The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Mark 15 Fear and Resurrection
Perhaps because we are so successful in depressing ourselves with Lent and Passiontide, Easter comes for most of us a joyous release; celebration that life and renewal are at the centre of Christianity despite the obsession of so many Christians through the ages with sin, punishment and death. But this feeling of joy at the rising of Christ was not generally the first reaction of the early witnesses to the momentous event. To be fair for most the experience seems to have happened quietly, almost surreptitiously; the disciples don’t see the risen Christ in a blaze of glory; they mistake him for the gardener, as a fellow traveller, as some randomer cooking fish on the beach. As we heard in tonight’s Gospel, the more usual reaction to the outright news or the evidence that Christ was risen, is usually terror; the women run away in fear.
This has seemed so odd that some scholars have thought St Mark’s Gospel cannot be meant to end so abruptly, with the women doing exactly what they were told not to do “because they were afraid.”
We can sympathise; I think we’d all be pretty alarmed to go to a tomb to find the corpse had gone, or to encounter a friend whom we knew to be dead. Fear and alarm would be natural reactions, but with the benefit of hindsight (which the Gospel writers had in greater quantities, perhaps, than hard evidence) one might expect the deeper and lasting joy of these experiences to be emphasised rather than the initial alarm; it is however, fear that thy choose to emphasise. Why should that be?
Generally (and this is quite a big generalisation) fear in the Gospels is positive and leads to a desirable outcome as if it is one of God’s (or the Gospel writers’) techniques for keeping the plot on the right track; the authorities are afraid to arrest Jesus for fear of the crowd; Herod is afraid to do away with John for fear of the Jews. Elsewhere fear accompanies recognition of  God’s glory and power; the shepherds watching their flocks were sore afraid at the arrival of the army of angels with their message of peace; the disciples in the storm tossed boat are terrified at the sight of Jesus walking on the water.
Whether consciously or not this use of fear corresponds with one of the most significant uses in the Old Testament which is summed up in the often repeated idea that fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom. God is indeed awesome, and even partial appreciation of what God is will inevitably be accompanied by some alarm, because inevitably it entails realisation of how very small we are and how wholly dependant we are on our creator. Out of that fear grows respect and understanding of his love for us and the joy and challenges which that love in turn entails for us.
We, however, have tended to see fear, like guilt, as a negative and unhealthy feeling.  We hope that societies which hold to together by fear (and guilt too) – like boys’ prep schools 50 years ago, or Stalinist Russia, are things of the past. This is fear which rushes the human spirit. It is the fear that we witness in the Passion narrative, fear which leads to betrayal and desertion and death.
 The resurrection stories seem to me to draw on the more positive aspects of fear and tell us, I think that there can be more something more valuable in fear than mere deterrence. If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, it should not be surprising that fear is one of the tools we need in order to understand the new covenant. How could a renewal of the world order fail to be surprising and more than a little alarming? But this is not the negative and crushing fear that precedes man’s inhumanity to man and his fellow creatures, but the astonishment and timid awe we should feel for something so much bigger than ourselves. The sort of humbling awe we feel before the intricacy of a spider’s web or the brilliance of a parrot’s colouring, tinged with the fear that we cannot understand it and so cannot control it. That sort fear is surely the right starting point to our understanding of the Resurrection, which goes so far beyond understanding and nature. It is a fear which encourages curiosity, which opens our minds to the challenge and which starts us on the road of living the eternal life that the Resurrection rolls out before us. It’s not a road we should take with brash confidence; with faith yes, but a faith that grows from awe and respect. Amen