What do you do when it doesn’t matter what you do?
When nothing you can do will change what has happened, what is happening?
When the forces of life and death, inertia and change, world events or entirely personal experiences are obviously beyond your control?
Mary and Mary and Salome do something anyway.
They buy spices – spices to mask the unpleasant scents of death. It’s almost certainly too late to prevent a stink, by the morning of the third day, but they buy spices anyway.
They get up early, probably when no one else is around, and go to the tomb of their friend, knowing – acknowledging to each other – that they can’t get into the tomb with their spices, anyway.
They know they can’t budge the heavy stone that seals the entrance to Jesus’ tomb.
And they go – with their spices – anyway.
They know it’s futile.
They know nothing they do is going to change the fact that Jesus is dead, murdered by the manipulation of the governing authorities. They know – probably – that their spices are hardly going to make a difference to the stink or to the process of decay, even if they could get into the sealed tomb.
I can’t tell – Mark doesn’t say – if they walked to the tomb fully aware of the weight of impossibility, or if they felt irrationally hopeful. Don’t know if they just wanted to say they tried, or if they are too numb to even think that far.
But there they are.
Doing what they do, whether it will matter or not.
And all of a sudden, the little impossible things – the smell, the heavy rock; the things they, we, can’t do anything to change – disappear into the biggest impossible thing of all.
Into what God has done.
The stone is unsealed.
The tomb is empty.
The story isn’t over.
Impossibly – impossibly – Jesus has been raised from the dead.
Is alive.
And left them – and their friends – and Peter – a message.
You will see him in Galilee – just as he told you.
It would make perfect sense if their hearts stopped for just a moment. Mine would.
I imagine the precious spices dropping from hands suddenly numb with shock, before the moment unfreezes, and they run.
Twice in one short morning Mary, and Mary, and Salome face a situation in which nothing they can do will change what has happened, what is happening.
The first time, they do something anyway.
The second time, they run away.
Leaving you and me – as we read, as we watch their story unfold – with nothing we can do to change it.
And once again, God acts.
Mark drops his pen (or his quill?) with everything unfinished. Mary and Mary and Salome running, gasping in panicked awe, their good news, their message to the disciples (to us) silenced with shock.
The tomb empty and Jesus gone.
Resurrection hanging on a cliff – the miracle accomplished, but not recognized, accepted, or rejoiced in.
It drives me crazy, that abrupt and unfinished narrative.
And I love it.
Because the only way we get from there to here – from the silenced message of the empty tomb to a church full of flowers and alleluias, to people who know death does not win, is God.
God bridging the gaps.
God changing everything when it is impossible for anything you or I could do to change anything.
I’m not sure, but I think maybe that’s why Mark stops right here.
Right here when awe and shock leave the story incomplete,
the story of what humans do stops,
and you and I – with Mary and Mary and Salome, and the other disciples and Peter – we hang on the edge of what God does.
The story – this story, your story and mine – are entirely in the hands of God.
And in the hands of God, everything changes.
Death – the one eternal certainty (besides taxes) – death is canceled.
Life expands – life becomes full of the impossible, breaks realistic and practical into scattered fragments, and sweeps us into God’s reality, where every moment is full of the glory of eternity.
Where joy will always have the last word, even when we have no words to claim that joy.
I don’t know about you, but I need this now.
These days, this world is so jammed with things I can’t do anything to change.
Full of forces I can’t stop or slow, immovable stones I can’t get leverage on.
Wars and atrocities, devastating weather and tragic accidents – both on a global and a personal scale. Constant assaults on human dignity, and on our ability to trust one another, on TV and social media, in legislatures and courts, at a scale I can’t figure out how to mitigate – on my own or with others.
Every day, like Mary and Mary and Salome, I – maybe you? – have to figure out what I do when faced with those things where nothing I can do will matter.
Sometimes, we can act.
We can buy spices to make the mess a little more livable. We can care for someone else, in the face of the things we cannot change.
We can show up, even where there’s every reason to expect that we can’t get past the barricade – of a stone on a tomb, of official indifference, of money, of social inertia.
This probably matters more than it seems to.
But what I need, what we need, I believe, is to enter this story, and to come face-to-face with the reality of miracles, the startling, gut-punching awe of God doing the impossible.
I need (we need) to stand in front of what God has done, is doing, can do, bring that once-and-far-away wonder right into the middle of all of our own impossibilities.
I can’t promise you that when you walk into your next impossible, you’ll find all the barriers knocked down, endings obliterated, and a world of possibility in front of you.
But I can’t promise that you won’t, either.
I can only leave you where Mark leaves us, suspended in the moment where God must act. Leaves us in the hands of God.
The only place where death is canceled.
Where every moment – every unfixable moment, every ordinary moment – is edged with the glory of eternity. And where joy will always have the last word, whether we ourselves are indifferent, or awe-stunned and silent, or whether we cannot keep ourselves from singing, whispering, shouting: Alleluia!
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