Sermon Transcript
Mark 16:1-8. When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices so they may go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb? And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back; it was very large.
And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, Do not be alarmed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee.
There you will see him, just as they told you. And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
Thanks. On Easter, we always pause whatever message series we are in in order to focus on a passage that speaks of Jesus’ resurrection, because Jesus’ resurrection is perhaps the most significant event that has ever happened happened in the history of the world. The only exceptions would be Christmas or Good Friday. It’s why we all made the effort to be at church today. For some of you, Christmas and Easter might be the only days you come to church because we sense the importance of it, don’t we?
Even those of us who come to church regularly, but we all miss sometimes, we are sure to be here on Easter because there is something captivating about the direction that makes us lean in. We don’t want to miss it. We come with expectation to hear about new life, power over the grave, reconciliation to God, hope for the world. And we will— you will hear all of those things today. But as we study this passage, we will see no one had those expectations on the first Easter?
No one. The resurrection caught everyone totally by surprise and it turned the world upside down. So let’s dive into our text from the book of Mark and as we do we will see first what Jesus’ contemporaries and Jesus’ closest friends, what they were thinking as they entered Easter Sunday morning. Second, we will see what they saw, what they experienced. And finally, we will look at what changed as a result of what they saw and experienced.
So first, what they thought on Easter morning. They thought Jesus was dead. They did not think he was alive. They were not expecting a message of new life or hope. These 3 women who go to the tomb, they are expecting to find Jesus’ body inside.
Verse 1, they went to help wrap, or they go there to wrap his body with spices that they are bringing with them. At the time, part of the normal burial ritual was to wrap spices and oils and fragrances all over a body before it was buried or entombed. And they couldn’t do that with Jesus right when he died because he died on a special Sabbath, the Passover, and they couldn’t work on that day. Sabbath laws. So they come back later to care for the body.
Similar to what we do, right? We make efforts to preserve the bodies of our loved ones after they pass away. Most of us don’t do that work ourselves, we have somebody else do it for us, we pay somebody to do it, but we still do it. And that’s what they were doing. They were going to the tomb with the supplies typically used to wrap and care for a dead dead body.
Obvious question: why would anyone take supplies to wrap a dead body if they thought the person was going to be alive when they got there? No one would do that. They were not expecting Jesus to be alive, just like a mortician wouldn’t. Full disclosure, I’ve never been in the back of a funeral home, but I’m imagining what it would be like. I’m sure the mortician wouldn’t go to the cabinet, if there is one, to grab spices or supplies to preserve a body and then carry those supplies back to the embalming room— is that what they would call it?— if he or she didn’t expect there to be a body laying on the table.
There would be no reason to grab the supplies and carry them to a dead body if you didn’t think the body was going to be there. But that’s what these women were doing. Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James, who some think is the same as Mary mother of Jesus, might be the other James though, and Salome, who many think is the mother of James and John. So they had gathered these spices to care for a dead body because they thought there would be a dead body in tomb. And not only did they gather the supplies, but these spices and oils, rather expensive in the day.
It wasn’t just like everyone had these laying around their house. It was some amount of sacrifice to get them. It cost money. So why would anyone purchase relatively expensive embalming materials and go through the trouble of taking them all the way to the tomb? Obvious answer, only one answer: they expected Jesus to be dead.
None of them had faith at this point in time that Jesus was alive or was going to be alive. None of them thought Jesus was going to turn this around somehow, pull a miracle out of his hat. They all thought he was dead and was going to stay dead because that’s what dead people do. It was game over. Whatever faith they had before, the Marys, the disciples, everyone, their faith was was dashed.
If they still had faith at this moment, they would have told each other, hey, we don’t need to take spices to the tomb to care for the body because he’s coming back. That’s what— this is the 3rd day. This is when he said he was going to come back. 3 times in the book of Mark, Jesus is recorded as saying that he needed to die but that he would raise to life again on the 3rd day. That’s Mark 8, Mark 9, and Mark 10.
So if they had faith, which they didn’t, they would have said, hey, remember, today’s the day he’s coming back. It’ll be any minute now. Like, forget the spices, get the champagne, and then it’s game on. But they didn’t say that because their dream was gone, because dead people stay dead. And why would Jesus be any different?
