Go Into All the World (Mark 16.9-20)

Introduction

You cannot help but notice that we make a much bigger deal of Christmas than we do of Easter.

In general culture, Christmas basically starts as soon as Halloween is over, at the start of November. Ugly jumpers and plastic Santas start to appear everywhere like a terrifying scene from a Zombie film. There’s Christmas adverts, Christmas cards, Christmas parties, Christmas bonuses, Christmas shopping, Christmas cake, Christmas crackers Christmas pudding … And of course, there’s the inexplicable annual fuss over who’s going to be Christmas Number One. Does anyone actually care about that? It all builds up to December 25th.

As for Easter, well, no one even knows what month it’s going to be in let alone the exact date. And apart from Easter eggs appearing on Boxing Day, and an Easter bunny vaguely turning up in March, the general sense of anticipation for Easter in our society is frankly underwhelming.

And it’s the same in church. Attendance at Christmas vastly exceeds attendance at Easter. And yet, Easter is infinitely more important than Christmas. I mean, while the Apostle Paul never once even mentioned Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, he said the cross and resurrection were matters of first importance.

If the first Easter actually happened like the New Testament says it did, it has prominence and precedence and pre-eminence at the very top of the short list of life’s absolutely essential things.

If it didn’t happen like the New Testament says it did, then the Bible is fake news, church is a waste of time, Christians are deluded, everyone you love who has died you will never see again and I’m no better than a snake oil salesman for what I’m saying today. But if it happened…

Simon Gathercole, Cambridge University’s leading expert on the historical evidence for Jesus wrote in The Guardian last year, that the “abundant historical references leave us with little reasonable doubt that Jesus lived and died. The more interesting question… is whether Jesus died and lived.”

The Empty Tomb

As we saw last week, one Sunday morning, as far as we can work out the dates, we’re not 100% sure, but it was very possibly 5 April 33AD, three women peer into a tomb just outside Jerusalem’s city walls. They expect to see human remains, hard and cold and possibly starting to smell unpleasant.

And what do they see? Nothing. Nothing but a discarded, bloodstained burial shroud left behind and a stranger telling them what is blindingly obvious; “Jesus is not here. That’s where he was, right there, but that was then and this is now.”

Sometime very shortly before they arrive, the most momentous chapter in world history is being written. The Bible, in Ephesians 1, describes the magnitude of that event by saying “God placed all things under Christ’s feet.”

Think about those feet for a moment.

·         those feet that first took proud little steps in his dad’s carpenter’s workshop

·         that went all over the dirty roads of an occupied land

·         that stepped towards untouchables when everyone else walked away

·         that walked on water in the middle of the night

·         that were washed by the tears and dried by the hair of a grateful and forgiven woman

·         that gave way under the weight of the cross on the way to death

·         that curled up in agony as they were smashed against the coarse wood of his cross by a nail the size of this one

·         that hung limp and lifeless as Jesus was lifted down dead from the cross

·         that turned stone cold in the cool of the tomb…

But as the sun rises on that first Easter Day, all of a sudden Jesus’ ankles begin to tingle, and his toes begin to wiggle, and his feet begin to move, and his legs begin to stretch - and he kicks off his burial shroud and walks towards the one-and-a-half ton door of the tomb which cannot stay in place as out from the grave he strides, victorious over death forever!

The First Witnesses

As I said last week, the earliest manuscripts we have of Mark’s Gospel, end abruptly, and in mid-sentence. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Hergé’s Tintin and Alph-Art are works that were never completed. We know why. Schubert and Hergé both died.

But no one knows why Mark’s Gospel lacks the ending it obviously builds up to. It’s like an Agatha Christie whodunnit that finishes with Poirot getting everyone together and saying that the murderer is in the room, but never getting revealing who it is.

So a few decades later, when the other three Gospels had been written, someone else, not Mark, decided to tidy up the ending a bit and that’s why v9-20 in our Bibles are written in italics. Scholars universally agree. Verses 9-20 were added later by someone else.

But everything in this postscript is found in the other three Gospels or in Acts except one little detail, and I take this to be the Word of God and authoritative for us.

