Spectators and Spect-actors
April 5, 2015 | Patrick Preheim

Let’s pray…Risen Christ, the vacant cross and empty tomb show us that the love that suffers is the love that saves.  So fill us with joy and faithful witness that the world may know that you are not a dead hero we commemorate but the living Lord we worship, to whom be the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever.  Amen

Mark’s gospel gives us rather shocking news on Easter morning.  Those interested in “seeing” the risen Christ will have to move from being spectators to being “spect-actors”.  That is right—we won’t find Jesus in tomb or in a sunrise service or plate of paska.  No, he will be found back in Galilee on the road of discipleship.  As we return to Galilee and follow after Jesus again we will indeed behold the crucified one raised.  As we learn again to imitate Jesus we will experience death being swallowed up.  As we learn again to speak like Jesus we will see the dead raised.  And this will require of us a shift from simply watching Jesus from the side-lines to taking the field ourselves.  This is the powerful and most challenging Easter message found in Mark’s gospel.  And lest you think I am mad for making such claims let me show how it is I get there from the text of Mark’s Easter story.

There is a lot of looking in the last verses of Mark’s gospel.

• 15.40 Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Joses, and Salome watch (θεωρέω) the death of Jesus.
• 15.47 Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw (θεωρέω) where the body was laid.
  
• 16.4 The women look up (ἀναβλέπω) to see (θεωρέω) the stone rolled away.
  • Three of these four references to watch or see are the same, and the lead translation in the Greek lexicon is “to be a spectator” (Harold Moulton’s Analytical Greek Lexicon).  The seeing continues in the rest of chapter 16.
• 16.5 The women see (ὁράω) see a young man dressed in white in the tomb.
  
• 16.6 The young man points out the place they laid Jesus directing the women to look (ὁράω).
  
• 16.7 The young man tells the women that if they want to truly see (ὁράω) the risen Christ they should go to Galilee. 

These three references for seeing or looking are a different word which has the connotation of awareness, almost a spiritual perception (Bilbos lexicon:  3708 horáō – properly, see, often with metaphorical meaning: "to see with the mind" (i.e. spiritually see), i.e. perceive (with inward spiritual perception).  These three references are all connected to the young man in a white robe pointing the female and male disciples back to Galilee. 
Ah, Galilee, that place where it all began.  Jesus is baptized by John in Galilee.  It is in Galilee that Jesus called his disciples.  It was from Galilee that Jesus began his public ministry.  Those interested in “seeing” the risen Christ will have to move from being spectators to being “spect-actors” back on the road of discipleship.  Back in Galilee following after Jesus and learning to imitate him they will meet the risen Christ and develop spiritual perception.

I pause in my biblical exposition to offer a personal story from this past month one way this stuff works in the real world.  Those part of congregational leadership or who follow denominational politics know that our Mennonite Church Saskatchewan annual meeting mid March had its share of drama.  Because Anita and I presided at Matt & Craig’s wedding were the focus of one motion.  No one likes to named in this way at a delegate assembly, almost a type of public shaming, and for me it brought back memories of similarly difficult episodes from ministry in a previous congregation—a type of pastoral PTSD.  In the past the emotional stress has left me fearful, eager to run away from the assembly, unable to speak; a lot like the women of today’s story.  An additional decade of bible study, reflection of the lives of the saints, and plain old maturity caused me to consider other options this time around.  I decided to go back to Galilee. I decided that throughout the delegate assembly I would intentionally seek out people from congregations concerned with us (Matt 5.47).  I decided that I would do what Jesus told us to do and offer a blessing to them and their congregations rather than curse (Luke 6.28).  I would choose to love an potential enemy (Matt 5.44).  I decided that I would not judge (Matt 7.1).   I was surprised at the results.  Following these instructions of Jesus led to a transformation within me.  I felt stronger on the inside.  I didn’t feel threatened externally.  I felt a trust in God to sort things out over the long haul.  It was a type of resurrection moment in which the risen Christ was so present and also a resurrection moment in which I felt renewed as a disciple of Christ.  Unfortunately I do not always And that takes me to another major feature in Mark’s Easter story:  the young man dressed in white.

The women find a chap sitting on “the right side”—the right side of what dare I ask?  Being on the right side, it seems, should be enough information for us Mark figured.  Throughout Mark’s gospel “sitting at the right” had been the place of true authority which the male disciples had coveted (Ched Myers, Say to the This Mountainm p. 207).  James and John asked Jesus for the opportunity to sit at his right hand (10.37).  Jesus quotes Psalm 110 about sitting at the right hand of God (12.36).  And Jesus answered the high priest that “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power” (14.62). And now we have a mysterious young man sitting at the right hand of the empty spot previously occupied by Jesus. He is at the right hand of the recently risen Christ as authority and witness to the resurrection.  He is at the right hand of Jesus even as Jesus is at the right hand of God.   Is this the same “young man” who ran away naked at Jesus’ arrest?  The naked young man who was a symbol of betrayal in the garden?   I think so.   The difference is that dressed in a white cloth and he is no longer shamefully naked. 

