An Easter blessing

He says he was born in what we now call, without prejudice, "the black church," a fellowship where Easter Sunday meant best of the "Sunday best," every last worshipper outfitted in whatever regalia they could pull together from the closet. Even though Easter never quite reached the soaring blessing-level of Christmas on the list of church holidays, it was, he says, a time for joy--and show.

In last Friday's New York Times, Esau McCaulley, who teaches history at Wheaton College, took readers, giggling, through boyhood memories, only to stop some believers cold in our Easter bonnets (believers like me), with the startling reminder that the women who went to the tomb that day weren't carrying trumpets or palm branches or singing the Hallelujah Chorus. They went off to the tomb to grieve not cheer.

The Bible is far stranger book than most of those who honor it want to believe--and it's big, it contains a cosmos. From the first day of creation to John's technicolor dreams, it's a superstore of stories and ideas, some of which get easily lost or simply left behind. In my life, I've written more devotionals, I'd guess, than your average Christian Joe, but Esau McCaulley, in the New York Times (of all places) showed me something yesterday I'd never really considered before, and that is this: the gospel of Mark ends very strangely. It concludes with a resurrection that doesn't send the disciples out canvassing but, he says, they leave instead in fear:

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Last line. End of story. 

McCaulley says it's scary for them and for us to think of Jesus as resurrected from the dead because if that's true, then, as the Misfit says in Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man. . ." if He did, it changes "everythaang." Absolutely nothing is the same as it was just a startling three days before. 

"Mark’s ending points to a truth that often gets lost in the celebration: Easter is a frightening prospect," McCaulley says. "For the women, the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead was one in which he was alive."

That's news, and it's the gospel.

He then asserts in no uncertain terms that he himself believes in "the open tomb" as a place where he can put all his fears and sadness--his George Floyd disillusionment, his disgust at attacks on Asian-Americans, at never-ending mass shootings, constant trouble at the border, and the overwhelming grieving we're doing from Covid 19, everything finally, the totality of the darkness around and within him. He can put it all in the empty tomb. It's a testimony.

I read McCaulley's essay early Sunday morning, Easter morning, and was moved. And I wasn't alone. At Easter worship yesterday, it was the centerpiece of the sermon. If you've not read it, please do.

I have never quite understood the tribulation America-first people claim with regard to, say, Christmas, that somehow the evil culture denies Christianity the esteem it expects or deserves. If you don't have cable, go to Facebook any Sunday morning and you'll find yet another superstore--just about any kind of worship you desire. If you get bored with Pentecostalism, dial up a mass. Religion and porn rule more of the world-wide web than any other content.

Ezra McCaulley teaches at Wheaton, where, not long ago, a faculty member resigned rather than face the music for divorcing his wife--it's a place with standards, a college where you can't get a job without testifying your love for Jesus, a place known, at least in part, for observant Christianity, the citadel of evangelicalism; and there were McCaulley's words, right before Easter, about the power of the open tomb, his own testimony to an entire nation from the pages of the New York Times--not fake news either, but good news from the gospel of Mark.

It was an Easter sunrise blessing.