Ending Without End

Beth Newman
Ending Without End
Mark 16:1-8
April 16, 2006

Be present with us, Lord, as scriptures are read and your word proclaimed.  Silence any voice in our hearts but your own, so that we may hear with joy what you have to say to us today.

 Who will roll away the stone?

I have to admit that the umpteenth time I read this text for this Sunday, I had a moment when I wanted to shake Mary, Mary and Salome for asking that question.  Here they were on their way to undertake the grim job of anointing Jesus’ body, and they know full well that a huge stone covered his tomb and that the three of them together aren’t going to be strong enough to move it.  What are you going to do when you get there? I want to ask them.  Grab the first passer by you see with hulky, broad shoulders and ask him for help, early on a Sunday morning, in a graveyard? Hope for a bionic moment of super-human strength?  Is that your plan?  Wait around until you say that you came and tried and then go home and just give up?  Is that what your plan is?  Give it the old college try and then check the task off your list for the day?
            Harsh, yes, I know.  What can I say?  I perhaps I was perturbed at my own lack of planning and organization, and was willing to take out my frustration on anyone, even if she happened to be biblical.  But then I noticed a detail in their open-ended question.  A small difference that I thought I’d heard and then realized I hadn’t, the difference of one, simple, two letter word.  Mary, Mary and Salome did not ask, “Who will help us roll away the stone?”  Their question was simply, “Who will roll away the stone for us at the entrance to the tomb?”  Was their question really a question after all?  Or was it a prayer?  A prayer offered over and over again on the way to the tomb?  A prayer muttered breathlessly as they trudged down the dusty path to the place where they saw his body laid, spoken like a mantra, keeping them focused, helping them to gather whatever will they had left to undertake this final responsibility.  
            Who will roll away the stone?  This isn’t a question about logistics.  It’s the question of faith.  “Who will roll away the stone?” Not a question of how, it is a question of who.  This is the question we ask when we sit by the bedside of a loved one whose body has been ravaged by cancer.  “Who will roll away the stone?”  The question we ask when we can’t quit drinking or doing drugs.  “Who will roll away the stone?”  The question we ask when we must stare down the dark road of betrayal.  “Who will roll away the stone?”  It’s the question we utter in the middle of the night, when the crisis of our lives crashes in on us, when the activities of our daytime routines can no longer distract us.  It is our Good Friday reality, what is whispered in the darkness.  It is the question we ask when all hope is gone. 
            And yet, and yet, it isn’t Good Friday anymore, is it?  No, it’s the first day of the week, and the dawn is breaking over the hills, lighting up the road just enough so that the women can make their way tomb.  This we know about these three women.  We know that in a few minutes they will be stunned senseless by news that will rattle them to the core and send fear shooting from their ears to their feet, which will take them away in terror.  In a few minutes, they will suffer from an acute breakdown of imagination, they will run away, just like their brother Peter and the rest, failing to make sense of Jesus’ fate, failing to believe his promise that he will return.  For it seems as if this promise was ultimately unbelievable, for any of them.  The last we see of Peter, he’s weeping at the realization of his denial.  Not a single disciple is mentioned as being present at the crucifixion.  All hope is place at the feet of these women who bravely witnessed the crucifixion, who show up to witness the burial, and return for the anointing of the body.  But even they eventually drop they ball.  They leave in frightened silence.  All this is what we know about them.  And yet, their question hangs misty morning air, “Who will roll away the stone?”  And this we know as well, that they dared to ask, that they dared to come, despite all the evidence that pointed to the reality that their attempt to anoint his body was wasted effort and energy at best. 
            Yet there is something about that question that seems to get them there.  Something about that question that seems worth asking.  Something about that question that seems to be enough, enough to make the bridge between their silent tongues and our shouts and songs of “hallelujah” this morning.  The open ended question mirrors the openedness of the story itself.    Mark leaves us with an image of them running away in fear and silence.  That’s it.  The gospel literally ends with a dangling sentence.  Others came in later and wrote endings that rounded out the story, but verse eight stands, hanging out there, like the gaping mouths of the women, before they pick up their jars of spices and flee. 