The naked disciple lost his linen cloth (σινδόνα) as he fled the garden (14.51-52).   Jesus was wrapped in a linen cloth (σινδόνα) and placed in the tomb.  The young man is wearing a fancier cut of cloth worn by priests, kings and those of distinction (Harold Moulton’s Analytical Greek Lexicon).   It is the same cut of cloth we hear the faithful witnesses wearing in John’s Revelation (7.9,13).  It is the same color of those robes from the Revelation and the same color as the transfigured Jesus (Mark 9.3).  In fact, the disciple has been transfigured from fearful to faithful.  How?  He tells us.  Go back to Galilee and go through the discipleship training once more.  In Galilee on the trail we will find the risen Christ and be transformed. 

The women must have gone back to Galilee.  The disciples must have gone back to Galilee.  We know this for several reasons.  Textually we know this because have a white robed disciple seated at the right hand of Jesus who has been redeemed through the furnace of faith filled discipleship.  Historically we know this because the early church grew as they channeled the spirit of the risen Christ in acts of charity, compassion, and martyrdom.  The proof is in the pudding.  Again, how do disciples get redeemed and clothed in white robes in the real world?  I close with the story of Mother Maria Skobtsova (in Robert Ellsberg’s All Saints, pp 144-145).

The story of Mother Maria Skobtsova is like a tale in three acts, each with its own drama and each revealing different dimensions of her extraordinary personality.  In the first act, she was born Lisa Pilenko into a prosperous aristocratic family in Russia.  In this life she was a distinguished poet and a committed political activist who married twice, first to a Boshevik whom she eventually divorced, later to an anti-Bolshevik, from whom she was later separated.  During the revolutionary upheaval, she served as mayor of her hometown, in the process risking persecution from both the Left and the Right.  In 1923, with her three young children she joined the throng of refugees uprooted by revolution and civil war and made her way to Paris.  Soon after her arrival, her youngest daughter, Nastia, died of meningitis.  The impact of this loss initiated a profound conversion.  She emerged from her mourning with a determination to seek “a more authentic and purified life.”  She felt she saw a “new road before me and a new meaning in life,…to be a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection.”

In Paris she became deeply immersed in social work among the destitute Russian refugees.  She sought them out in prisons, hospitals, mental asylums, and in the back streets of the slums.  Increasingly she emphasized the religious dimension of this work, the insight that “each person is the very icon of God incarnate in the world.”  With this recognition came the need “to accept this awesome revelation of God unconditionally, to venerate the image of God” in her brothers and sisters.”…

Her house became a center not only for the works of mercy but for the renewal of Orthodoxy.  While her kitchen was crowded with the down and out, her drawing room was the scene of spirited discussions among the leading émigré intellectuals of Paris.  Out of these discussions a new movement was born, Orthodox Action, committed to realizing the social implications of the gospel…

The third and shortest act of Mother Maria’s life began with the German occupation of Paris in 1940.  In the context of Nazi racism, her commitment to seek out and revere each person as the icon of God assumed a deliberately subversive meaning.  Aside from her usual work of hospitality, she was aided by her chaplain, Father Dimitri Klepinin, in rescuing Jews and other political refugees.  These efforts, linked to the organized Resistance, continued until they were arrested by the Gestapo in 1943.  Maria was sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, whre she managed to live for almost two years under conditions cruelty…Though stripped of her religious habit, she remained the nurturing mother, strengthening the faith and courage of her fellow prisoners and helping to keep alive the flame of humanity in the face of every calculated assault.

In becoming a nun Maria had said, “I think service to the world is simply the giving of one’s own soul in order to save others.”  Now in her hunger, illness, and exposure to the elements, she found the ultimate destination of her vocation.  In light of the redemptive suffering of Christ she found a meaning to her own suffering.  As she wrote in a message smuggled out of the camp, “My state at present is such that I completely accept suffering in the knowledge that this is how things ought to be for me, and if I am to die I see in this a blessing from on high.”… [She was further quoted as saying, “I am your message, Lord.  Throw me like a blazing torch into the night, that all may see and understand what it means to be a disciple.”]

On the eve of Easter, [March 31, 1945] days before the liberation of the camp by Russian troops, Mother Maria perished in the gas chamber of Ravensbruck. 

Christ is risen.  He continues the redemption of followers who have fled in terror—in the garden and from the tomb.  He lives in and ministers through the multitude of disciples who have willingly turned their backs on the empty tomb in favor of life on “the Way”.  He asks us to be more than spectators; he invites us to be actors in this great drama.  May he have the courage to join him on the Way. 

Amen.