Let us pray: O God, take these words and use them - may they come alive with your power and your presence - may they help us to be your people. Amen.

    Like reading the last chapter of a mystery novel and then going back to read from the beginning, we cannot truly understand what it must have been like for the women who showed up at the tomb. Unlike us, they did not know what had happened. In such a situation, the fear that overtook them, as described in Mark’s version of the story, is easily understood.

    That all sounds plausible until you think about it just a bit more. That’s the kind of paragraph I would start with if I simply wanted to interpret the story as an incident by incident account of what happened on that Easter morning. With Mark, it’s never too difficult to take the story at a basic level. He doesn’t say much beyond what needs to be said - with one interesting exception. I’ll get to that in a moment.

    The first complicating factor is that the story was written many decades after it all happened. Even though a vast majority of scholars agree that the gospel of Mark was the first of the four gospels to be written, it was still not likely produced until at the earliest some sixty plus years after the events it describes. While it sounds like a breathless description of events just happened, we can attribute that more to the skill of the writer and the mood that he wanted to convey than we can to the timing of the material therein described.

    The second complicating factor goes back to that seemingly throwaway assertion that may have just passed you by unnoticed. Let me quote myself, “Unlike us, the women did not know what had happened.” Did I fool you with that one the first time? For you see, there is in that statement an assumption, and we all know how dangerous assumptions can be. The assumption is that we do indeed know what happened. On one, very basic level, perhaps we know what happened. But the real mystery is that you can read the last chapter first, then read the story from cover to cover, four different version of it, and perhaps even a fifth version of it, if the news this week about a Gospel of Judas is really true, or a sixth if you include the Gospel of Thomas, and the mystery is not really revealed in the last chapter any more than it is in the first or any of the chapters in between.

    That doesn’t bother me. My faith can handle a certain amount of mystery. In fact, I’m not sure what my faith would do without some mystery to keep it alive.

    There’s one other little mystery in the story as Mark tells it. I alluded to it a moment ago when I said that Mark’s account, like the rest of his gospel is remarkably succinct and straightforward, except for one little statement. Mark says that the women were afraid. They fled the tomb and said nothing to anyone. So, my inquiring mind wants to know: How did Mark know that they said nothing to anyone unless one of them told him or someone? Such are the questions that lead to good doctoral dissertations I think.

    I don’t know what happened on the first Easter. Even if one of the women eventually overcame here fear and told someone, I still don’t know what happened. Something happened - I don’t doubt that. It was big enough that writers were ready to write about some six or seven decades later. It was big enough that Luke could write in the book of Acts about Peter’s dream and what that dream told him about the meaning of what happened at the empty tomb on Easter morning. It was big enough that we’re still talking about it, that it still forms a centrepiece of our own story. It was big enough to merit newscasts which start with stories about Easter around the world. It was big enough to draw people to gather in special places for sunrise services in practically every place big enough to have even a few followers of the Christian faith all around the world.

    My questions don’t concern themselves with events of many hundreds of years ago. The bigger mysteries for me are eminently solvable right now. They start, however, with a question that comes right out of the story.

    The young man, dressed in a white robe, is sitting on the right side of the tomb. Among other things, he says: “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

    Apparently, the women were too afraid to ask any more questions. But if they had, we might assume it would be something like this: “So, where is he?”

    And that’s the question I want to ask - a question that arcs its way across the ages to this very moment. “Where is he?” For you see, we are an Easter people. We are an Alleluia people. We are people who claim a role as members of the body of Christ. It’s not about the answer to a mystery from that first Easter. It’s not even about the answer to the question about why it took up to seventy years for the gospel stories to get written about it. It’s not about the answer to who among the women got over their fear enough to tell someone what had happened. It is about how we answer that question with the actions of our lives. Who would even worry about what happened back then, if they could see the Christ alive in the way we live out the love of God in the world?

    On this Easter I am not thinking about what happened those two thousand or so years ago. I only need to know that something very powerful spoke to people. It percolated for seventy years, lived out in community worship and action, until someone named Mark wrote it down for us. I am thinking far more about where the Christ is present in our world. For example, I am thinking about Christian Peacemakers. Tom Fox - tragically executed before he could be set free, Norman Kember and Canadians James Loney, and Harmeet Singh Sooden who risked their lives in order to share their vision of what a Christ-like witness should be. I am thinking about the other Christian Peacemaker teams in various parts of the world, including those who are living with people in Palestine to make sure that the stories of ordinary people are getting told, to make sure that we don’t just have the propaganda put out by people who have power and pull with the media. I am thinking about people who are living out their faith in many other ways - in partnership with other Christians in many different parts of the world. I am thinking about people who risk stigmatisation and credibility by working with HIV/AIDS victims and survivors on the devastated continent of Africa. I am thinking about the risen Christ I see all around me, and wondering what I can do to be the Christ that I see there. I am thinking about groups like Kairos, an interdenominational organisation that is helping us to see the call to work for justice in the world, and co-ordinating and supplying resources so that we can see the power, beauty and trouble surrounding water in our world. I am thinking about the challenge that God has given us to be people of the way - a way shown to us by Jesus, a way that as Peter saw in his dream and told to the people who were listening - that God shows no partiality. That is the Easter message I am hearing in my life! Those are my alleluia moments. So, where is he?...
... ... Amen.