Sermon: St Mark

Today, 25th April, is St Mark's Day – or it would be if major festivals that fall on a Sunday in Eastertide weren’t transferred to the next day. But I can’t pass up the opportunity of honouring him today by preaching on his Easter story, for me the most powerful witness to the resurrection in the New Testament. You have it printed out on a sheet. This earliest of the resurrection accounts consists of just eight verses. They tell of the empty tomb, the young man's message that Jesus is risen, the command to tell the disciples that he has gone ahead to Galilee, and the promise that they will meet him there. The story ends with the women's flight from the tomb, ‘for they were afraid’. And that’s all. There’s no meeting with the risen Lord, no gift of peace, no great commis-sion, no restoration of fallen or doubting disciples, no promise of the Spirit, no triumphant ascension. It’s a lean story, spare, under-state-d. It leaves so much unsaid, so many questions unanswered.

True, our Bibles print a longer ending to the gospel. But it’s not found in the best and oldest New Testament manuscripts. It’s an inept tidying up job. It has none of the vividness we’ve learned by chapter 16 to expect of St Mark. Instead there’s the familiar tendency of well-meaning religious people to spell everything out and tie up loose ends, and that should make us suspicious at once. I for one am glad that my Easter faith does not depend on handling deadly snakes or drinking poison. And as for theories that Mark died before he could finish his gospel, or that the last page was lost, these are theories of desperation. No, we can trust the manuscripts, and let the short ending stand.

But what does it mean, this edgy story that leaves us uneasy, bewildered? However powerful Mark’s theme, its music is in a minor key. If it is spring, the memory of winter is still recent; if it is dawn, night has not long fled. It subverts the happy endings we like so much, sits uneasily alongside Easter bunnies and chocolate eggs and Thine be the glory. Suppose we had never read the other gospels, never heard of Mary in the garden or the Eammaus Road, or of Thomas, or that breakfast by the lakeside we read about this morning. Suppose all we had was Mark. What kind of Easter would that leave us?

Mark was writing for Christians at a time of persecution. To them, the words of the young man at the tomb would be deeply significant: ‘Do not be alarmed. He has been raised; he is not here. He is going ahead of you to Galilee’. Mark-'s fragile, suffering church would not have misread the message that despite the resurrection, the risen Jesus wasn’t coming to rescue them from their time of trial just yet. But they were to cling on to the promise that he was going ahead: ‘there you will see him, just as he told you’. So Mark's Easter is about the Christ who is promised, even though he is not yet present. And the symbol of that promise, that certainty of meeting, is Galilee. Galilee stands for all our futures, our hopes, our longings. At the empty tomb they are hinted at, but not yet realised. Its full meaning is eschatological. It lies ahead. It can’t be fully known for now.

Mark invites us to look again at what we mean by the truth of Easter. There are those who are agnostic about the empty tomb, but tell us that Easter means meeting and knowing the risen Christ. St Mark, however, turns that round. His reticence is not about the empty tomb but about the presence of the risen Jesus. The tomb is empty to be sure; we affirm that he is risen. But we don’t yet meet him, know him face to face. So I believe that Easter is true, even if the full experi-ence of it eludes me. Instead, I am silenced by this awesome demon-stration of God's power. Easter, far from banishing my bewilderment plunges me deeper into mystery. I need to wait for the future, for whatever ‘Galilee’ may come to mean. Mark warns against expecting that the joyous recognitions of John's lakeside or Luke's Emmaus are for all of us all the time. But he says that there is more than one way of being an Easter people: our alleluias may be whispered rather than shouted. For him, Easter's new begin-nings are promised, not yet fully present. At the empty tomb, hope is all that is left to us. But it’s all we need.

The poet R.S. Thomas says, ‘He is such a fast God’. He talks about ‘a room I enter/from which someone has just/gone, the vestibule for the arrival/of one who has not yet come’. This is Mark’s empty tomb, a place of bafflement where understanding only comes with waiting. In the story, Mark shows himself as the great New Testament theologian of faith, what the Letter to the Hebrews calls ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’. Mark's Easter is about things hoped for but not seen: ‘he is not here’. His Easter faith is in the gaps, the silences, the hints. For him, the place of God's power is an empty space, like the holy of holies at the heart of the temple. And in his story of absence and longing, I learn that most of life is lived on this threshold between emptiness and meeting, between fear and hope, between darkness and noon, between Golgotha and Galilee. I learn that it is not knowledge that counts, but faith.

So there is no happy ending in St Mark, no closure - for adult life does not consist of closures and happy endings. Rather, it consists of open ends, and risk, and crossing thresholds. That is why we need a message as stark and tough as Mark's: not for nothing is traditionally the lion among the evangelists. For it requires us to believe in a way that sheds false hopes and illusions. It calls us to obey in faith and hope the summons that first rang out by Galilee, and reverberates on every page of St Mark's Gospel: follow me. Mark's great gift to us in spelling out the nature of true discipleship is to refuse to make it too easy. He reminds us that the empty tomb is not the answer, but the question. It leads towards the edge of things, where the unpredictable leaps out at us, and we emerge shaken, silenced and changed.

It’s a story, I think, that is peculiarly in tune with our post-modern age with its open-endedness that makes us not spectators but participants. Like the Marys, we bring to the empty tomb our own con-fusion, emptiness, unbelief. We hardly know why we come, except that we are driven by some instinct that here is the clue to human life where meanings are uncovered and new possibilities open up before us, where hope, dread, wonder, fear and longing meet. And this is Mark's faith. Sometimes, the veil is lifted, and my spirits soar; and then I can sing ‘No more we doubt thee, glorious Prince of Life’. But not always. Much of life has a more sombre hue. I need an Easter faith for ordinary days that can embrace my questions and my doubt as well as my joy and love. So I go back to the empty tomb, and try not to run away like Mark’s frightened women. Something compels me to stay, even if, as the story insists, Christ is not here. For I hear a word that penetrates fear and longing, that speaks of promise and hope, and that rolls away the stone at the portal of the human heart. It’s a word we in Durham particularly cherish as a sign that a new day is dawning. What is that transfiguring word? Galilee!