5 April 2026

So What?

Mark 16:1-8

The oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark all end abruptly with chapter 16, verse 8. For our reading today, we’ll assume that that was intentional. We read Mark 16, verses 1-8.

16 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ 4When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6But he said to them, ‘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. 7But 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.’ 8So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. That’s why we’re here today at church. That’s what we celebrate at Easter. It is the heart of Christianity and has been at the center of Christian teaching from the very beginning. In brief, here’s what happened. Jesus of Nazareth was killed by Roman soldiers on a cross. He was all the way dead. They jabbed a spear up into him to make sure. Then, after two nights of being dead, he wasn’t dead anymore. He was alive again. But he wasn’t just alive again; he was alive differently. Other people had been raised from death – Jairus’s daughter, Lazarus, some kids back in the days of Elijah and Elisha – but they were brought back to the same life they had left. Eventually they all died again. But what happened to Jesus was different. He wasn’t restored but transformed to a new kind of life that we can only glimpse briefly in the reports of those who encountered Jesus after he rose. Evidently, he was recognizable, but not by sight. People who recognized him did so by seeing him do something familiar or by hearing him call their name. He was physical and material, but not in the same way. You could touch him, feel him, and see old scars on his flesh. He could eat and drink. But at the same time, he was not restricted by physical barriers like walls or locked doors. Jesus was raised from the dead, but he was raised to a new kind of life, marked by a new and qualitatively different sort of body that no longer was affected by time or decay or death. He was the same person, still physical, and yet utterly transformed.

Paul takes that a step further. He says that Christ rose as the “first fruits of those who die.” Because of Christ’s resurrection, the old laws of physics, the ones that still govern our visible world, will be set aside in the same way for us. We, too, will be transformed to that new kind of physicality. This is the meaning of Easter. That day began the process of complete transformation of matter and time. The move toward a complete renewal of the universe – a new heaven and a new earth – has begun. It began on the Third Day after Jesus of Nazareth died.

This, as you can see, is rather a big deal. It’s an audacious belief with cosmic implications. So why does the Gospel of Mark treat it so ambiguously? It’s not that Mark isn’t sure about the resurrection. In that gospel, Jesus explicitly teaches his disciples about it ahead of the event three times. But when it came to recording the actual event, all we get from Mark is an empty tomb and a young man in white clothes (not even explicitly an angel) telling the women that he’s risen as he said, and they ought to go tell his disciples. Then, in the ultimate anticlimax, the gospel ends with these words: And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. 

Why so low key? This is big! This is what the whole book has been leading up to. Why would Mark end it like that? Here’s what I think. Mark was the earliest of the four gospels, written maybe 20 years before Matthew and Luke, who were themselves some 20 years before John. At the time Mark wrote, the church was expanding – through the ministry of Paul and others – but was still small, insignificant, struggling, and fighting amongst themselves about things like how Jewish the church should be. In short, it was not yet clear if this church thing was going to take. Mark wasn’t sure if Jesus’ transformation was going to be catching. The jury was still out on whether Christ’s resurrection was going to make any difference either in the world or in his followers’ lives. So Mark ends with an open question: Jesus rose. What difference will that make? Jesus rose: so what?

In the millennia since that day we have seen untold thousands of individual lives transformed in breath-taking ways by the power of Christ’s first transformation. So we know now that this big thing really is, or at least can be, as big as it sounds. But that doesn’t release us from Mark’s question. Say Jesus did rise from the dead. What difference does that make to us? So what?

A few years ago, when I was serving in Wausau, a young man from the community who had some questions about faith stopped by the church, found my office door open and stepped in. Over the next few weeks, I met with him several times. Call him Nick. Nick was curious about faith. He figured there was something here. As he put it: “You can’t get six guys together for pickup basketball, but you can get hundreds together every week in church. Why? What do they find here?” But Nick was also too smart to settle for “something.” He wanted to know what. At one point he asked me this question: “I can tell you what you’re missing by being a believer – open-mindedness, tolerance for people who are different from you, the ability to embrace new ideas. Can you tell me what I’m missing by not believing?”

Could you answer that? Here’s what we should say. By following Christ, we are given purpose and meaning. What we do with our lives matters now, and not just now – what we do matters beyond the few short years we have on earth. We are in the process of being transformed to a new being, a process that does not stop at death. By following Christ, we are also given a wider perspective on the world. As Christ loves the whole world, so we as Christ-followers are given love for those beyond our own circle of friends and family. We are being transformed into the image of Christ’s love, a wider and wilder love than any other. No one can love more intensely than one who has been crucified with Christ and raised to walk in newness of life. As Christ followers, we are granted an assurance and peace that reaches beyond the normal human obsessions with status and wealth. That’s what we should say. But here’s the thing. If we said it, would anyone believe us? Would they look at us, at our lives, and say, “Yeah, that tracks”? We can’t talk about how we are being transformed into the image of the Risen Christ unless we are. 

Which is a problem. Because that was obviously not what Nick had seen. His question contained in it a condemnation. He evidently saw Christians as frightened people, clinging to the old and afraid of the new. He saw Christians as exclusive and angry, more likely to hate people who are different and consign them to hell than to love them the way Christ did. Now I could point out to Nick – well, in fact, I did – that the loud, obnoxious public face that some Christians show does not represent all of us. And he was even willing to agree that a few were making us all look bad. But it didn’t really matter. The problem was that Nick hadn’t seen enough examples of people living transformed lives of love to counter the examples of those public nuisances. Again, we can’t talk about Christ’s resurrection, unless Christ’s transformation is becoming true in the way we live our lives every day.

This Sunday, in thousands of churches across America, preachers are preaching a standard Easter sermon in which they trot out logical and scientific reasons that you ought to believe that the resurrection really happened. Maybe you’ve heard that sermon. It’s been around a while. Here’s what I have to say to those preachers who’ve taken that one out and polished it up for another ride: Nobody cares! Nobody cares if we can prove our faith by logic or science! What people care about is whether we show it! A few years ago the Barna Research Group did an intensive study of young people who had left church. Let me read you a quotation from a college student interviewed in that study, named Emma:

I want you to be someone I want to grow up to be like. I want you to step up and live by the Bible’s standards. I want you to be inexplicably generous, unbelievably faithful, and radically committed. I want you to be a noticeably better person than my humanist teacher, my atheist doctor, my Hindu next-door neighbor. I want you to sell all you have and give it to the poor. I want you to not worry about your health like you’re afraid of dying. I want you to live like you actually believe in the God you preach about. I don’t want you to be like me; I want you to be like Jesus. That’s when I’ll start listening. (Kinnaman, You Lost Me, 232).

There’s our “So what?” challenge: to be, like Christ, visibly transformed people. Now the good news is that some of you are. I look around every Sunday morning and I see those people. I see the Resurrection in lives that have been changed and are continuing to be changed into new creations. And I am grateful for your example. You give me something to reach for. You help me believe. 

Here’s what we can’t do. We can’t come to church on Easter and say that we believe in Christ’s resurrection, then go home and live exactly like everyone else. If your life is not being transformed toward Christ’s transformation, then stop saying “I believe.” That’s not helping. Our task isn’t to convince people to believe; our task is to show people why it matters. Our task is to be the so what. Christ is risen. Now, in our lives, let him be risen indeed.