Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
“God is an intelligible space whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.
God is within all things but not enclosed.
Outside all things but not excluded.
Above all things but not aloof.
Below all things but not debased.
God is supremely one and all-inclusive.
God is therefore ‘All in All’”.
The word “liturgy” means “the work of the people”. Liturgy is the witness to and embodiment of the transcendence of the categories of past, present, and future into a “now”. When were God’s mighty acts? Yes. Liturgy exists within my participation, but is not contained by it; desires my presence but is not dependent on it. The Holy Spirit is the source and inspiration for our aliveness to Christ in our midst. We begin when we decide to look at what is. That is faithfulness. Mere nostalgia for the past is not faithful, nor is our work added to lives which we own and possess. In God’s sight, all of life is liturgy - we remember and live from the source and end of human life itself.
The Easter Vigil is the liturgy of all liturgies - nothing less than the very drama of creation being made alive in its proclamation in and among us. Darkness is its opening act as earth and sky and heavenly bodies join in. The joke among sacristans is that the six most complicated words in the Prayer Book are, “In the darkness, fire is kindled”. For those of us for whom this is an annual event, a part of our identities, we cannot imagine being anywhere else doing anything else this morning. But we can think of family members or friends who would be perplexed by this work.
In our increasingly secular culture, liturgy is odd work - weird, inconvenient, impractical, awkward, certainly uncomfortable at times. We do not claim to produce anything tangible, to be guaranteed to be entertained or even sufficiently distracted - we promise none of the markers of attractive ways to spend time and attention in our culture. We do believe that something unseen and mysterious is happening. We believe that we are touching the very source of God’ covenant faithfulness to us and for us. We began in darkness so that we might put our bodies into the dark night that precedes dawning, set ourselves first and fully in the embrace of the blackness of death and the grave and the womb of the world, unable to see, to move, set groping for a glimmer, a flicker of light. We gather to begin at the time before time when the universe has not yet, but is about to be, big-banged into existence. And as humans, we are most human, most aligned with our image-bearing vocation as creatures, when through our senses and hearts, imaginations and doubts, enter the great drama of our existence.
So the work is to be “remembered” into the story when we forget, when distractions lead us into detachment and isolation, by acting it out from darkness into light, from despondency into terror, and then to greet hope and joy.
The gospels are the first liturgies, written to instruct and train catechumens and form the faithful within their unique perspective and community. We would think that part of that instruction would be a firm grounding in the resurrection of Jesus by preserving appearances and sayings that assure the faithful that Christ is alive and in the midst of them. But Mark, who is already a bit odd and doing his own thing in his Gospel, gives us a different Easter morning than Matthew, Luke, and John.
The earliest and likely first ending of the gospel of Mark is 16:8:So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The lectionary includes the shorter ending of verse 9: And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Likely some later scribe was copying along and got to verse 8, “... for they were afraid”, and thought, “well, that’s not a very Jesus-y way to end the gospel, now is it? I’ll fix that right up.” And thus an extra verse. There is an even longer ending of Mark that I will not get into - read it yourself if you dare and if you decide to follow it literally do it far away from me.
So after Jesus has cast out demons, healed, taught, multiplied loaves and fishes, calmed the storm, been crucified and buried - now, on Easter morning, when it is finally time to pour on the celebration and unleash the fireworks and glory and find some relief from the unrelenting conflict and struggle - Christ has conquered death and the grave! What do we get? So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Resist the temptation to say, “yes, but.” Before we get there (and there are six more Sundays yet to come), we enter an awful emptiness, the yawning chasm and chaos of the absence of a dead body that every expectation, every way of seeing reality assured these women would be present in this tomb as surely as the sun will rise. A dead body lying there on that slab just as they had left it on Friday afternoon. It is not there. An angel announces what has happened, what to do now, and they leave. The gospel ends there, ends with the fear hanging in the air. No appearance, no word of peace - just the ultimate cliffhanger.
This is classic Mark. He loves to leave teaching and parables unresolved, leaving questions unanswered/ He writes the gospel as a “fill in the blank” quiz as if to say, “and now what happens?” Write your response here in the margin. We are all part of the story, processing in real time. For this persecuted community, many exiled from home and family, excluded from the synagogues, hunted by Romans, the fireworks of glory and triumph are not where they are. And so for us as well. We may believe in resurrection - believe it to be the greatest news in the greatest story ever told - but that news does not, is not intended to, wipe away our grief and sorrow or make us forget our pain. We can have both. We can know that both are true. Even at the empty tomb there is fear and pain and grief yet to live. Sometimes we can’t get to the joy and celebration just yet. Some years, some periods of our lives, we are stopped cold in the awful dark emptiness, the terror and amazement, caught between the presence of death we expected and the presence of absence which bewilders us further.
Rather than hasten to words of peace and assurance, hasten to touch Jesus’ feet or gaze at his wounds, might there be liturgy in the space between death and glory, the nothingness, the absence, the darkness where dwells our deepest fears and trembling hopes? Those other moments will come. But these women, the disciples, and all of us, must receive them in our own time. If we rush past the dark emotions we may smile and act as if it is the dawning of new creation, but our hearts will still be in the tomb. Liturgy is language and sign and movement. It is also silence, absence, and stillness. We may not live in the tomb, but we must enter it. It is a necessary place, but it is not home. When we enter the tomb, enter the emptiness, we are in that place of coming undone and thus becoming the ones in whom the risen Christ dwells. The risen Christ can and will dwell even in our terror and darkness, he does not wait for our joyful assurance, our personal inner fireworks. Because he has conquered death by death, he can be present to my terror and take me with him through it.
Mark knows that we will want a more comforting ending, which is why he does not include one. He knows we will want him to finish the liturgy; tell us what it means, what to do. He does not. He leaves that up to us. He lets us proceed with what is next when we are ready. The impulse to fix the ending of Mark is understandable, but I’m glad it ends the way it does. Leave it as it is - at the end of verse 8. It may take a while, we may flee far in terror and amazement, too afraid to say anything to anyone. At the other end of our fleeing is home; the far country of fear becomes peace - Christ will not abandon us - we cannot outrun him. The center of life in the risen Christ is everywhere; his circumference is nowhere. This is just the end of the gospel, not the end of the story. The story continues until all things are made new. It has a perfect ending. We are the ending. Amen.
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