Copyright © 1999 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
I remember my first date with my wife. We went to a movie and then sat and drank tea and talked until about 2 a.m. It became a pattern for us. We would go out on a Friday evening and I would find myself driving home in the early hours of Saturday morning. As she looks back Beth finds it a bit hard to believe, since many evenings now she sees me dozing off in front of the television at 9 o’clock. Yet it’s true. I did not want our time together to end. So I did my best to prolong those dates.
You have probably felt that same unwillingness for an experience to end. Whether it is turning toward the last page of an engrossing book, watching the final few minutes of a captivating movie, or spending the closing hours of a visit with dear friends, you know how there are moments which you wish could go on forever, never ending. Unfortunately, you’ve probably never felt that way about a sermon.
The two Marys who came to Jesus’ tomb on the first day of the week must have thought they had arrived at an ending. Verse 1 of our text tells us that they came to look at the tomb. They probably wanted to see if they could get in, given the huge stone rolled in front of the door. The other Gospels explain that they meant to make sure Jesus received proper burial rites by anointing Him with spices. They intended to let their time with Him end by spending a last hour caring for His body. They needed "closure," as we say today.
Yet how could they be ready to close this chapter of their lives? How could they accept an ending which must have seemed far too soon? Jesus was at best thirty-three years old when He went to the Cross. He was a young man from the perspective of most of us. Even then, when the average life-span was shorter, it was still too early for a brilliant, strong, healthy man to die.
In a great deal of our living, it feels as if an end comes too quickly. Even a long, long life can seem too short for all we hope and dream and share with others. My great aunt Grayce died on Wednesday. She was 95. Yet it seems like such a short time ago I was a boy sitting with her, her husband, another great aunt and my grandmother playing cards and feeling very adult to be learning the game of Pitch. Now I actually am an adult, they are all gone, and I haven’t played Pitch in years and years. Endings come too fast.
It is especially hard to reckon with one’s own ending. For perhaps a third of our lives many of us simply do not believe there is any end. And then, like a field goal reaching the top of its arc and falling short, we become more than conscious that the power of our life is fading. Slowly but surely, our minds lose their sharpness and our muscles lose their strength. After a racquetball game this week I overheard two guys in the locker room discussing an injury one of them had received playing basketball. The other one commented, "Basketball can really be a rough sport." "Yeah," said the injured man, "especially when you’re getting older." I glanced over to see that neither of these two who were lamenting the diminishing capacities of age could have been more than thirty years old!
Even the youngest among us can be exposed to the awful fact that life draws to an end. A grandparent or even a brother or sister, a mother or father can be lost much too soon in what we believe is the ordinary way of life. Though the impact is not near as painful or lasting, even the demise of a pet can bring a sense of ending home to a young person. At age seven I wept for two days after we found our parakeet dead in the bottom of his cage one morning. And this season always recalls for me the death of another pet, a beloved dog who died early on Easter Sunday while I was in college.
However, it is not just death which confronts us with ending. Like those two basketball players, we fear not just the end of life, but the end of life as we really want to live it. We are afraid of not being able to do what we would like to do, of not accomplishing what we hoped to accomplish, of not completing those goals which we thought were the very reasons for living.
I vividly recall my grandmother’s way of expressing all this. When she would get especially frustrated and angry, perhaps while wrestling the lid on a jar with arthritic hands, she would lapse into uncharacteristic profanity and exclaim, "It’s hell to get old!" It was her way of venting all the feeling that her freedom to do as she wished was coming to an end. Today it was the opening of a jar. Tomorrow it might be driving or even walking which she could no longer do for herself.
That loss of freedom we fear is another sort of death. It is the fear of life without a future. Our term for the experience is the name we post on signs for streets that go nowhere: a "dead end." We give the same name to work that allows you no chance of advancement, no possibility of moving forward into work you would enjoy more, no hope of increase in pay or benefits. We talk about being stuck in a "dead end" job.
