Mark 16:1-8
“Grandmother, tell me again. Tell me again what happened.” Two women, one young, one old, sat in the shade of the tree.
“Where do you want me to start? From Bethlehem? From the Jordan River?”
“From the donkey. Tell me your part.”
Grandmother laughed. Hannah loved the story about the donkey.
“Ah, yes, the donkey. Jesus was going to Jerusalem, and we all went with him. We always did. Wherever he went, we followed. … He stopped outside Bethany and sent a couple of the disciples into town. They were to bring back a donkey. When they did …”
“Grandmother, tell me about the donkey. Don’t skip that part.”
They both laughed. “It seems the two disciples saw a young donkey tied up beside a house. They untied it and started back. The owner stopped them. ‘Where are you taking my donkey?’ ”
Grandmother always used a stern voice for the man, and Hannah clapped her hands.
“They didn’t know the man, did they?”
“No, and he didn’t know them. He thought they were trying to steal his donkey right out from under his nose.” She touched her finger to Hannah’s nose. “So what did they say?”
Hannah knew the words. “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.”
“Now may I go on?” Grandmother asked. Hannah nodded.
“So Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem. We all followed. The men put their cloaks and branches on the ground, so the donkey wouldn’t put his feet in the dirt. And we shouted, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’
“Then Jesus went back to Bethany, and …”
“Skip all that, Grandmother. Go to the bad part.”
“I wasn’t out with them in Gethsemane, but Andrew told me about it. Jesus was praying, and a group of men came out and took him away to the high priest. From there they took him to Pilate, the Roman authority. The crowd, those men from the high priest and some others they gathered off the street, … the crowd wanted Jesus crucified, so Pilate gave in. He had Jesus flogged and then taken out to Golgotha. When Jesus couldn’t carry the crossbeam any longer, they had Simon of Cyrene carry it.”
Tears came to Grandmother’s eyes as she remembered what followed. “Some of us women stood nearby and watched. It was horrible. I … There were three men being executed that day. They put Jesus in the middle. People mocked him.
“About noon, the sun disappeared. It wasn’t just clouds covered it over, but darkness … It was like something had eaten the sun. We could barely see anything. And then … in the middle of the afternoon, Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ We all felt forsaken, because then Jesus died.”
Hannah wiped tears from her own eyes. “Then they took his body and put it in a tomb, didn’t they?”
“Yes, Hannah. We followed, so we would know. We couldn’t do anything over the Sabbath, but the next day, … the next day we would bring the spices.”
Grandmother stopped, and Hannah waited. She knew to let the older woman have some time to grieve again.
“Then, on the first day of the week, Mary wondered who we could get to roll away the stone. It didn’t matter, because we were determined. The Marys and I gathered our spices and went back to the tomb. And then …”
This was another place where Grandmother needed time to remember, time to wonder, time to relive the moment. Hannah waited patiently, but after several minutes she put her hand on Grandmother’s knee.
“Oh, yes.” Grandmother smiled at her. “Sorry.”
“But the stone was already rolled away, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, child. When we went in, we saw a young man dressed in a white robe. He wasn’t Jesus, and Jesus wasn’t there. And he told us …”
Grandmother and granddaughter said the words at the same time. “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. But 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.”
Hannah repeated the “go” part: “ ‘Go, tell his disciples and Peter …,’ but you didn’t, did you? You didn’t tell them, did you?”
Grandmother’s head dropped. “No, we didn’t. We were afraid. Afraid of the young man. He would have been an angel. We’d never seen an angel. Afraid of the disciples. We knew they would not believe us. But mostly, mostly, afraid of what the angel said. What did it mean, ‘he has been raised’?
“We could see that he was not there. The body Joseph had placed in the tomb was gone. There was no body. But where was it? We knew Jesus was dead. That was obvious. We watched Joseph put the body in the tomb. We saw the men roll the stone into place. We knew it was there. When someone is dead, they are dead. They are not raised.”
A thought occurred to Hannah, one she had not expressed before. “But Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb. And after four days, when his spirit would already be gone.”
Grandmother paused in thought. “Yes, but Jesus did all kinds of miracles when he was alive. He gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf. He made the lame able to walk again. He healed the lepers. But he wasn’t alive anymore, so … how could he?”
Hannah shook her head. “But Grandmother, he was alive again, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, child, he was … and is.”
“So how did the disciples find out? Why did they go to Galilee? And you went, too, didn’t you?”
“It was Mary Magdalene. She didn’t tell them that Jesus had been raised, because they would not have believed her. Instead, she reminded them what Jesus had told them the night before he was crucified. We were there, serving their meal, so we heard, too, that he said he would go before them to Galilee.
“They hesitated, they argued, but they went. And because we had always gone with them, we went too. … And there he was. We all saw him.”
Several minutes passed while the two women sat in silence.
“So what does that mean, Grandmother?”
“Ah, child, you think it’s just a story, a wonderful story. And it is. But it’s more than story. It’s … it really happened. I saw it with my own eyes. Jesus was dead, and then he wasn’t. He was very much alive.”
“But what does that mean?”
Grandmother thought a moment. She had never before tried to express what it meant. She knew what it meant to her. She knew that it meant something to the other women. But what would it mean to Hannah, who only knew about Jesus through what Grandmother told her? How did she explain the importance of it?
“It means … You asked how Jesus could raise himself. He couldn’t. He was dead. But God could. And God did.”
She steepled her hands in front of her face. “God did to show the world that everything that Jesus did, everything that Jesus said, all the healings, all the teachings, that was all God working through Jesus. Jesus was acting under God’s authority all the time, doing what God wanted him to do. Even when other people didn’t like what he did.
“When Jesus healed on the Sabbath, that was because, like Jesus said, people are more important than rules. He had the opportunity to do something good then, right there, and he wasn’t going to throw it away because it was the wrong day. There is never a wrong time to do a good thing, to help someone in need.
“What Jesus taught, about loving our enemies, about doing good to those who harm us, that’s what God wants us to do. People were sick and disabled, not because God was punishing them, so Jesus, doing God’s work, healed them. The poor and the widows, God wants us to help them, so Jesus did what he could. When Jesus told us to love our neighbors, it’s what God said back in the days of the prophets.
“So when the authorities killed Jesus, God raised him again to tell them they were wrong.”
Grandmother bowed her head for a moment.
“But they haven’t figured that out yet, have they, Grandmother?”
“Sadly, no, child. And that’s our job, to keep spreading the word, to keep letting people know how much God loves them, and to keep doing whatever we can to help others, like Jesus did.”
“It’s not easy, is it?”
“No. And sometimes the world fights back. Often people don’t want to hear what Jesus said, because it is hard. But don’t run away, child, because you are afraid. God will be with you, as God was with Jesus.”
General Questions
1) How does this story follow its Scripture?
2) How does this story expand its Scripture for you?
3) What is the message of this story?
4) How does the message apply to us today?
Specific Questions
- Why would the donkey’s owner let the disciples take it?
- Why was it important that the women knew that Jesus was really dead?
- Why did Jesus mention Peter?
- How do we today explain to people the story of Jesus in a way they can understand?
