Shocked by God's Powerful Reach
Easter Sunday
April 20, 2003
Mark 16:1-8
[Message shared with the people of Friendship Church]

Back in the day when doctors made house calls, a dying man expressed fear of death to his doctor. This man couldn’t shake his feelings even though he, like his doctor, was a Christian. The doctor heard his patient out, not sure exactly what to say. Just then a whining and scratching was heard at the door. When the doctor opened it, in bounded his dog, who had been waiting outside for its master. While the dog wagged his tail happily, the doctor sensed an opportunity to comfort his patient. “My dog has never been in this room. So, he had no way of knowing what it’s like. But he knew that I was in here and that was good enough for him. In the same way, in spite of our fears, we can look forward to heaven. I don’t know a lot about it. But I know that Jesus is there. And that’s good enough for me!”

On this Easter Sunday morning, I can tell you that there are many mysteries about this life and the one beyond the grave. There are things we don’t know and that we won’t know until after we die, like what things look like on the other side of death. But all who entrust their lives to Jesus Christ can face life and death without fear. Jesus, the One Who died and then rose again, is waiting for us!

In the Bible, there are four major accounts of the first Easter Sunday. They come in the four first books of the New Testament, books we call gospels. Our Bible lesson today is the account given in the book written by a man named Mark. Mark, as many of you know, uses an almost breathless, journalistic style in telling about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. If you’ve ever seen the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, you have a pretty good idea of Mark’s manner of writing. Like Wolf as he gives the news, Mark barely comes up for air. He moves rapidly from scene to scene in Jesus’ ministry, with little explanation. Mark seems to do this in order to challenge us to draw our own conclusions.

In His account of Jesus’ resurrection, Mark uses just eight verses! That’s a pretty sparse narration of the most stunning event in all human history. In fact, in the original Greek in which the lesson was written, the final verse is so breathlessly rendered that it’s an incomplete sentence. Many Bible scholars in fact, think that Mark ended his entire book with this dangling sentence, that someone else added twenty-two verses just to tidy things up.

Be that as it may, our Bible lesson for this morning ends with three women who had gone to Jesus’ tomb to anoint His body terrified into silence by what they were told in the tomb. They couldn’t fathom the notion that the Savior they had watched die and helped to bury was alive again. Mark says:

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.

Mark’s ending forces us into the same position those women were in when they first heard that Jesus had been raised and looked at His empty tomb. We must choose whether we believe or not. The other three Gospel writers in the New Testament— Matthew, Luke, and John—make it clear what choice the women make. They run to the other disciples and tell them that Jesus has risen from the dead. Several of them actually see Jesus. (Ultimately more than 500 of Jesus’ first followers would see Him after He rose from the dead.) But I think that Mark is right in telling us that in those first moments after being told of Jesus’ resurrection, the women were terrified. They needed to decide whether the God we know in Jesus Christ is powerful enough to retrieve life and then reach us even after going through death on a cross! They needed to decide whether they could trust that after they died, Jesus would be waiting for them. Have you let God reach you through the risen Jesus? Do you believe in the good news of Easter? Do you trust Jesus Christ with your life? Those are questions that the resurrection of Jesus forces us all to answer.

She always believed in God; it was just that when she joined the faculty at Stanford University, she was so busy traveling that she didn't attend church regularly. She was a specialist in international affairs, diplomacy. So she often found herself in another time zone, not just out of town. One Sunday, she was in the Lucky's Supermarket near her home, among the spices, when an African-American man walked up to her and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. Then he asked her, a perfect stranger, "Do you play piano by any chance?" She said that she did. They were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American Church, a Baptist church right in the center of Palo Alto. So she started playing for that church, and that brought her back regularly to worship.

She says that she doesn't play gospel music well; she plays Brahms. And disconcertingly, in Black Baptist churches, ministers will just start a song and the musicians will pick it up. She had no idea how to play like that. So she called her mother and said, "Mother, they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" Her mother laughed and said, "Honey, play in C. People will figure out how to join in."

Condoleeza Rice, President Bush’s national security advisor, tells this story because when all of this happened in her life and she found herself playing piano on Sunday mornings, she thought to herself, "My goodness, God has a long reach. All the way into the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning."

Easter tells us that God has a long reach. He can immerse Himself in death and still pull out life, for Himself and for all who follow Him. That came as a shock to the three women who had gone to anoint His lifeless body on the first Easter Sunday. Easter has become old hat to us, I’m afraid. I wish that we could recover some of the shock the women felt as they fled Jesus’ empty tomb. Jesus rose from the dead and He’s reaching out to you and me again today to give us life. And that is still stunning, life-changing news if you let yourself really think about it!

As many of you know, during my time in seminary, my life was blessed by my connection with a professor and mentor named Bruce Schein. Not long after I graduated, Pastor Schein’s health began to deteriorate, the result of Parkinson’s Disease. Before dying about two years later, he had been clinically dead and revived several times. After one such siege, I met him for the last time. He looked emaciated, could barely walk, and his hands trembled constantly. But there was a radiant smile on his face. I can still hear his words almost as if he were speaking them to me right now. “Mr. Daniels,” he said, “I have been to the throne room. It was beautiful.” And then he added, with a wink, “I put in a good word for you.”

None of us knows for certain what lies on the other side of death. But Jesus rose from the dead to give all with faith in Him a beautiful eternity. Easter tells us that the risen Jesus is reaching out for us even now and that if we let Him have us, He will never let us go! That’s shocking news, mysterious news, that forces us to draw our own conclusions and make our own choices. Will we be stunned into following Jesus now and in eternity? Or will we go on with our lives as though nothing has happened? The choice is ours.

[The notion of Jesus reaching out to us comes from a message by Pastor Mike Foss. He also shares the story of Condoleeza Rice, which comes from the April, 2003 issue of Homiletics magazine. A different version of the story of the dog and his doctor was shared by Pastor Glen VanderKloot in his e-mailed devotional, OnLine with Faith. However, the version I cite is taken from Illustrations for Biblical Preaching, edited by Michael P.Green.]