A Weird Ending

Apparently, there is an old medieval custom that began in southern Germany, in Bavaria. The custom is called Rissus Pascalis. What would happen is, on Easter Sunday morning, the local priest was supposed to start church with a joke. He would come down into the body of the church and he would tell jokes. Apparently, some of them were quite risque, and he would sing nonsense songs so that the building would become full of laughter and the hysterics would be heard down in the village, and people would come and join in. Now, southern Germans aren't all that famous for being funny; there's a lot of things to not laugh about in Bavaria and southern Germany, but the point is obvious, isn't it?. The laughter echoing through the church is like the cosmic laugh because Jesus is alive and he's on the loose. All the forces that conspired to lay him in the tomb—the fury, the lovelessness, the violence, the vaunted powers of kings and empires—they were made a laughingstock because death cannot hold him.

God has the final laugh. We have been following the Gospel of Mark over these past ten weeks, and it began right at the beginning, chapter 1 verse one, where it says, "This is the good news of Jesus the son of God". Or did we really think that the Son of God would stay dead? At first glance, though, it seems silly because dead men don't get up. We've got a machine at the back in the cupboard called a defibrillator. We hope we don't never need it, but we've got it there just in case someone has a cardiac arrest or someone's heart stops, you can get it revived again. But not someone who's been torn to pieces as Jesus was.

And yet, 28 lifetimes ago, something happened. A movement began the like of which has not been seen in history, in the history of the human race. In the middle of the first century, something explodes gently and kindly into the world. A peculiar message comes out, and the people who tell it are nobodies, and they're often weak and unimpressive. They are from the bottom rung of society. They don't have an army. They don't have a great leader. And at the heart of the message, which would become the greatest movement in human history, is not an ethical system or a set of spiritual disciplines, but of a person doing something. The central message was: "We've seen him. He's risen".

There were three men crucified on that Friday afternoon. Why do people only remember the middle one? More than that, about seven billion people today think the middle one was God. Why Jesus of Nazareth? Why is he remembered? Well, because there's disturbingly good evidence that the corpse stood up and walked out of the tomb. Now, I could talk on and on about this, but really I just want to focus our minds on just those few verses from Mark chapter 16:1–8 and perhaps the ones that come before.

We have four good histories of Jesus, and all are adamant that he's risen, but this account is maybe the most unusual. It finishes, for example, at the end with no Jesus. The other accounts talk about his appearances, but it doesn't mention his appearances. And then it finishes suddenly. There's no Mary weeping, there's no doubting Thomas, there's no Emmaus road, there's no disciples. Just three women, an angel, an empty tomb, and a message.

The early Christians must have found it a bit frustrating and thought they might rewrite the ending. It's there if you want to see it, just underneath that line on page 1011. There's nothing to be hidden here; they put it there, it's just that it doesn't appear to be from Mark's hand at all. It seems to have come much later and doesn't appear in the earlier manuscripts. So, it looks like people were a little bit nervous about the shortness of it, and they've decided they're going to put an ending on there because it ends so mysteriously and ambiguously. The only people who know Jesus is risen say nothing because they're scared. And even if they did speak, who would listen to them? Because the earliest witnesses are women.

Now, please don't get annoyed with me; I'm not saying that I think this is a good thing. It's just back in that day and in that culture, women were ineligible to be witnesses at law. In fact, if you had a court case that you had to take to court and your only witness was a woman, then don't waste your money. That's the way people thought. So, Mark's taken some big risks in ending his account of Jesus' life just like this. Why? Well, maybe it's just the way it happened. God chose these women to be the first witnesses. See, if Mark was an inventor, then why have such a quick finish? Why not go on and on? Why downplay it? Why include such unimpressive witnesses? I'd suggest to you it's because Mark knows the message can speak for itself. The news of Jesus rising doesn't need any things to prop it up; it doesn't need any embellishing. He's happy just to say what was said.

Well, let's have a look at it. If you've got it there in front of you, we're on page 1010 of the Red Bibles, chapter 16, verse one. "When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, 'Who rolled the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?". These women are the key. They saw him die; they saw him buried. That's what it says in the verses beforehand.

Now they're up early and they're going to anoint the body. They're very devoted, aren't they? They're very devoted followers and the only ones left after the other disciples scatter. They get up early on the day after the Sabbath to anoint the body. They take spices that would have been expensive and costly to them. They've got to move the stone away and they're not quite sure how they're going to do that. They're unsure what to do, and they're devoted and sincere followers, but in some ways, they're wrong, aren't they? Because hadn't Jesus said he was going to die and rise? In fact, he said it on three occasions; Mark records it for us: "I'm going to die, I'm going to rise. I'm going to die; I'm going to rise. I'm going to die; I'm going to rise".

And they get to the tomb thinking they're going to find a dead Jesus there. But the stone is rolled away. The body they've come to anoint is gone. And if that's not enough, they find a heavenly messenger, a young man dressed in a white robe. And they are alarmed. These kinds of heavenly messengers never really appear very often in the Bible at all, but here there is one. And he says in verse six, "Don't be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He's risen. He's not here. See the place where they laid him". Jesus the man from Nazareth, the man who we know about from history, he was crucified, but now he's alive. That's what the messenger says. "He's not here". In Luke's account, he records the angel, the man in white, has a little dig at them: "Why do you look for the living amongst the dead?".

