Go to Galilee (Easter 1B Gospel)

 

The Resurrection, He Qi

“Go to Galilee”

Easter 1B

5 April 2015; 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. Sung Festival Mass

Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon
Isaiah 25:6-9; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24, and Mark 16:1-8

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel, the original ending of the Gospel of Mark, has always troubled people. 

The angel tells the women to proclaim to the disciples Jesus’ resurrection and coming appearance in Galilee, but they run away silent, because they are terrified.  The end. 

It’s not just us moderns who are bothered by this ending.  Early Christians were so disturbed by it that they added their own endings to the Gospel, drawing from independent oral traditions, at different times: a short one and a longer one.  This is what appears in today’s Bibles in the verses that follow today’s reading with its abrupt, original ending. 

We know that these were additions because they are not in any of the best manuscripts of Mark, and are not quoted by any of the earliest Fathers:  their copy ended with “they said nothing because they were afraid.”   The added endings only show up in later, less original manuscripts. 

The abrupt ending seems pessimistic and grim.  But it is not pessimistic about the resurrection.  The angel’s message is clear:  Jesus is risen; he is not here.  You are looking in the wrong place.

Mark’s pessimism is about the disciples’ reaction to Jesus, and the women’s reaction to this startling news.  Throughout the Gospel, the disciples misunderstand Jesus, misinterpret him, and are constantly engaged in in-fighting and mutual scapegoating.  In Mark’s Gospel, all the disciples desert him when he is arrested.    Only these three women show up at a distance at the side of the cross to see Jesus’ suffering and death.  But on Easter morning, even they, just like the male disciples and St. Peter, end up running away.  They run not out of fear for their own safety, like the men did, but rather, because they just can’t process what has happened.  It terrifies them.  They are afraid of how such a story might just unhinge their world.  The ending “the women ran away, were silent, because they were afraid” seems to express simple skepticism about our ability to come to grips with the risen life of Christ.    Mark ends the Gospel abruptly: the women, just like the men, ran away from Jesus.  And Mark looks at us and waits for us to react. 

Mark here is speaking to us.  He wonders whether we can handle the truth, the good news of Jesus’ resurrection. 

That’s why the angel’s message to the women is so important:  “Don’t be so terrified.  You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here.”  Not here in this world of death and domination; not here in this world of everyday business as usual.  He is not where your life experience tells you to expect to find him.  He is not here. 

“Go tell his disciples that he is going ahead of you.”  Now if this were John’s Gospel, the sentence would end, “and there in heaven he will prepare a place for you.”  But this is Mark, and the focus remains on the here and now, on the reign of God Christ proclaimed breaking into the here and now.   

“He is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him just as he told you.” 

Galilee.   Why Galilee?  In Mark, both the men disciples and the women have all followed Jesus from Galilee on his ministry, and ended up with him in Jerusalem.  Remember that Galilee was the backwater.  It was the sticks.  We see several times in the Mishna, the earliest part of the Talmud, stories where it is clear what people thought of Galilee, where people abuse each other with the term: Galili Shote!  You Fool of a Galilean!  You Galilean Idiot!  

The Good News in this stark Gospel ending is this: we are all invited to go to Galilee and meet once again with our beloved Jesus.  The men who abandoned him, the women who ran from the angel silent, all of us who have failed to take the hope and love of Jesus into our hearts and reorder our lives and the world by them, all of us.  Note the angel is clear:  “tell the disciples, even Peter”—who denied three times—“Jesus is going before you.” All of us can meet the resurrected Jesus.  But we must be willing to rethink everything from the start, and break all our habits and assumptions, and reach out to the strange and condemned.

Go to Galilee:  go to your roots, where you started out, and reconsider everything in light of this news. 

Go to Galilee:  go to the margins, the dregs of society.   Go to the ghetto.  Go to the other side of the tracks, where the hicks and rednecks live.  Go beyond the bounds of polite, acceptable society. 

Go to Galilee:  go to the poor, the outcast, the unclean, the unrighteous, the ignorant. 

Go to Galilee, you foolish Galilean, and the living Jesus will appear to you there.

Jesus will appear to you there, as he has promised you. 

Jesus in Galilee was all about crossing boundaries, expanding inclusion, serving those who others said deserved no service:  the oppressed, the marginalized, the persecuted.  Only by going back to our roots and retracing not our steps, but his, his steps of inclusive, wondrous love, can our eyes be opened and the mystery of the resurrection be revealed to us.  

He is not here.  But go to Galilee, and he will go before you.  And there you shall see him, just as he promised. 

In the name of Christ,  Amen.