So let’s look at it now (page 967). It says in v9 that Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene. The other three gospels all agree.

It tells us here that Jesus had delivered her of seven demons. To have one is a right pain in the neck – she had seven of them. Just think of the oppression, the burden, the constant grinding down, the heaviness, the darkness, the torment she lived with…

An ancient tradition says Mary Magdalene had been a prostitute. We don’t know - and we don’t need to know what the demons were or how she got them.

All we need to know is that when she met Jesus, at his word of his command, they had to go and her living hell was over.

No wonder she loved him! No wonder she stayed to the very end at the foot of the cross and no wonder she was first to arrive at the tomb. This was perhaps the first man she ever met to treat her with courtesy and respect as a woman and not as a commodity.

As Matthew’s Gospel also testifies, she bursts in to the house where the men are “mourning and weeping”.

So the women are up, running around, organising the whole shebang, sorting the funeral out, getting stuff done, while the men are all sitting around at home, feeling sorry for themselves and whining like puppies in a pet shop.

Not one of them has the wit to say, “Hey guys, do you remember when Jesus said he would go up to Jerusalem, be rejected, be crucified, would die, get buried and after three days rise again… well, you know he said it not once, not twice but three times… well, you know he actually did go to Jerusalem, get rejected, and crucified, died, and is now buried… well, do you think the last bit might happen as well?” They’re too busy sniffling and whimpering to even think of it.

In fact, even when Mary Magdalene tells them in v11 that he 1) is alive and 2) that she has actually seen him, they do not believe it.

Verse 12. Later that day, as Luke’s Gospel also says, two of them go for a walk to Emmaus, meet Jesus, return and tell the others. They still don’t believe it. They simply dismiss it as rubbish.

Verse 14. As John’s Gospel also says, Jesus meets with all the eleven this time. Jesus has to say, “Stop doubting, and believe.” And finally, reluctantly, uneasily and hesitantly they come to see and believe that Jesus is alive.

But as v15 and 20 say, when it all sinks in they start spreading the message over the whole then-known world. They do it during a reign of terror organised against them. They don’t fear death. They are just fine with being eaten by lions and wrapped in pitch and set aflame for torches in Nero’s garden. Because they know Jesus is alive. Death is no longer fearful or final for them.

Charles Colson was known as President Nixon's "hatchet man” and he was one of seven men jailed for his part in the Watergate scandal. Whilst doing time in the federal Maxwell Prison in Alabama, he became a Christian.

And reflecting on his experience he once said this: “I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Everyone was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely not!”

In v16 Jesus says, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”

John’s Gospel says the same thing in chapter 3. “Whoever believes in [Jesus] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”

The gospel speaks in plain language. No one can say that God has not made himself clear enough. No one can say, “Oh, why doesn’t the Bible say anything about believing? No one said anything about having to believe anything. I thought God just wanted me to be a nice person.”

Believe it or not, this point needs to be made as much in church as out of it. There are people up and down this land, faithfully attending church services week in, week out, all entirely in vain because they have never been converted.

I actually heard about someone the other week who is training as a lay assistant to conduct Christian funerals, who doesn’t really believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

That’s like someone who hates kids applying to become a teacher. Or someone who thinks what people really need is prolonged pain training as a nurse.

The Australian Professor Gerald O’ Collins says: “In a profound sense, Christianity without the resurrection is not simply Christianity without its final chapter. It is not Christianity at all.”

He’s right. If we don’t believe that Jesus died and rose again we are not Christians; we are still condemned by our sins, estranged from God and lost for all eternity.

Signs and Wonders

But wherever the good news about the risen Christ goes, there will be signs and wonders to authenticate it. Verses 17-18 summarise the entire Book of Acts, which is a documentary of the early church.

You can read in Acts about deliverance from demon possession, laying hands on the sick for healing and people speaking in tongues they haven’t learned, it’s all there. But it’s not only in the Bible. If Jesus is really alive today, he heals the sick today.

