Your Selected Sermon
What Stone is Blocking Your Tomb?
Almost all of us have experienced the type of grief that is absolutely paralyzing.
You walk from one room to another and can’t remember why.
You arrive at your destination only to discover you’ve left your purse or wallet behind.
You forget to eat or drink for an entire day, reheating leftovers in the microwave all afternoon long.
Within the grief, lies fear. Fear that life will never be the same again. Fear that your heart will stay broken forever. Fear that the night will never end and daybreak will not come. Fear that the dawn will arrive too soon, and with it the demand to join the living, when you only want to linger with the dead a little bit more.
The two Marys and Salome know about grief, and they know about fear. In the few verses we get in today’s lesson from Mark, the women are marked by both. They are single-minded in their purpose. You can almost see them anxiously waiting by the door to their home, waiting for the sun to go down, for the Sabbath to end, so they can rush out and buy the spices they need to anoint the beaten and broken body of their beloved Jesus.
I wonder if they even slept that night; did their sorrow keep them awake, did they share memories together? Did Mary Magdalene tell the others of how she was reborn when Jesus cast out the seven demons from her body? Did Salome recall the time when the blind man was healed when Jesus spit on the ground and rubbed mud in the man’s eyes? Did Mary, James’ mother, laugh at how ridiculous her son sounded when he first told her he was leaving his family to follow a homeless rabbi? Did they all fall into silence when they realized that now, they were the ones who looked ridiculous. They had believed that Jesus was something different, someone special. They dared to believe that he might really be the Christ, God’s messiah, the one who would save God’s people. Jesus told them over and over again that in him, the Reign and Kingdom of God had come near. Now, they seemed to be near the kingdom of nothing – the reign of Caesar had seized and killed Jesus.
But even in their grief, they knew what had to be done. His body had been shoved in a tomb cut out of the side of the rock. The Passover was ready to begin and they had to be quick in burying him. No one had gently wiped away the blood stains from his hands and his feet. No one had untangled his hair where the crown of thorns had matted it down. The wounds on his back where he had been lashed were full of dirt. His body needed to be anointed and cared for. Even if he died as a criminal, the women would see that he was buried as a king.
In their grief, they seemed to forget two important pieces of information: one, Jesus told them over and over again that he would be killed, yes, but also that he would rise again after three days. They can tear down this temple, he said, referring to his body, but I will build it up again. Just wait and see. They come to the tomb on the third day with spices to anoint a dead body not to welcome a resurrected Lord. Second, they forgot that a huge boulder blocked the tomb. They couldn’t possibly move it themselves.
So imagine their surprise when they arrived at that tomb, grief-stricken and fearful, and the stone was not there. Someone else had beaten them there. They summoned the last bit of courage they could muster and took a tentative step inside. And what they saw – nothing other than a white-robed young man – and what they heard – that Jesus was raised, no longer dead, no longer bound by the power of this world – scared the wits out of them and so they ran away, too afraid to do as they were told and tell this good news to the other disciples.
Fear, grief, running away. As you can imagine, the Gospel of Mark is not the typical choice for the Hallmark cards and the hymns and the movies to present the story of Easter morning.
So why, then, did Mark present the best news the world will ever know in this unusual, and on the surface, not very victorious way? On Easter we want shouts of Alleluia, not yelps of fear. We want to walk in the dawn of a new day, not dwell in the tomb of the past. We want the disciples to run back, knowing that Jesus was alive and having experienced his Risen, transformed self, not running away to hide their heads in the sand.
But I think that many of us can relate to this telling of the Easter morning story. We are so like the three women, and our actions are so like theirs. In so many parts of our lives, we doubt, we are afraid, we are hesitant. We enter different tombs in our own lives and sometimes we are afraid to leave them, because it means our lives would change in radical ways. We spend more of our lives in the tomb of Good Friday rather than in the freedom of the resurrection of Easter Sunday.
What tomb are you dwelling in today? Does the tomb of financial fear have you enslaved? Are you afraid today of how you’re going to pay the bills or save for your children’s college education? Are you locked behind a big stone of uncertainty about your health? Does your body feel more like a prison than a temple? Does the heaviness of an impending test or recent diagnosis or a chronic condition keep you trapped in fear?
Or is your tomb simply the status quo? Do you stay in the same job or in the same relationships because changing them requires too much work? Does the idea of seizing a new purpose in life pull at your heart but the effort to get there seem too great?
Are you living in a tomb of doubt, where you wonder what to make of this man, Jesus? Can he be who he says he is? Is he really the son of God, fully human and fully divine? What’s this business about being raised from the dead? It’s not logical? It doesn’t make sense. The stone of rationality is blocking your leap of faith.
My brothers and sisters, hear, then, why Mark is the perfect storyteller for us this Easter morning. This is the good news that God offers us. In a nutshell, this is what the man in white told the two Marys and Salome, the message that caused them both fear and awe: Jesus is on the loose. And he’s going to meet you. Go back to your home, go back to your friends, go back to all that you know and be ready – death can’t hold him, the Romans who killed him can’t control him, grief and fear do not bind him. Jesus is on the loose.
And that’s the news that caused these three women to be at once afraid and awe-filled. If Jesus is no longer dead, then all he said about himself is true. They must believe that God is stronger than death, that Jesus now rules over those who killed him. And then, that their lives cannot be the same – they must now live as followers of the savior of the world, willing to sacrifice everything they know and all they have in service to him.
Our challenge, today, is what are we going to do with the news that Jesus is alive, that he has been raised? Are we going to run in fear? Or are we going to run in awe, step out of the tomb that was holding us back and embrace the new life that we are offered in Christ?
The tomb that you are in, it is not blocked any longer. The powers of this world that you thought were in control have been destroyed. The place where you saw only darkness, my friends, is now being blindingly lit. Death has gone away. Jesus is on the loose.
This is awesome news. It’s also scary news. Jesus is on the loose. We can’t use the excuse of fear anymore. Jesus is on the loose. We don’t walk alone anymore. Jesus is on the loose. The status quo has been turned upside down. Jesus is on the loose. I can’t escape his spirit. Jesus is on the loose. The tomb is empty. Jesus is on the loose. Jesus is alive! Come out of your tombs, brothers and sisters, for now Jesus is here. Jesus is on the loose!