The women who came to the tomb, as well as the disciples hiding back in the city, had arrived at what had to feel like a dead end. Not only Jesus, but all their expectations for the future had died on the Cross with Him. They came with a task for that moment, the anointing of the body, but what about tomorrow? What would they have to do the next day which might give them any hope, any future?
One answer to that question which is often foisted off on us, even as a supposedly Christian answer, is that the women and the disciples discovered a future in the belief that the spirit of Jesus lived on in them. In the hearts and minds of His followers, Jesus’ life did not come to an end, but continued on as they spread His message of peace and love. The "resurrection" of Jesus is supposed to have been the immortality of His work continuing in people’s lives down through the ages.
That sort of answer offers us a modicum of satisfaction about drawing to the end of our lives. There is a kind of immortality which comes through being loved and remembered after one is gone. There is even the occasional hope that those who come after us will do what we have had to leave undone. Recently I heard that a modern composer has penned a satisfying completion to Schubert’s "Unfinished Symphony." And those of you who love the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien know that The Silmarillion, the book we waited so long for while he was alive, was only completed and published by his son after he died.
In the end, though, all that is not very helpful. Woody Allen said, "I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying." I believe he captures our true sentiments better than a lot of yada yada about living on in the hearts of those who love us. What we really desire is to go on living ourselves. We want to be able to write the last sentence of our book, to drive the final nail in the addition we’ve been building, to sew the last stitch in that dress. Before we are ready to lie down and die we hope to win a tournament, get married, make a sale, vacation in Europe, play with grandchildren, even just have a week off to do nothing. If we only had the time.
And if it looks as though we won’t get to do those things, the things we would do if we only had time, the activities which bring those moments we wish would never end, then it doesn’t really matter if someone remembers us. The prospect of being gone and leaving it all unfinished is a dark gray sky and cold wet snow falling on it all. Immortality that does not mean going on living yourself is not much of an answer. To have a future is one of our deepest needs. As we look ahead to growing old, sick and finally dead, it dismays and disheartens us to realize that in the end that our need not to end may be left unmet.
Into this picture steps the angel which greeted the women. Verse 5 tells how, in response to their fear and worry at having reached the dead end of a tomb, he said, "Fear not. You are looking for Jesus, who was crucified." They were there because they believed that was where their Lord and Master had ended up. But the angel told them that this was not the end at all. In verse 6 he told them, "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay."
That shining messenger from heaven did not offer those women the comfort of their memories. He did not send them off to finish what Jesus had failed to accomplish before time ran out. He did not counsel them to accept the fact that Jesus was really gone. Instead, he offered them a visible and tangible proof that the end was not the end. He was not there. They could look at the place where He had been lying dead. Verse 61 of the previous chapter relates how they had watched Him put there two days before. Now they could see for themselves He was not there anymore. The story was not over.
But the best was still to come. Verse 7 continues the angel’s speech to the women, now with some directions. "Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you." The key to it all is certainly in the explicit statement that Jesus was risen from the dead. However, in the directions to be given the disciples there is the perfect answer to our need. Those simple words, "he is going ahead of you," mean the end of ending. Then, of course, the angel merely meant that Jesus would precede them to Galilee where they would all see Him alive. But there is a mighty significance in the thought that Jesus has gone ahead of us.
In his book, The Man Who Walked through Time, Colin Fletcher relates how in 1963 he walked the length of the interior of the Grand Canyon in one two-month backpacking adventure. He was the first human being ever to traverse the whole canyon on foot in one journey. But he explains that it was another man who made his trip possible. Harvey Butchart was a mathematics professor from Flagstaff who had a passion for the Grand Canyon. He made it his goal that in three and four day trips he would walk the length of our greatest national park. It took him seventeen years, but he did it. He had traveled every mile of Fletcher’s journey in bits and pieces before Fletcher ever set out.
