Looking toward Easter

The oldest gospel we have, the gospel of Mark, ends in the most curious of ways:

But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

The ending is strange. We've come to associate joy with Easter. Christ is risen! And yet, here in Mark the news of the Risen Lord brings not joy, but fear. Why?

We find a similar reaction to the first proclamation to the gospel. On Pentecost Peter ends his sermon in Jerusalem with this accusation: "Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah." Finding blood on their hands the people call out, not without some alarm: "What shall we do?" Why is there fear on Easter Sunday?

There is fear on Easter because God didn't kill Jesus. We did. And according to the moral calculus of our world--"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"--our own lives are now in the balance. Vengeance is now the order of the day. Because of our sin our lives are now under a death sentence. A life for a life the calculus goes. 

So the blood of Jesus, having soaked deep into the soil of Jerusalem, is crying out. Just like the blood of Abel crying out against Cain: Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The LORD said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground."

Easter is seemingly not Good News for the guilty. It is not Good News to find out that your victim is alive. We know what's coming. We've seen the movies where the victim comes back from the dead to seek revenge. So if Jesus is alive, if the victim has come back, we had better hide in fear. Judgment day is coming.

That is how we expect the story to go. As did, it seems, those who first encountered or heard about the resurrection. And we can understand why they jumped to this conclusion. In short, everything in human psychology and human moral history--and even the Bible to this point--suggests that Easter shouldn't be Good News for the perpetrators, the ones who betrayed, fled, stood at a distance, washed their hands, or called out for his death. All these, and you and I, are going to face the victim on judgment day. And that isn't going to go well for us. We have blood on our hands.

And yet, in a way we cannot comprehend (the biblical shorthand for this feeling of incomprehension is grace), this story ends up going in a very different direction. The blood of Jesus doesn't cry out for vengeance. The blood of Jesus is different from the blood of Abel, the archetype of all victims. In the words of Hebrews 12 the blood of Jesus "speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."

What is this better word? Where Abel's blood cries "Vengeance!," the blood of Jesus cries "Peace!" Where Abel's blood cries "Guilty!," the blood of Jesus cries "Forgiveness!"

But by stepping into Jesus' story, his way of life, we have a new story. A new way to live. Receiving forgiveness from our victim we pass that forgiveness forward, shutting down the cycles of violence and hate. It stops with us. Or more precisely, it stops with Jesus. 

Easter isn't just the shock of being forgiven by our victim. Easter is about living under the blood of Jesus rather than the blood of Abel. Easter is about learning to speak those better words--peace, forgiveness, grace and love--in a world trapped in reciprocal bouts of violence, from the petty to the genocidal. We learn to forgive as we have been forgiven. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians:

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors...

As we move through Lent, only twenty-three days away from Easter, it it worth considering how we are being transformed as Christ's disciples, ambassadors, agents of peace in a hurting world.

A prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

We regularly say:

"We proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."

In our primitiveness, we do not doubt your coming,

soon, powerfully, decisively.

In our settledness, your coming is not too urgent our real,

because we are venously entitled, privileged, protected, gated.

In our rationality, the "until" of your coming makes little sense,

so we mumble and hope no one notices.

In these last days,

In these latter days,

In these final days,

We draw closer to your promised "until."

We draw closer in fear,

in hope,

in gladness,

in dread.

So we do proclaim the Lord's death until he comes,

until he comes in peace against all our violence; 

until he comes in generosity midst all our parsimony;

until he comes in food midst all our hunger;

until he comes in community midst all our alienation.

We your faithful hopers,

distracted by despair, but hoping,

distracted by affluence, but hoping,

distracted by sophistication, but hoping.

Come soon, come Lord Jesus, come soon

while we face afresh your death,

until you come soon and again...again and soon.

Amen.