It's a good question. See, the point is we're not here today to worship a dead hero—one we admire, one we look up to, a good teacher—but one who was dead and is now alive. It was almost 60 years ago that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We remember his extraordinary life and the things he achieved; he's a hero for many, but he's no longer alive. This says Jesus, who once was dead, is now alive. Christianity is essentially a relationship with the one who was dead but is now alive. "He's not here." See, he's gone.

And they had seen where his body was laid; that's really obvious in chapter 15. And now they see and the body is gone. In those verses just before that Anne read for us, from 15:42 onwards, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the council, went boldly to Pilate to ask for Jesus' body. And Jesus was dead. It says there in verse 43, Joseph went to ask for Jesus' body because his body was dead. Pilate was surprised, verse 44, to hear he was already dead. He summoned the centurion and asked him if he'd already died. When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in linen, placed it in the tomb, and then rolled the stone away. They saw where it was placed. He was dead. And they saw now that he was no longer there; he is risen.

When you think about it, why do we know so much about Jesus? I mean, there were other people who pretended to be messiahs who did great things at the time, and we know very, very little about them at all. The reason we know he died was because he rose. Plenty of people died, plenty of messiahs died, and it wouldn't have been important enough to write about him unless something very significant happened.

But there's a little bit more. Look at verse 7: "Go tell his disciples and Peter"—it's good news for Peter—"He's going ahead of you into Galilee. There you'll see him, just as he told you". Tell his disciples to go to Galilee. Galilee is a very physical place. There are people who sometimes say, "Oh you know, it's just that people just kind of felt like Jesus had risen, like he'd risen in their hearts". But Jesus said beforehand, "I'm going to meet you in Galilee". And here it says, "Go back to Galilee". That is where he's going to meet you. Galilee, where it all began, where he began walking by the Sea of Galilee and called people to follow him and called people into that quest, which was to take people and catch them; he said, "I'm going to teach you how to fish for people". Galilee was where it all began, and they're to go back there because that's where he's going to meet them.

Finally, these women are the heroines until verse 8, and then it suddenly all goes terribly wrong. Verse eight says, "Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid". These women who've risked so much now, it seems, turned out to be no better than the men. "Go and tell the disciples. Go and tell them what's happened". But trembling and bewildered, they fled. They don't say anything to anyone because they're afraid. Now, I understand why they might be like that; I understand that they're trembling and bewildered. I understand they saw him die and they saw him buried and now he's gone and the body's not there anymore and there's this angel thingy saying he's not here. I understand they're very stressed. But as we're reading this, we're saying, "Come on, you've got to tell people! People need to know the good news that this is all about," which began at the very beginning, chapter 1 verse one of Mark, the good news that everyone needs to know. But they're not saying anything.

And we say to ourselves, "How can it finish like this?". It's a weird ending. When I was 13, I went on a school excursion to see the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. Now, for a 13-year-old boy, it's not what you want: young women walking around in the Australian bush wearing funny hats and curtains and the strange flute music that got played. And at the end, you get to the end of the movie and you think, "What happened? Like, what happened to them?". Apparently, the writer Joan Lindsay who wrote the novel, her editor thought it'd be better to take the ending out. Well, thanks very much for that enigmatic, unsatisfying ending. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—you get to the end of the seven novels, and how does it end? Well, their kids go to Hogwarts. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass—it was all a dream, right?

Sometimes it happens in music; you get these very unsatisfying endings. Paul McCartney wrote a song in the 70s called "Silly Love Songs". How someone who wrote "Yesterday" can also write a song called "Silly Love Songs" is beyond me. It's a very, very silly song, but it ends on chord four. A little bit of music theory: chord four is like an unresolved chord. It's a point of dissonance and we're waiting for it to move to what's called consonance, but it stays on dissonance. And we say to ourselves, "Is that how the song ends?".

And as we're reading this, we think to ourselves, "Is this how it all ends?". You see, who's going to do the telling if they don’t? If they are silent, how will anyone find out? Because the women are the only ones who know. But are they? Are they the only ones who know? Who else knows? You know. You've seen the ending. You've heard the message. You have been taken to the tomb. You know he was crucified. He was dead and buried. You have heard the message: "He's not here. He's risen". You are in the same position as the women. So, what will you do?

Heard about breaking the fourth wall? Mark's inviting you to break the fourth wall. What will you do? Is it just too weird for you to say this Jesus rose? The British comedian Eddie Izzard, in a serious interview, said, "If there was life after death, it would be nice if just one person came back to let us know. Easter, maybe?". Clive James in an interview was asked if he believed in God and he said there cannot be a God because if there was, he would impact our history in an unforgettable way. BC, AD? Seven billion people in the world.

See, what does Mark 16 say to you? It's a very clever ending, isn't it? So, you can be a follower of Jesus, you can know it's true, but will you be courageous or will you be fearful? Joseph goes to Pilate boldly and courageously asks for the body when he's dead. And the women, when they go to the tomb, they're nervous and they're afraid. And he's alive. Where is it with you? See, is there something beyond this long weekend that's bigger than just the weekend? Is it not a fact that someone has died for you, that someone has risen from the grave and holds out to you the gift of forgiveness and eternal life at his expense? You might be unconvinced and say, "I'll believe when I get proof". But God doesn't give us proof; he just gives us evidence. And we're invited to weigh up the evidence for ourselves. How did this come to us? How did we get this? What do you make of it? There is someone who's opened the gate to glory and will carry you through if you'll just trust him.

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