Easter is the beginning, not the ending

My favorite Easter story is from the gospel of Mark. It is the most spare and also the oldest of the four gospels. It is written in a simple, “just the facts, ma’am” kind of style and it’s telling of the Easter story and the finding of the empty tomb are consistent with that style. In the original text, the story of the discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene, Mary moth of James and Salome ends this way: “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.”
Not very satisfactory is it? In fact it was so unsatisfactory that early church folks added two more endings and 11 more verses just to give the story a proper and logical ending. But maybe there isn’t supposed to be a neat and tidy ending to the story. Maybe that is the point of leaving the reader hanging.
Easter is not an ending after all. It is a beginning.
We Christians believe that Jesus, by his incarnation as the Son of Man, his walk with us, his crucifixion and his resurrection, broke the power of death and opened up a new path to an intimate relationship between God, our creator, and we God’s creatures. But a relationship is not an event, it is a process. One that begins with a tearing down of the walls that divide us and continues as we undertake this journey of life and love together. The story doesn’t wrap up neatly in the gospel of Mark because the story is not over.
Jesus transformed reality with his resurrection and empowered us as his sisters and brothers to enter into that changed reality, that new relationship together. No longer is God some distant and immutable being somewhere out there, because his love would not allow that distance. He is someone who has walked among us as Jesus the Man of Nazareth, become one of us that we might become one with him, suffered death as we do, a death designed for the most accursed of humanity and in so doing, drew the circle of those whom he came to save wide enough to include all of God’s creation, especially those considered the least, the last and the lost.

Yet, even with all of that, God has given us a role to play. The intimate loving relationship with God that Jesus called “abiding” is now open to all of us, and we are called to choose whether or not we will accept the invitation to enter into that relationship, to be the people we were created to be. The truth is that we haven’t done a very good job to date in holding up our end of that relationship, as the suffering and misery in the world attests. But the good news is that the resurrection was not a one-and-done event, but rather, the opening of a door to a new way of being. That door is still open and that is something to celebrate. Happy Easter to all!

Lukens is the spiritual leader of Bethany Congregational Church in East Rockaway.