The Empty Tomb

Every three years Mark’s version of Easter comes around for the Gospel lesson. There’s always an option for using John’s Gospel, and I wonder how many preachers choose John. Mark has the least satisfying account of Easter Day. There are no resurrection appearances whatsoever. All he gives us is an empty tomb. The women who watched Jesus die on the cross come to prepare his body with aromatic spices, wondering how they will roll away the big stone covering the tomb. They arrive to find the stone moved and a young man sitting there. They are terrified. The man tells them not to be afraid, that Jesus has been raised, and gives them a message to tell the disciples and Peter. Dumbfounded, they tell “no one no how” (the Greek is emphatic!) and run away afraid. Mark, as we have it, ends abruptly with the word “for.”

This was as unsatisfactory to early Christians as to us, so it wasn’t long before enterprising scribes added shorter or longer endings. Given the state of biblical scholarship in the seventeenth century, the longer ending became enshrined in the King James Bible. We now know that the earliest manuscripts of Mark ended at that “for.” That’s where Mark simply stopped. Whether he intended to go further is a different question, one that cannot now be answered. Little wonder that a preacher would prefer one of the other Gospels with their more satisfactory endings.

So what does one do with Mark? Take him as he is, to begin with. And what Mark gives us is an empty tomb. We are so eager to get to the joy of Jesus alive once again that we forget that the first evidence of the resurrection was the empty tomb. Some people never get past that – they say that Jesus didn’t really rise from the dead; his disciples spirited his body away and started spreading stories about his resurrection. That has never been very satisfying for me. I don’t know anyone who is willing to die for a story they know to be false, nor do the Gospels read as though they were written by deceitful people. They sound like the product of an event beyond human comprehension, like seeing the body of a crucified man transformed into something extraordinary.

If we take Mark’s Gospel as we have received it, then we must address the empty tomb before we think about resurrection appearances. The Apostle Paul gives us one way to do that in his letter to the Romans. He understood baptism as a kind of death in which we are buried with Christ and then rise again as we come out of the water (a better symbol with full immersion baptism than a few splashes from a small font). “If we have died with Christ,” he writes, “we believe that we will also live with him…The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.” Passing from death to life is what an empty tomb presents to us. Death no longer has ultimate control, even though all of us will experience it. Death is not the end.

Although Mark has none, there must have been resurrection appearances. The fact that Christianity exists is ample evidence that the women eventually told their story, perhaps in response to their own encounter with the risen Christ. By the time Paul wrote to the Corinthians there was already a tradition of resurrection appearances – to Peter, to the twelve, to five hundred people at one time. Peter himself fleshes that out: “God raised [Jesus] on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”

Rising from the dead creates a lot of skepticism. We have a tendency to think that we scientific moderns know better than those primitive peoples. But the ancients knew perfectly well that no one rises from the dead. Paul got pushback in Athens when he proclaimed the resurrection and created chaos in the Jewish council for the same thing. No, this must have been something different, something totally unexpected, something real. The fact that the story is always told from the perspective of women is remarkable. If it had been created to deceive people, no one would think of using witnesses that were not credible in the ancient world.

Taken together, the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances require a different worldview, one in which life overcomes death, where the rich and powerful, the Caesars and Herods of the world, do not have the last word. That in itself is part of the Christian hope. Yet there is hope for all of us, not just those who suffer under cruel governments. When the young man in the white robe says, “Tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee,” it means that even those who abandoned Jesus will be brought back. Mark adds “and Peter” – Peter, the one who said he would die with Jesus and then denied him three times, even Peter will be reconciled to Jesus.

If Peter can be reconciled, so can we. That’s the great promise that we are given at Easter. It’s a promise that is greater than death being overcome at the empty tomb, greater than fear turned to joy at the sight of the resurrected Christ. It’s the promise that nothing, not death, nor life, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will ever be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.


[Easter: Mark 16:1-8. The Great Vigil of Easter also includes Romans 6:3-11; Easter Day itself includes Acts 10:34-43 and 1 Corinthians 15:1-11.]

Listen to this as preached on Easter Day.