gospel, ending not on a note of celebration and fulfilment, but rather with the words ‘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.’ An emptiness that points not to the transcendent absence of the God who cannot be seen, but rather the emptiness of a missing friend, a desecrated grave, a question mark hanging over their very sense of self and understanding of what is meant to happen next.
Unlike Luke’s Resurrection account, and unlike the intricate tapestry of Thomas Aquinas’ magisterial theology, Mark’s Gospel insists on a messier, wilder, and more immediate understanding of who God is and what that means for human being.
While the Gospel ends with the silence of those who had gone to the tomb, we know that they did not stay silent, otherwise we would not have their story to share. Though this incident of bereavement and emptiness seemed to them like the end of all things, it proved in time merely to have been the beginning of something much greater and more marvellous than they could otherwise have understood.
Mark’s Gospel is filled with particles of Greek that might best be translated “n’then” as though nobody in the story has any time to lose: Jesus is always on the move, always going on to the next place and the people attracted to his teaching and his life move with him.
Jesus himself transforms the meaning of the categories and structures into which he was born, healing when he wasn’t meant to, touching the ones he was not supposed to be touching, eating with traitors and people who had ruined themselves and their lives. By doing so, he transformed not only the lives of those he touched and taught and dined with, but he opened the door to breaking down the very categories to which they had been assigned.
The untidiness of Jesus’ life, death, and Resurrection (for what could be more untidy than the disruption of the orderly passage of the living to the dead) is borne out in the climax of Mark’s Gospel by the invitation to be caught up in this whirlwind of loving change and the consolation of Jesus promise that things will not always be as they are.
The invitation of the empty tomb, from which the women fled silent and afraid, is to run with them. To run with them until they, too encounter the risen Christ among their friends, in their community and in their lives and so their lives are transformed. The risen Christ, for Mark’s Gospel is not found in any tidy identities or neat rules and patterns of behaviour. Rather the Resurrection for Mark points to an invitation to participate in the risen life of Jesus now, in our lives, and so live out the Resurrection life in the very shape and colour of our life today.
It is a life that may not be concerned with the expectations of identity which have been handed to us at our birth or along the way in school or beyond. It is a life that breaks such bonds and offers freedom instead: the freedom to love and to be loved, to give and giving to receive, to see and to see truly. The mess of our lives is not the end. Rather it is the very place in which God meets us and begins something wonderful and new.