Alive Again: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 16:1-8)

The evidence for the resurrection from the dead of Jesus the Nazarene is incredibly strong. And if Jesus rose from the dead then everything his disciples said about him and everything he said about himself is true. And there is, therefore, no one else in whom we must deposit our trust.

Mark gives a very bare-bones description of this amazing event.

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might 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 he 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. (Mark 16:1-8, ESV)

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead signals that he is indeed the Messiah, sent by the Father to announce the kingdom and rule over it as David’s heir and God’s Son.  It signals that God accepted his sacrifice and that he was himself guiltless and therefore qualified to pay our debt to God in our place and then deserved to come to life again.  

In his divine nature, of course, the Son could not die, but in his human nature he experienced the separation of his soul from his body which lay in the grave.  His soul went to Paradise (Luke 23:39-43), Abraham’s bosom (Luke 16:19-31), then returned to his now revived body, a body now suited for the kingdom, his own body in every sense, but changed in remarkable ways.  In Luke’s and John’s Gospel we see him able to appear and disappear at will, traveling in some method we are unaware of.  Yet he can eat and be touched and though his body is healed he still bears his wounds from crucifixion.  He later ascends in this body to heaven.

If the Jews could have demonstrated that Jesus’ body was still around somewhere, they would have.  They anticipated an attempt to steal his body (Matthew 27:62-66) and had a Roman guard posted there on pain of their deaths if they did not protect the grave from his disciples.  Jesus was definitely dead, as the piercing of his side demonstrated (John 19:34).  He didn’t faint. The soldiers responsible for his crucifixion could not have failed to detect he was still alive.  So the only way he came out of that grave as he did was the miracle of resurrection.

If his disciples had faked his resurrection then they had to somehow overcome professional Roman soldiers, get the body and hide it somewhere, and knowingly and hypocritically declare he was alive and be willing to face their own deaths for such a proclamation.  And not one of them could ever, in a pang of conscience, break their story and confess it was a lie.  There is no doubt that they thought Jesus was alive.  Paul mentions 500 witnesses, many of whom were still alive in his day, who had seen the risen Lord (1 Corinthians 15:6) and of course he had seen him and turned from being a persecutor of Christians to the Lord’s apostle.

Jesus had told his disciples that he would rise from the dead.  And he told them he would meet them in Galilee.  The ESV Study Bible insightfully says,

After the initial encounters with the risen Jesus in Jerusalem, Galilee again served as a place of preparation (as Jesus had predicted in 14:28). Jesus thus avoided the possibility that the disciples might hold false expectations of a political, messianic kingdom in Jerusalem.

Jesus does not intend to establish his throne on earth yet, but is going away and leaving a task with his disciples to spread his message to all the world and then he will return.  We are still giving witness to his death and resurrection and its saving benefits for the human race if we will just believe and receive him.