Terrified by what had happened on Friday, the women who had watched Jesus’ crucifixion and burial hurried early on Sunday morning to his tomb. Due to the fact that the Sabbath was approaching, Joseph of Arimathea had not been able to embalm Jesus’ body and his body had already been buried about a day and a half. The women needed to complete all the embalming that was used in Jewish burials. There was not a moment to lose.
But when they reached the tomb, their terror was amplified. The other Gospels tell us that they wondered how they would roll away the heavy stone that served to seal the tomb. But when they neared the tomb, they discovered that the stone had already been rolled away.
What crossed their mind then? Did they think that someone else had come there before them to conduct the embalming of Jesus’ body? Perhaps Joseph of Arimathea? Perhaps one or more of the disciples?
Maybe initially they were thankful and thought that they would have some help with the embalming. But when they got to the tomb and went in, their terror was amplified. The body of Jesus was not there! What were they to think?
Likely they thought that someone had come along and stolen his body. Perhaps, in a mark of extreme disrespect, the Jewish religious leaders had taken Jesus’ body so that he would never get a proper burial. They would have been completely distraught. In fact, the Gospel of John depicts a distraught Mary of Magdala looking in vain for the body of Jesus. Where had his body gone?
It was bad enough that Jesus had been arrested without cause. It was bad enough that the soldiers had abused him during the course of the miscarriage of justice that masqueraded as a trial.
It was bad enough that they had to witness Jesus hanging from a cross and suffering though he was innocent. It was bad enough that they had to see him buried without undergoing the proper ceremonies. But now? Now someone had come along and stolen his body!
We Gentile Christians living twenty centuries after the event cannot even come close to imagining how terrifying this was. Deuteronomy 21.23 says,
“If someone guilty of a capital offense is put to death and their body is exposed on a pole, you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Be sure to bury it that same day, because anyone who is hung on a pole is under God’s curse. You must not desecrate the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.”
Jesus had been crucified and his body had been exposed on the cross. Thanks to Joseph of Arimathea, his body had been buried.
But now someone had stolen it. What if they had thrown it away out in the open somewhere? Jesus would then not just have been under the curse, but his body would be now responsible for desecrating the land of Israel.
It was as though the nightmare that began at the Mount of Olives with Jesus’ arrest would just never end. One terrifying event led to another with the terror escalating each time until now they had no idea how big a curse Jesus was under.
We Christians living this side of Easter cannot also imagine what it would mean for Jesus to be under the curse. For someone to be under the curse meant that that someone was excluded from God’s blessings.
In other words, not only was Jesus a failed Messiah, but also he would not have a place in the Messianic kingdom when it finally was established. He would not be raised, as proclaimed in the book of Daniel, to eternal life but would be condemned for eternity.
You see, while they believed in a resurrection, the Jewish belief differed from the Christian one in two main ways. First, they believed that it was something exclusive to the final Messianic age, while we Christians believe that Jesus has been raised before the final Messianic age.
Second, the Jews believed that the resurrection was reserved only for Jews – righteous Jews being raised to everlasting life, with unrighteous Jews being raised to everlasting condemnation.
We Christians, however, believe that the resurrection pertains to both Jews and Gentiles with the determining factor being faith in Jesus, not our righteousness.
But here the women had to entertain the possibility that someone had stolen Jesus’ body and had placed it out in the open, thereby excluding Jesus from God’s blessings. Can you imagine a more terrifying prospect than reaching the conclusion that someone you loved deeply, someone who loved you deeply, would be excluded from God’s blessings?
Entertaining the worst possibilities, the women are further terrified when the two men appear and they respond by prostrating themselves before the two men.
The men ask the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” The men remind the women about Jesus’ promise that he would be raised on the third day. The women then hurry to the disciples and relate the events to them.
But the disciples were in no frame of mind to accept what the women were telling them. To them all this talk about being raised seemed like nonsense. What did this mean? Why did it seem like nonsense to them? What kind of nonsense?
We who live in the twenty first century might conclude that it seemed like nonsense because they did not believe people could be raised from the dead. We might think that they believed that there was only this life and nothing more.
But a disbelief in the resurrection – a resignation to the purely physical and material – is a twenty first century disease and not a first century one.
As I just mentioned, the Jews did believe in the resurrection. But it was an event that would happen during the Messianic age, not before it. Resurrection belonged to the Messianic kingdom, when the Messiah was the ruler of the whole earth, when Yahweh would restore his people to their original glory and restore David’s kingdom to its original power.
But here the women were saying that Jesus had been raised! But the disciples probably could see some Roman soldiers outside or hear their morning training sounds. The Romans were still around and in charge of Israel. Israel was still an occupied nation. How could Jesus have been raised? It just made no sense.
It made no sense, not because they doubted God’s ability to raise people, but because it did not fit the pattern that they were expecting.
And it made no sense to them, not because they had not hoped Jesus was the Messiah, but because they could not understand how a dead Messiah could be the true Messiah. A Messiah who died was a Messiah who had failed.
But Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Why? The women would have told the disciples what the two men had said, reminding them of Jesus’ words predicting his death and resurrection. But it is clear from Luke’s narrative that Peter did not believe Jesus had been raised. Not yet anyway.
Ever impulsive, Peter probably ran to the tomb to check the bare facts of the matter. Had the stone been rolled away? Was Jesus’ body not in the tomb?
Even when he had confirmed the women’s story and had seen the linen cloths lying by themselves in an otherwise empty tomb, Peter did not believe, but began to wonder what had happened.
We have a tendency of beating up on the first disciples. We revel in accusing them of being blind to what Jesus was doing. We find pleasure in stating that they were slow to understand God’s plans.
Now it is true that Jesus says this about his first disciples. But would we have fared better had we been there when Jesus was first announcing the good news of God’s kingdom? Would we have grasped what Jesus was doing? Quite likely not.
But the reason we beat up on the disciples is that we do not place ourselves in their shoes. What was it like to associate with Jesus, whose views were not just a little out of the ordinary but quite off the wall from a Jewish perspective?
Nowhere in the entire annals of religious thought do we find the idea that the solution to our problems – call it salvation, or moksha, or nirvana, or whatever else – comes from the death of an innocent person. But Jesus had announced precisely that.
Nowhere in all of preceding human belief do we find the idea that a dying person is a victorious person. But that is precisely what Jesus had announced. The kingdom of God would be established on the foundation of his death.
We take that for granted, but it was a novel thought, an extravagant claim, an unbelievable insight and a completely bizarre idea.
And so Peter sees the cloths in the otherwise empty tomb and leaves, wondering what in God’s good world was happening. His whole idea of how God worked was unravelling.
Peter would fortunately have about forty days during which Jesus would explain things in detail to him and the other disciples, outlining how his work fit into God’s overarching plans for creation. He would then understand fully the victory of life over death, of forgiveness over sin and of weakness over might.
In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes, “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
The lion, Aslan, explains this in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, saying:
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.
“But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
The ultimate truth of Good Friday and Easter is that when the forces of evil put Jesus to death, they signed their own death sentence. For the terror of Easter is the declaration to the forces of evil that even the worst they can do to control humans – the threat and sentence of death – is powerless before the innocent lamb that was slain.
Χριστός ἀνέστη! (Christos anesti, Christ is risen!)
Purposes Crossed 