The question was enough to get them there.  Maybe it is enough to get us here.  
            Bombings every day in Iraq.  Our people getting killed. Their people getting killed.  Just this week, the announcement that a young man from Burnsville, killed by a suicide bomber.  Just this morning, news of another car bombing.  Who will roll away the stone?
            Another story of a child kidnapped, abused, murdered.  Shot and paralyzed in a drive-by shooting, a little girl taken by a man who lived in her apartment building and horribly murdered, the bodies of two missing boys found in a park lagoon near to their homes.  Who will roll away the stone?
            The despair that grips the lives of so many living so far away: the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Palestine, Nepal, just fill in the blank, the stories seem endless.  Who will roll away the stone?
            The despair that grips the lives of those close to us, along the Gulf Coast even now.  The stories of those abusing crystal meth, here in our own community, and the children caught in the vicious grasp of that drug’s, or any drug’s. web.  Who will roll away the stone? 
            We ask, because sometimes the world looks like Good Friday.  Sometimes the darkness is more than we can bear.  But still we show up, muttering the question under our own breath, even while knowing that the stone to heavy and everything else seems so unbelievably frail.  Because we know, we know that the stone is in God’s hands.  The stone is always, always in God’s hands.  We cannot roll away the stone.  We can’t.  We can’t do it.  It’s bigger than all the brawny muscle we can muster.  For all the autonomy we’d like to claim as our own, we are at the mercy of the stone, and the stone is in God’s hands.  Who will roll away the stone?  We confess not our own power but rather a God of power, a God or resurrection power.  Only God.  Only God can roll away the stone.
            And yet, if we let these women be our guide, we do not give up, even when the stone seems too big and the journey to the tomb a hopeless endeavor.  Precisely because we know the frailty and fallibility of our own lives, we know that the story, our stories, just like the stone, are ultimately in God’s hands.  That is where the story ends.  Not at the empty tomb, not in the church pew, not here at the table, no these are beginning points, mid-way points.  Our endings, just like our beginnings, just like the stone, rest in God’s hands.
One preacher has this to say about Mark’s account of the resurrection: This was not the happy ending, and I love, love, love how the writer of the Gospel According to Mark gets it across to us, because Jesus' resurrection is SO not the end of the story, of the Good News that we have for the world.
Because Jesus' resurrection is not just about Jesus.
It's about God. Jesus didn't raise himself, you know -- at least, that's not what the scriptures in our canon say. God raised Jesus. Jesus had the nerve not only to hang out, break bread with, and bless and forgive the dregs of society, but to say that GOD did the same. Lots of good fathers and mothers taught their children what kind of end would find someone who tried that kind of stunt, someone who tried to insinuate that the God of the universe was the same kind of indiscriminate deadbeat he was, and respectable society breathed a huge sigh of relief when Jesus met the death they all said he was headed for. Work hard, pay your taxes, and don't cause trouble, and you could take over the family business; follow someone like Jesus, and you'll end up just where he did. The cross. Game over, and it wasn't all that fun for anyone.
But that is nothing like the story we have to tell. The story we have to tell is that the very Creator of the universe raised Jesus as a righteous Son of God from the dead, and that means that God is every bit as ridiculously, incomprehensibly loving and merciful as Jesus made God out to be. So the story of Jesus' resurrection is a story about God.
Mark’s gospel does not end at the tomb.  It doesn’t end with the sight of the three women high-tailing it home to safety as fast as they can.  The ending is no end.  It is only a new beginning.  And here we are, you and me.   Why?  Maybe it’s because we have shown up in as the dawn is breaking, muttering an utterly ridiculous question, hoping beyond hope for a miracle.  Or maybe, just maybe, we have a story to tell.