Alleluia, Christ is risen!

"To live in the light of resurrection-that is what Easter means." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia! Christ has been resurrected! He has broken the chains that enslaved him, the chains that enslave us all-sin, death, evil of every kind. God has acted to set him free, and through him, all of us have been set free as well!

This is the joyous message of Easter, the central feast day of the Christian year. But no matter how many times we hear that message, it is still incredibly hard to wrap our minds around it-let alone work out the implications for our lives. And if it is hard for us, after almost 2000 years of Christianity, think of how hard it was for the women on that first Easter to grasp what had just happened or what it meant. They had watched Jesus die a horrific death. They had accompanied his poor broken body to the tomb and watched as the entrance to the tomb was sealed with a great stone. They went home because they couldn't do anything more on the Sabbath. As soon as the Sabbath ended, they made their way back to the tomb to do the last thing they could for their beloved Jesus-they brought spices to anoint his body. But when they got there, the tomb stone had been rolled away and the tomb was empty.

In the gospel reading, we hear that they were "alarmed." But the Greek is much stronger-it says they were utterly amazed. A young man, a stranger dressed in white who was sitting by the tomb, told them not to be amazed. He instructed them to go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead to Galilee and will meet them there, just as he had told them he would. But they disobeyed this instruction. In fact, "They fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

And this is where Mark's gospel ends. We are left hanging on this note of fear and suspense. We don't know what happens next.

Mark is the earliest of the four gospels and it is the most blunt and realistic about human nature. The theme of human fear, disobedience and lack of comprehension are woven throughout the gospel. But this ending is still shocking and disturbing. The women are terrified and flee, and tell no one. No wonder the three other gospel writers preferred a different version of events, in which the women run to tell the other disciples. And early Christian scribes who were unsettled by Mark's ending and added a few paragraphs to soften the impact. If you look in your Bibles, you will find an alternative, longer ending to Mark. But scholars are pretty sure that Mark ended the good news with shocked silence.

I like Mark's ending, because it reminds us that resurrection is completely outside our experience. It violates the laws of nature. Resurrection is something brand new in the universe. It is a new mode of life, as new as the first appearance of organic life.

Resurrection does not simply mean that our spirits survive after death. Many people in Jesus' day already believed in the continuation of our spirits after death. In fact, Jesus was mistaken for a ghost several times after he was raised from the dead, but the gospels are clear that resurrection is not ghost survival but a new kind of life.

It's hard to comprehend what that means. First, there is the issue that we have never experienced anything like it. Our experience is that we bury people and they stay there. Resurrection is contrary to everything we know about human existence and death. But the biggest challenge in believing in the resurrection is not intellectual. If God chooses to raise the dead, then who are we to say that it is impossible? The greater challenge for us is trust. Do we dare to take the leap of faith and trust God? Do we dare to hope that the good news Jesus came to give us is true? It is hard for us to trust good news-it is much easier for us to believe in bad news. That's why our newspapers hardly ever report good news-it seems like an aberration and the person reporting it seems like a naïve optimist. As John Cleese of Monty Python fame said in one of his movies, "Despair I can handle. It's hope that does me in."

We are so conditioned to expect the worst that when something amazing happens it's hard for us to take it in, let alone trust it. Perhaps part of the women's fear that morning was that they were dreaming - that it couldn't be true.

We have the same choice before us that those women did that first morning. Will we trust in the good news? Will we put our faith in God who has given us a sign that we are loved with a love that is powerful enough to overcome death and evil? Will we enter into the new life that God is offering us?

Or will we run away, too afraid to trust, and too stuck in the way we see the world to open our minds to what God is doing? Not just what God did a long time ago, but what God is doing now, here, among us, and among the people we meet each day. Resurrection is not just a one time event-it is something that is available to us now. There is resurrection life in a part of our souls that most people don't dare go to.

The gospel of Mark leaves us hanging because the story is ongoing-we still have a choice to make, and each of us still has our own chapter to add. Mark leaves the future open-ended because the future is up to each one of us. We can step into resurrection life at any moment, and let the risen Christ transform us.

We don't know fully what that resurrection life will look like because it is still a work in progress. It began with Jesus' resurrection and it is still coming into being. But Mark's gospel gives us a hint. The young man tells the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee and there they will meet Jesus. The gospel begins in Galilee, so the young man's instruction functions like musical notation at the end of a piece of music that tells you to go back to the beginning and play it again. In other words, if you want to see Jesus, and begin to live the resurrection life, go back to the beginning of the gospel and read it again. It is in telling and retelling our story in the company of the faithful that we begin to see the risen Lord and the new life that he opened to us. Like the disciples, we gather to hear Jesus teach, we are fed by him, and we are healed by him. He gives us power to care for the poor, the weak and the helpless as he did. He strengthens us to speak truth to power and bring about justice in the world. He draws us into intimacy with God, so we can give ourselves in love as he did. If we trust in him, and in his resurrection, our lives will be transformed. We will be raised from the dead to lead a fuller and richer life, a life of passion, creativity and above all, love. It will not be business as usual, it will be a new way of being.

We may even find the courage to speak up and spread the good news and invite others into this new mode of life. After all, the women who fled terrified that first Easter finally overcame their fear, and found their voices. They must have told someone. If they hadn't, we wouldn't be here.