No one thought he was coming back. These ladies had no faith. His disciples had no faith. A different account of Jesus’ resurrection records His disciples walking along a road to a city named Emmaus, and they say, Luke 24:21, we had hoped that He was the one to redeem Israel. Past tense.
You know, the things Jesus had been doing, the things He’d been saying, it sure looked promising this was the guy, but then He was executed. So, we don’t think he’s the one to redeem Israel anymore. He can’t be, he’s dead. We had hoped, but now we don’t. The reason why their total lack of faith is significant, or one reason why it is significant, is because if you were making up this story, this is not how you would write it, especially then.
In a shame and honor culture, culture, you would do everything you could not to look shameful. If they had invented this story for some reason, they wouldn’t have invented it like this. By the way, it’s hard to come up with a reason why they would have invented the story. Small side quest here, then we’ll come back to shame and honor. But think about it.
What could be a reason that they possibly would have invented the story of the resurrection? Did they believe they could profit somehow from Jesus being alive? If so, it didn’t work. They didn’t profit. Instead, they were hunted.
So if they had been in it for the money and then they end up not making money and instead end up becoming very uncomfortable, that’s when you drop the story. You wouldn’t keep telling it. It’s achieving the opposite of what you want it to achieve. So you would just kind of stop saying the story, fade away, maybe move. I mean, just hope everyone forgot that you were once saying that Jesus was alive.
But they didn’t do that. They kept at it. They kept saying Jesus was alive for no observable personal benefit. So profit can’t explain why they would have invented the story. Another possibility, maybe they thought Jesus’ teachings were important enough.
You know, all that love your enemy stuff that was really unique to Jesus, and even atheists today like Richard Dawkins, for instance, recognize that Jesus was the first person ever to say, love your enemies. So no one had said it before Jesus. So maybe the disciples thought that type of teaching was so crucial for the world to hear that maybe if they invented the story of the resurrection, it would boost the influence of that teaching somehow. That would be pretty far-fetched just by itself. But the real proof that wasn’t their plan is if you go read the book of Acts, and you should, you should read the book of Acts, which details the early church after Jesus’ resurrection, you’ll see when the disciples go around and preach about Jesus, they don’t preach his teaching.
They barely mention anything that Jesus taught. Their sermons in Acts were not repeating Jesus’ lessons on Not that those aren’t important and they don’t show up other places, it just wasn’t primary for them. Instead, they almost exclusively preached, Jesus rose from the dead for the forgiveness of your sins. The thrust of their message was the resurrection. It was not preserving Jesus’ teachings.
So, it’s unlikely they invented the resurrection to add credibility to Jesus’ teachings because they don’t mention His teachings very much. So it’s hard to find a reason they would make up the story. But for the sake of argument, let’s just say they did invent the resurrection for some reason that we can’t really identify. Let’s just say they made it up. They would not have written themselves into the story in the way that they appear in the story because they all look rather foolish.
All the disciples the Marys, all the women who followed Jesus, everyone, they all look foolish. They all expected Jesus to stay dead. None of them believed Jesus would rise on the 3rd day like he said he would. None of them thought he was about to be alive. And in a shame and honor culture, if you were making it up, you would write yourself in as a faithful believer.
Because it’s embarrassing, right?
Jesus, 3 times, at least 3 times, 3 times that we have recorded, he says, hey, look guys, I need to die, but I’m coming back 3 days later. Then I imagine Jesus was like, hey, hey, Peter, looks like you’re not paying attention, so I’m telling you again, and then I’m going to tell you another time after that. I’ve got to die, but I’ll be alive again on the 3rd day. Jesus repeatedly told them it was going to happen, and now it’s the 3rd day, and everyone says, well, he’s never coming back.
We had hoped he’s the one, but clearly not. Right?
The story is written to make them look silly. They look faithless because they are. And in a shame and honor culture, you’d never make up a story where you look silly. Other literature from the time period, no one wrote a story about themselves where they were in an embarrassing position. If it were written today, ah, maybe we would possibly write ourselves into the story in a shameful way for comedic value or something, because today there is a certain amount of pride in just embracing awkward moments, right?
You just kind of turn into the skid and own it sometimes, and people laugh, and that gives you some amount of credibility in their eyes. That’s today. But even today, we often try to tweak the accounts of events so that we look better. We may not try to make ourselves look perfect, but we at least try to look better. That’s us today.