Butchart walked the last and most difficult bit just a week before Fletcher would come to it. A series of three natural amphitheaters had looked impassable, a dead end. A couple days before he arrived at that point, though, Fletcher received the message that Harvey had done it. He had crossed the only untraveled miles left. So Fletcher writes how he came to the first amphitheater and how steep and difficult it looked, but he says, "I knew one man had already crossed… I don’t think I realized until afterward what a difference that made… Instead of hanging back… I just… moved out." He tells about one bad moment at the center where the wall became slick and steep. He could see no handholds. "I hesitated" he writes, "Then, remembering Harvey Butchart, I began to ease forward again."
At the end of the last amphitheater Fletcher found footprints ahead of him. He stooped down to look at them, then tells, "I stood up smiling. I found that my tiredness was gone. It was good to know, beyond any real shadow of a doubt, that I was following… the footsteps of a man who had blazed my trail."
The fact that Jesus has gone ahead of us through death to life is the guiding truth which makes it possible for us to continue on in our own journey. The endings we arrive at are not final. There are no dead ends in a life with Jesus Christ. He rose out of the deadest end of them all, out of the grave. And He intended for us to follow. He has gone before us and we need not fear that we will ever arrive at a final ending. He left footprints in the ground leading out of that tomb. We are always following those steps. The life He rose to was life unending and He has marked the way to unending life for you and me.
Therefore I want to invite you to live now in the assurance of the unending life God gave us when He raised Jesus from the dead. You have a future. Your life is not growing closer to an ending. It is moving ahead into a limitless and eternal future which God will keep unfolding for you forever.
An unending life with Jesus in the kingdom of God is the promise of our faith. It really ought to be as Dallas Willard says, "something we can now plan or make decisions in terms of, with clarity and joyful anticipation. In this way our future can be incorporated into our life now and our life now can be incorporated into our future." An unending life offers us a wealth of possibilities in the way we respond to our circumstances and in the choices we make for our actions. Imagine planning your life around the fact that it will not end.
However, even for we who are already solidly committed to Christ, that might ring not quite true. We do not all that often take eternal life into consideration when we have to decide about what to do today. Like my grandmother, we can grow as angry and frustrated as anyone can with the limits of what seems to be a finite life drawing to an end. And yet… we have this other wonderful way to look at it all, from the perspective of an unending life. The cry of Easter "He is risen!" reminds us of that viewpoint. He has gone before and we are going on after Him.
To be sure it is easy to ignore the perspective Easter gives us. Age and circumstances and loss and unfulfilled dreams appear to hem us in with dead ends. Willard laments the fact that so many faithful Christians end up disappointed with the way their lives turn out, because they have forgotten the perspective of unending life.
In much the same way, Karl Barth recalled in an Easter sermon a couple of Japanese soldiers who were found in the Philippine jungle fourteen years after the end of World War II. They did not know the war was over. They were still afraid for their lives, shooting at anyone who would dare approach them. "Strange people," says Barth, but we are even stranger if we fail to apprehend the implications of Easter. You have nothing to fear. The great war for the future is over and it has been decided in our favor. Christ Jesus has won it for us. It is time to come out and begin to live in that victory. You have a future.
A little glimpse of what that future will be like is revealed in the last verses of our text. Verse 8 recounts how the women left the tomb, "afraid yet filled with joy." Their spirits were somewhere between the cold fear which had struck down the guards when they saw the angel and the complete joy which the news they had heard should have given them. But then verse 9 says, "Suddenly Jesus met them." All doubt disappeared. They saw Him. They heard His greeting. And they heard His own voice tell them again not to be afraid. And I believe their fear left them for good.
We have good reason to go on with confidence and peace. What awaits us is also a sudden meeting with Jesus some day. Like they did, we will see Him. We will no longer follow footsteps marked on the path of life leading us into the future, but with our own eyes we will see the one who leads us. We will follow Him forever into a limitless and unending life which will keep unfolding in ways we have never imagined. We will live without fear. We will go forward without tiring. We will rest without boredom. We will praise without doubt.
Long ago, St. Augustine completed his long, long book The City of God, with a description of how believers in Jesus will spend eternity. He wrote, "There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the kingdom of which there is no end?"
Christ is risen! There is no ending to that story. Believe in Him and there will also be no ending to your story.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 1999 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj