Looking Ahead and Going Home

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Looking Ahead and Going Home

Scriptures: Isaiah 25:6-9 Mark 16:1-8

Two thousand years ago the Gospel was a brand new literary form. It wasn’t a familiar poem or an epic, not a history or a philosophical treatise, nor was it a speech or a report.

The gospel was invented as a way to tell people good news. That’s literally what the word “gospel” means: a way to tell people whatever the gospel writer considered most vital about Jesus; about his work and his teachings, his life and his death. The entire purpose of the work is to challenge people with a new vision for life and to excite them to the possibilities for their own lives.

Mark is the inventor of this form and his gospel is the first of its kind. Matthew and Luke literally copied Mark, often word for word and John copied the idea, although all three shared the understanding that Mark hadn’t said enough.

The end of the gospel is the part that has bothered people the most over the years: the image of the empty tomb; the promise of Jesus to be seen in the future; it’s like ending on a cliff-hanger, albeit a hopeful one. People hated that.

Matthew and Luke fixed it by writing new and improved gospels with lots of stuff about Jesus appearing to people. John changed nearly everything, adding lots about Jesus wandering around after the resurrection. Later people would even tinker with Mark’s gospel itself, inventing two new endings, the longer of which ended up in the old King James version.

So what’s the deal? Why did Mark bring us to the resurrection and refuse to show us the risen Christ?

Well, remember what I said: the purpose of a gospel is to tell people what is most important; to challenge them and to inspire them; Mark is doing exactly that.

He starts with the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus makes the trip from his home in Galilee to the Jordan river, is baptized, goes into the wilderness for a time and then returns to Galilee to begin his ministry. Mark considered the birth of Jesus to be unimportant.

The vast majority of what Mark then shows us is Jesus going around his home province: healing, helping, teaching, feeding; gathering his disciples and training them; challenging people to understand God in a different way; offering people a vision of a world where our creator doesn’t favour the rich and powerful but actively loves and blesses the poor and the weak.

That is most of the gospel.

As the end of the gospel approaches, we have the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem and then that really intense week in which Jesus arrives with the fanfare of Palm Sunday, gets up the nose of the rich and powerful by clearing the temple and by publicly teaching things that the Roman and Jewish authorities considered subversive. He establishes Communion as a new kind of Passover meal, is betrayed, arrested, denied, given two mock trials and ultimately crucified, killed, and buried.

It is a powerful week, a pivotal week, a defining time in which the new church has its founder snatched away, teeters on the brink of elimination and then is snatched back from that brink by the discovery that Jesus is alive again and is given such inspiration by that discovery that we are still going 2000 years later.

It’s wonderful, it’s exciting but it is still only a week, a short time out of Jesus’ ministry. And that is the point Mark is making. Listen to the words spoken by the young man in the tomb: “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. 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.”

The message is clear: go home! Jesus will meet you at home, where most of his ministry took place.

It’s as if all of that excitement of the week in Jerusalem is like being on top of Mt. Everest: you strive for it, you sacrifice so much to get there but you can’t live there; the air is too rarefied. It may be the most amazing view in the world; it may be that while you are there you are literally on top of the world; but you can’t live there.

You have to go home. Certainly, you go home profoundly changed. You take your experience with you, but to live you have to go home.

If you look at the other gospels you get a mixed report of what the disciples actually did. Luke has them staying in Jerusalem for ages, even years, while John has some of them return to their fishing boats and Matthew has them start to spread out, first through the Jewish lands and then out into the rest of the world.

But all of that is beside the point because the message is for the readers of the gospel, people who were hearing about it 35 years later and beyond. The message is for us: we can’t get stuck at the pinnacle no matter how exciting or wonderful it is. We have to experience Easter and then go back into the real world as transformed people, and keep on making those changes Jesus showed us.

The most powerful empire of the world had done the worst it could do. Rome was administratively efficient; it made running an empire into a smooth machine which appeared to take up Jesus, only to grind him up and spit him out.

All those things Jesus had been saying all along about God lifting up the weak, the poor, and the marginalized happened in the person of Jesus on the cross, in the resurrection: we can see life overcoming death; brute force being defeated by love; human and divine love combining to overcome the faceless brutality of an uncaring system.

Mark tells us to take that revelation, that proof of the truth of Jesus’ teachings and to bring them down from the mountain and back home again.

Who can we think of in our world that are people being pushed aside, being treated indifferently by uncaring systems? People with no influence, with few resources?

Jesus reached out to people like these and taught us to do the same. In the resurrection we are shown not only eternal life in the next world but a transformed and renewed life in this one.

The way of love looks weak compared to the ways of force and power and yet God’s way of love was enough to take Jesus through the cross and grave and back out through the empty tomb. And from there God calls us to bring that way of love back home, to transform the way life happens, to lift up the people who cannot lift themselves up and to create a just world where all are equally loved and blessed.

That’s the message Mark wanted us to get from the resurrection and it is good news indeed.

Amen.