Then, in a shame and honor culture, no way you would have written the story in a way that made you look bad if you were inventing it. Zero chance. If you were inventing this story then, you’d say something like, Jesus followers were sitting together in a room counting down to the resurrection, like, 3, 2, 1, midnight, get the Easter hats out, he’s coming!
That’s how you would have painted yourself.
And you would have written something like the religious leaders scoffing at you because Jesus had been executed, religious leaders saying something like, haha, your dream is dead. But then you would write yourself in the story standing up for Jesus and saying back to the religious leaders, just you wait, he’ll be alive again soon and then you’ll see, you’ll all You’d write the story so you had honor and your enemies had shame if you were making it up then, and probably still today, but definitely then. But they didn’t write it that way. They wrote it the way it happened. They wrote themselves into the shame side of the legend.
None of them believed, none of them. Not any of the women, not the disciples, no one. Until something happened, until they saw something. They saw an empty tomb, they saw an angel, and then later they saw the resurrected Jesus himself. When these ladies arrive at the tomb, they don’t see the dead body as expected, but instead they see an angel, and they were alarmed, or afraid depending on your translation, which is what often happens when an angel shows up in Scripture.
When an angel shows up, people don’t say, oh, hi, I like your robe. What’s your name? It’s never that. It’s always an event. Angels are warriors of light.
It’s terrifying. So, they see an angel, they freak out a little, and then the angel tries to calm them down. He says, don’t be alarmed. Angels always take a minute to defuse whoever sees them. And then the angel says, Jesus isn’t here.
He will meet you in town as he told you he would. Remember, he said he was going to rise on the 3rd day. He’ll be there. So the women leave astonished and afraid, it says, but still not full of faith, still not sure what’s going on, wondering if they should even tell anyone else about the experience, which according to this passage, it seems like they didn’t initially want to tell anyone else, but eventually they did. And when they eventually tell the others what they saw, some of Jesus’ disciples run to the tomb to see if it’s empty like the women said it was, and then they react in very similar ways to the women.
The men are not sure what to make of it, except John. John sees an empty tomb and believes immediately. Everyone else takes a minute. Belief would come later. It wasn’t until after seeing the risen Christ.
It was then they realized this was real. This was happening. Jesus is really back. Jesus is alive again, which is significant because we might have the idea that these ancient people were gullible, or that they’d believe anything then, right? They were first-century simpletons.
They didn’t understand that dead things have to stay dead like we enlightened people understand today. You know, probably the minute they saw an empty tomb, they thought, He must be alive! So, yeah, maybe what happened is someone stole the body as like a joke or whatever, or a jackal got it in the middle of You know, who knows? And then here comes the disciples, they see an empty tomb, and they just jump to the conclusion He’s alive.
But that’s not what we see in the text. These first-century people expected Him to be dead, and they did not easily overturn their expectation. Even when they saw an empty tomb, still thought He was dead. Even when a glowing warrior of light told them Jesus is alive, like He said He would be, they still thought He was dead. They were not immediately convinced.
They were wrestling with it. In John’s account of the resurrection, he records what happens after Mark’s account, which we read. So, it’s a little bit later the same day, and Mary and Salome have gone to the tomb. They’ve seen the angel. Then they’ve gone back to everyone else.
They eventually explain what they they saw, at some point at least Peter and John come running to see the tomb, and at least John says Mary Magdalene follows along behind Peter and John. So now Mary Magdalene is back at the tomb, and she is standing, she is weeping outside the tomb. Again, this is later, she’s had time to process what she saw earlier. And as she wept outside the tomb, she saw 2 angels angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been laid, one at the head and one at the feet. They said, woman, why are you weeping?
She said to them, they have taken away my Lord, and I don’t know where they put him. Which means she still doesn’t believe he’s alive. She thinks somebody’s taken the body. She can’t wrap her mind around the possibility that he would be alive. And she turns around and She saw Jesus standing, but she didn’t know it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will, I will take him. She’s seen 3 angels at this point. She’s had time to think about it.
The angels reminded her that Jesus said he would rise again. Again. And she’s adding this up in her head. She’s like, okay, we have an empty tomb. I’ve seen 3 angels.
Jesus said he would rise again. His body isn’t here, so that means— oh, I know! Someone must have carried him away. Can you show me where you put him. I certainly can’t think of any other reason why He wouldn’t be in the tomb.
Right? It’s inconceivable that Jesus was alive, because dead people stay dead, especially the way Jesus died. No one’s going to come back from that.
So, they weren’t gullible. They didn’t jump to conclusions when they saw an empty tomb. They had to be confronted with multiple pieces of evidence before they changed their beliefs. Their preconceptions about what is possible had to be changed, had to be challenged again and again, but eventually their undeniable experiences did change their preconceptions. In other words, there was new data to consider, and they were willing to let their long-held belief that dead people stay dead, they were willing to let that belief be challenged.
Are you?
Is there any amount of data, is there any experience that could challenge your current beliefs about what is possible with dead people?
Or would you say, it doesn’t matter what I see, it doesn’t matter what I experience, I know for sure dead people stay dead and there is nothing in the world that could ever convince me otherwise.
Is that you?
Now who is being dogmatic?
Now who isn’t being open-minded?
I’m not saying it should be easy to believe Jesus is alive right away. These ancient peoples certainly didn’t believe it right away. It’s expected that it would take all of us a minute. That is totally reasonable. Reasonable.
But if you are unwilling to accept new evidence that would contradict your previously collected evidence, if you say, case closed, I will not receive any new studies or experiences on the matter whatsoever, we’re done, how unscientific is that?
Aren’t we always open to being challenged? Aren’t we always open to considering new information?
These ancient people were. They were slow about it. It was hard for them. It was very hard for them to wrap their minds around it, which makes sense. Resurrection is not an easy thing to come to grips with.
But what they saw, what they heard, what they felt, what we find out later is over a 40-day period, they eventually came to believe Jesus is really alive. It’s happened. It’s true, he resurrected from the dead.
Now what difference does that make? What changed when Jesus rose from the dead? Everything changed. There is no simple way we can detail all the implications of Jesus’ resurrection in a relatively short message, so keep coming back, stick around, because Jesus’ resurrection is a complete reversal of how everything in the universe works. Everything.
See why it would be hard to summarize? This will be a flood of implications, but I’ll give you a big picture and then a few details. Big picture: everything in our universe is sliding toward death and decay, more chaos, right? Thermodynamics, entropy. Our bodies obviously are sliding toward decay, but also everything else that is living will rot.
Every tree, every animal, and even more than what is living. Non-living things crumble, buildings crumble, and on top of that anything we try to manage tends to slide toward chaos. Any process or system or group of people, have you tried not managing one of those and seeing what happens? Without constant effort it just deteriorates. Or trying to keep a tidy house, on its own does the house get more tidy or more messy?
It’s everything. Unless there is constant effort into it, it will always slide toward chaos. It will all turn to dust. Even if we spend our entire lives pouring into something in order for it not to crumble, eventually we crumble and then it will too. Everything is moving toward dust on a long enough timeline.
Everything. That’s the universe.
But what if you saw someone moving in the other direction?
Instead of crumbling, he was coming back together. He had defeated that slide toward dust.
He would be starting something entirely new in the world, something the world had never seen before, something imperishable, something that would last and last forever. That’s the resurrection. It’s the beginning, not the completion. It’s the beginning of God’s work of recreation, of redeeming the current creation that is broken and corrupt. In Christian belief, in Christian doctrine, we believe that God originally created the world good and to last forever, and that life, at least human life, was not subject to death and decay.
We were supposed to live forever with God, who is the author and the source of life. But we as humanity, we turned away from the source of life. We said, goodbye source of life, we’re going to go our own way away from you, which is away from life. And this is pretty common sense, but if we turn away from life, where do we go? Death.
It’s the only place you can go if you turn away from life by definition. Sin and sin’s transmission. So we experience this slide toward death and decay, but we also experience a slide away from the goodness and wholeness of God. We experience corruption, brokenness, because we left the source of goodness and light and wholeness. So we caused the corruption and the decay that we experience.
We caused it when we walked away from God. It’s not the way that creation was supposed to work. It’s the penalty. It’s the consequence for us because we turned away from the life and goodness and wholeness when we turned away from God. So we get darkness and brokenness and death.
We brought it into the world. But the rest of the story is God loves us so much he was not willing to leave us in the mess that we created. So he comes to earth as Jesus Christ and bears the consequence and penalty that we created for turning away from him. Jesus shoulders our death, our decay, our brokenness, our separation from God, our sin. He carries that for us in our place on the cross, and then he rises in victory over it, thus showing that it’s defeated, that death and decay and separation from God and brokenness and corruption and sin, they’re all defeatable.
It’s why Easter might be the most significant event out of all the events of Jesus’ life. Easter might be the most significant. Because imagine if the Christian doctrine was God came to earth as Jesus Christ, he lived the life we should have lived, he died the death we deserve to die, he was separated from God like we deserve to be separated, and the end. Period. Death swallowed up Jesus just like it will swallow up all of us.
Sin swallowed up Jesus just like it will swallow up all of us. Corruption swallowed up Jesus just like it will swallow up all of us. That’s not a liberating story. That doesn’t fix anything. In fact, it probably shows our problem isn’t fixable.
If God himself could not overcome the curse that we brought on ourselves, if God God himself can’t turn our mess around, then it can’t be turned around. And the slide toward death and decay and separation from God, all of that is more powerful than God himself. And that would not be good news. That would not be worth telling the world about. Which means it is not helpful to say something like, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is just a symbol of hope.
It didn’t really happen. It’s not literal. You know, the resurrection, it’s just a nice idea. It’s comforting to think about that life is more powerful than death, but in reality, like, we all know death eventually wins. Well, pardon me, but that doesn’t fill me with any amount of hope.
What’s the point in having a symbol that life is more powerful than death unless life can actually win?
What’s the good of an idea without the fulfillment of the idea? It’s pie in the sky. It means nothing. It’s not hopeful. It’s not helpful.
It’s delusional.
But if Jesus Christ really did conquer our curse, and he did, that means forever is real. It means forever is tangible. It means instead of creation always falling apart, it can and will come back together. It means forever with God is not wispy spiritual. Creation itself will be liberated from the curse that we’ve brought upon it.
Do you realize the Bible is the only place where you will find a God who values creation enough to redeem it?
Every other religion, every other faith has some means to get you out of this world, for you to escape the corruption and sin that is all around us, to go someplace spiritual, wispy, ethereal. And it’s that place, it’s the spiritual that’s pure and good, but we’ve got to leave the physical in order to get there. That’s every other religion. But the God of the Bible says, I’m going to redeem this world. I’m going to redeem the tangible, the physical.
I’m going to absorb all the death and decay humans brought into the world, and then I’m going to rise and victory over it. I’m going to remake everything that has been corrupted by sin. I’m going to get the effect of the curse completely out of here. And he starts with Jesus. Jesus is called the first fruits of that new work.
So Jesus is the beginning of the harvest, so to speak. He’s the first portion of, of the crop that’s ripe and ready to go, which means there’s more harvest to come, much more. There will be our resurrection to new life. And finally, the world itself will be remade without corruption.
So what does Easter change? It changes everything. Life wins. Goodness wins. And you have proof of it.
It means your efforts to build a better world are not in vain because there really is going to be a better world that will last forever. It means whatever trouble or difficulty you are facing will not be forever. The curse is being reversed. The first fruits have already happened, and there is a massive renewal that is going to follow. And most of all, Easter means God has reconciled Himself to us after our departure from Him, after we chose darkness and death and sin over His light and light, his light and life and goodness.
After we left, he came here. He bore the penalty of our rebellion and provided a way for us to be back together with him.
If you have never received what Jesus has done for you, maybe Easter could be your day. You can just pray in your head, Jesus, after what you did for me, how could I not give my life to you. You can say, Jesus, seeing how good you are, I can’t believe I would ever want to walk away from you. Thank you for bearing the curse of my sin that I am responsible for on the cross. Thank you for reconciling me to God.
Thank you for being more powerful than any mess I’ve ever created. Thank you for being bigger than any guilt I’m ever carrying. Thank you that you can you can resurrect me out of any shame that I’ve ever walked in. Thank you for being the firstfruits of the total renewal of our world.
If you’ve never told him that, tell him today.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for Jesus. Thank you that we see people like us in Scripture who had to wrestle with this. But through their wrestling, Lord, we can see that it’s true. This really happened, that Jesus really came back to life, resurrected life, imperishable life.
And he gives us the same offer, and he promises one day to remake our entire world so that there is no corruption or death or darkness, um, or sin whatsoever. We long for that day, Lord, and we will work for it alongside of you until it comes. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