Jean Smith from Cwmbran in Wales was in her mid-sixties. She had been blind for sixteen years. She had a white stick and a guide dog. An infection had eaten away at the retinas and mirrors behind her eyes – they could not be replaced. She was in constant pain.

Jean went on a local Alpha course. On the day away, focusing on the Holy Spirit, she felt the pain leave her, though she was still totally unsighted. She went to church the following Sunday to thank God that all the pain had gone. She was anointed with oil and prayed for in Jesus’ name. And as she wiped the oil off her forehead, she noticed, to her astonishment, that she could see the communion table. God had miraculously repaired her retinas.

She had not seen her husband for sixteen years. She was shocked at how white his beard was! She had never seen her daughter-in-law before. Her six  year-old grandson used to guide her around the puddles to avoid her getting her feet wet.

He said to her, ‘Who done that Gran?’ She said, ‘Jesus made me better.’ ‘I hope you said thank you, Gran’ he said. ‘I will never stop saying thank you,’ she answered.

Ajay Gohill was brought up as a Hindu and worked for the family business in a newsagent in North London. At the age of twenty-one he contracted erythrodermic psoriasis, a chronic skin condition. His weight dropped from 11.5 stone to 7.5 stone. The disease was all over his body from head to toe. He lost all his friends. His wife and son abandoned him. He wanted to die.

But as he lay dying in hospital he cried out to God. He looked in his locker and found a Gideons Bible there. He opened it at Psalm 38.

My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly.

I am bowed down and brought very low; all day long I go about mourning.

My back is filled with searing pain; there is no health in my body.

I am feeble and utterly crushed; I groan in anguish of heart…

Lord, do not forsake me; do not be far from me, my God.

Come quickly to help me, my Lord and my Saviour.

Every verse of that Psalm seemed to be about him. He asked God to heal him and fell into a deep sleep. The next morning, he woke up, totally healed. His skin was new like a baby’s and his life was turned around. He was reunited with his son. When interviewed in a church service he said, ‘Every day I live for Jesus.’

I found a picture on social media last week of our good friend Mike Taylor from Tees Valley Youth for Christ with a 13-foot python. It reminded me of v18. I don’t think we’ll introduce snake-handling services at All Saints’ any time soon, though if you want to arrange one when I’m on holiday I have no objection… But in Acts 28, Paul was bitten by one but was unharmed.

The one thing you can’t find in either the Gospels or Acts is any witness to drinking deadly poison and surviving. Well, let’s give that a go eh?  Opens can of Red Bull and drinks… If I’m still breathing by the end of this talk, I think that might count...

Seriously though, the early church historian Eusebius wrote about Barsabas, the apostle who replaced Judas Iscariot, “drinking lethal draughts and surviving” but that’s an ancient tradition, not in the Bible, and in any case I wouldn’t try it at home.

Ending

I’d better draw to a close. And as I do, I leave you with this thought.

In every major city on this earth you will find shrines to holy men and women, famous celebrities, great heroes and outstanding leaders. Sometimes at a tomb, other times at the place where a fatal accident took place. You’ll often find memorials there with flowers, handwritten cards and candles.

It was customary for Jews in Jesus’ day to dedicate a shrine venerating the last resting place of a prophet or holy man. But nothing like this was ever done at Jesus’ tomb. No one really went there. No one gathered around the site to light candles or write prayers or shed a few tears.

I visited the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem when I was 20 years old.

As you can probably see from the picture, it’s a beautiful and quiet little space with a simple, empty 1^st Century tomb hewn into the rock. I asked one of the guides there if this is where he thought Jesus’ body had been laid, and he said, “Honestly, I really don’t know. It could be. If it’s not this one, then it would be one quite like it.”

The bottom line is this: no one knows where Jesus’ body was put. Because no one ever went there! Why would they? What would be the point? It doesn’t matter! Who cares? There’s nothing there! Jesus is alive!

That is the news the first Christians spread everywhere, turning the world upside down. And that, my friends, is the exact same message we have for our generation which is just as needy as theirs was.

Nine months ago, we began this series in Mark with the very first verse which says, “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the messiah.” The beginning of the good news is that Jesus is alive. And so can you be.

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 8 April 2018