This Is Not the End
So 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. – Mark 16:8 (NRSV)
“Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, there they will see me.” – Matthew 28:10 (NRSV)
Mark ended his masterpiece of a Gospel on a cliffhanger: a resurrection with question marks. Luke, Matthew and John, writing later, embellished the story, adding multiple appearances and new miracles by the risen Jesus. Maybe they had better intel than Mark. Maybe they created fiction for a people craving hope. Or maybe they had a lived experience of a Christ who kept showing up, shaping and saving their lives.
A double-thousand years later, we pick up these four stories and find our own resurrections in them, every year. The original Easter story has still never ended. It goes on, in endless song, above earth’s lamentations.
When the humans I love are facing hard times, which seems to be all the time these days, I am fond of lifting up the modern proverb: “Everything turns out alright in the end. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.”
We will not all survive the current apocalypse. We will not all be raised from our sickbeds or our tombs. Some of us will lose jobs or businesses we have spent a lifetime building. Marriages that might have made it otherwise, absurdly pressured by chronic stress and exhaustion, will end in divorce.
But after all of these endings, there will be new beginnings—some of them visible, tellable; others beyond the veil of earthly death.
Easter is not a history lesson with a tidy ending, but an invitation to look past death in all its disguises. After every death, new things get born. You may sometimes have a year of Good Fridays, but Easter will always arrive. It is as inevitable as sunrise after the long night.
Prayer
God, your servants didn’t write four resurrection stories, but eight billion. We are all little gospels, still being told. Thank you for telling us. Amen.
About the AuthorRev. Molly Baskette is the lead pastor of First Church Berkeley UCC and the author of books about church renewal, parenting, spiritual growth and more. Sign up for her author newsletter or get information about her newest book at mollybaskette.com.