April 4, 2021 ( Easter Sunday) – Mark 16:1-8
Mark 16:1-8
Forward
The Resurrection of our Lord – Easter Day – April 4, 2021
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The scene is a barber shop.
An elderly barber named Pops is giving advice to a young employee.
The employee has had a difficult past.
He was framed for a crime he didn’t commit and imprisoned.
Once jailed he was terribly mistreated.
And while he was in jail his girlfriend died.
Now that he’s out, he wants nothing more than to keep his head down,
mind his own business, and not bother about anyone else.
Now Pops knows this guy is gifted.
Pops knows this guy could help a lot of people and have a good life.
But Pops also knows that the young man is stuck in the past.
That the past is preventing him from moving forward.
For the young man is grieving the death of his girlfriend and
all the things that happened to him in jail.
So Pops looks at him and says,
Take my advice, brother. The past is the past,
and the only direction in life that matters is forward. Always forward.
I’ve never forgotten this scene from the first episode of the TV show Luke Cage.
Pop’s advice is good.
Grief of all kinds has a way of preventing us from moving forward with its sheer weight.
But the only way is forward.
One of you told me about your experience with grief lately.
About how some of the best advice you’d received from the grief counselor was just this:
When you’re grieving, you’re often told to move on.
But, this grief counselor advised, it is much better to “move forward.”
I like that.
It’s not that you move on from the past as if it didn’t exist – that is no way to live.
Rather, you move forward, taking all the gifts you’ve received with you into a new future.
This is precisely the advice the mysterious young man dressed in white gives to
Mary, Mary and Salome at the empty tomb this morning.
The women come in tremendous grief, shaken to the core, likely,
by what they had witnessed just a few days prior: the cruel and unjust execution of Jesus,
their teacher and friend.
The have come to honour Jesus’ dead body by covering it in spices.
They are expecting to find a dead body.
They are expecting to honour all that Jesus was and all that Jesus did in the past.
They are not expecting resurrection – resurrection is the last thing on their minds.
Yet, what the young man tells them is this:
You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth but – he’s not here. He’s gone on to Galilee and if you hurry you can catch him even though he’s out ahead of you. Do something with your grief. Tell others that Jesus has been raised. Don’t stay here – go! There’s a good life out there for you. Jesus is already there. Move forward.
On Easter Sunday morning, Jesus moves forward.
God gives him the gift of another day, and what does Jesus do with it?
He moves forward.
This is always such a strange resurrection account to read.
But I do like it very much.
Jesus just gets up and goes, like he promised he would.
And he promises to meet his friends out there, in the future.
And so the young man tells them, move forward.
There’s good stuff ahead for you – move forward.
Peter Marty, the editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine,
notes this week that we often make the mistake of thinking the Bible is about the past.
Yet, the Bible is always, always, about moving forward.
Moreover, God is always about moving forward.
He notes that when Moses asks God’s name, the response is, “I will be what I will be.”
Future tense. Forward.
He notes that Paul describes his life as forgetting what lies behind and
straining forward to what lies ahead.
Future tense. Forward.
Jesus encourages his followers to put their hand to the plow and not look back.
Future tense. Forward.
The advice from scripture seems to be: take what you have received and move forward.
Not moving on, but moving forward.
Jesus is out there ahead of you, says the man in the white robe this morning,
not stuck in your memories.
Mark is so convinced that Jesus is out there and that Jesus’ story isn’t over yet,
that he doesn’t even finish his gospel.
As I’ve noted many times, his gospel ends suspended, in mid-sentence.
After the women receive the advice from the young man to move forward –
which they will eventually act on – this is what Mark says:
Terror and amazement seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, afraid they were for. . .
For what?
Maybe Mark just wasn’t sure what to write next:
I mean, what else is there to fear if Jesus has been raised from the dead?
Maybe the women eventually came to realize that there was nothing to fear any longer.
Not the paralysis of grief, nor the injustice of a violent oppressive empire, nor even death.
Maybe they came to realize that with Jesus raised from the dead,
Jesus would always be in the future, ahead of them,
ready to meet them and work with them against the forces of exclusion,
hunger, poverty, isolation, greed, racism, illness, and injustice.
Maybe they came to realize that they need fear none of it anymore.
Jesus is in the future already, ahead of you, waiting to work with you against these things.
There’s good stuff there waiting for you in the future.
There’s good stuff there waiting for our world.
Move forward.
Wouldn’t it be great if we had that young-man-in-the-white-robe-perspective about everything?
Each new day we could wake up thinking:
Jesus has already anticipated this day –
Jesus is an early riser, just like he was on Easter Sunday morning.
He’s already hopped out of bed, had his coffee, and done his calisthenics.
In fact, he is already at work and waiting for me to get up and work with him.
If we had that perspective, each new day we could wake up thinking,
There is actually nothing to fear this day.
Jesus is waiting for me whatever this day holds.
Each new day we could wake up thinking,
There is good stuff ahead for me and for the world this day.
That, my friends, is the good news of Easter.
The story is not over yet – my story, your story, the story of our world.
Jesus is already ahead of us working for good.
Jesus has risen and moved forward.
So let’s move forward and meet him.
Amen
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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