Reading 17: “Long Live God”
Read Mark 14:1-31
Aside from my immediate love for the musical “Godspell,” the thing I most remember about leaving the theater that first time I saw the movie version was the grumbling of the adults around me.
I must’ve been about 14 years old that evening. And as the movie ended, and as I wandered out alone—more than a little tingly from this depiction of the Gospels that was unlike anything I’d ever seen in Sunday school—all I heard from the grownups around me was complaining.
“Can you believe they left out the resurrection?” they grumbled. “Are they saying that Jesus died, and it all just ended there?” “I thought it was just horrible,” they went on.
True, the musical does not end with a physical reincarnation of the Jesus character. His last, gasping words while hanging on that inner-city, chain-link fence are “Oh, God, I’m dead.” But the story—and the musical—don’t end there.
There’s a pause in the music, tempting you to think it’s all over. Then, a chord. And then the chorus begins to sing again. Quietly, gently: “Long live God.” They repeat it, over and over. And then from underneath their refrain comes another chord progression that sounds familiar to the audience. What is that? you wonder. I know that, you tell yourself.
And then the sound explodes. That quiet, secondary melody bursts forth with voices and drums joyfully repeating the song we heard in the musical’s very first scene. “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!”
He is not dead. He is alive. He told us as much in that meal: “This is my body; this is my blood.”
As the church, we toil now in the long, green season after Pentecost. This is our mission. Prepare ye the way of the Lord. He is not dead. He is alive. He is among us. His work remains to be done.
Jesus transforms the lives of those with whom he interacts. What might he be transforming about your life right now?
What might the women fleeing from the empty tomb be scared of? Have you ever had the experience of “terror and amazement” at the same time?
Thank you, Lord Jesus, that you are indeed alive and active in this world around us. Fill us with your joyful presence as we encounter—and share—your love in the most unexpected of places. Amen
Michael Weaver has sought (and sometimes found) God in a variety of non-traditional settings since his ordination 17 years ago. His “calls” have led him three times to southern Africa, to outdoor worship on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and to his most challenging “call” of all: stay-at-home daddy.
