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Copyright November 14, 2021 by Rev. Bruce Goettsche
The two most celebrated days on the Christian calendar are Christmas and Easter.
Both days have been wildly secularized with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny taking the main focus.
We tend to be more “wowed” by the lights, gifts, and Easter baskets, than we do by the actual events of those days.
And that may especially be true for the resurrection.
We generally focus on it one day out of the year.
And that’s why I am grateful to focus on that story on a day other than Easter.
When secular scholars look at the Resurrection of Jesus, they say “the Resurrection story is filled with inconsistencies.”
There are surely differences in the accounts much like the differences between witnesses to a crime.
Different people focus on different things.
It is when you piece together all these testimonies that you find what is likely the truth.
J. Warner Wallace, a cold case detective who sought to prove the facts of the resurrection to be unsustainable, concluded the differences in the accounts speak TO their credibility.
A made-up account by the disciples would have had a suspicious consistency in the telling of the story.
Here are some of the differences in the gospel accounts.
· How many women went to the tomb?
John says Mary Magdalene.
Matthew says it was Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s mom.
Mark says it was Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James (which could have been Jesus’ mom), and Salome (who many believe was the mother of the Sons of Thunder (James and John the sons of Zebedee).
· Did the angels appear to just Mary or to all the women?
Matthew, Mark, and Luke say the angels appeared to “the women” when they came to the tomb.
John says the angel appeared to Mary after she had told Peter and John and they had checked out the empty tomb.
· How many angels were there?
Matthew and Mark report one angel, Luke and John report two.
These are valid questions that can all be answered without having to engage in foolishness.
There is one more question that has plagued many: how can we say that Jesus rose on the third day when He wasn’t in the tomb, it appears, for even 48 hours?
Let’s answer this one right away.
Jesus was buried between 4:00-6:00 p.m. on Friday.
He was raised sometime before sunrise on Sunday.
If you do the math that would be 36 hours!
We must hear this like a Jewish person.
Jesus was in the tomb for a part of three days.
He was buried on Friday (day one).
The Sabbath began at 6:00 p.m. on Friday (day 2), Saturday at 6:00 p.m. was the end of the Sabbath and the start of Sunday (day 3).
This also explains how the women were able to go shop for burial spices before they went to the tomb early on Sunday.
They went on Saturday night after Sabbath had ended.
In this way we see Jesus rose on the 3rd day.
The Arrival at the Tomb
It is fair to ask why these women thought they could gain access to the tomb since it had been sealed and was under Roman guard.
The answer: the Jewish leaders didn’t ask for the guard and seal until the Sabbath.
In other words, the women knew nothing about the guard or the seal.
As to how many women went to the tomb?
The fact that Mary Magdalene is spotlighted does not mean other women did not accompany her.
For example, I might say my youngest sister came by to see me.
However, it was actually my sister, her husband, and possibly her daughters and sons-in-law.
There is no contradiction here.
I was spotlighting one person of the many.
John spotlighted Mary Magdalene,
Early on Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance.
2 She ran and found Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved.
She said, “They have taken the Lord’s body out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
When they arrived at the tomb and found it standing open, the first conclusion was someone had stolen the body.
They did not assume Jesus had risen.
I am sure there was an attitude of “Now look what they have done to Him!”
It is reasonable to think that this upset Mary Magdalene so much that she immediately went back to Jerusalem to get Peter and John.
Meanwhile the other women moved closer to the tomb and that is when they saw the angel or angels.
Once again, reporting what one angel said does not mean there were not other angels present.
I might say, Debbie said something to me.
Someone else might correct me to say the entire family was present and Debbie said something to me.
Was I lying?
Nope, just a difference in how the story is told.
After the women talked with the angels they headed back to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, Peter and John ran to the tomb.
3 Peter and the other disciple started out for the tomb.
4 They were both running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.
5 He stooped and looked in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he didn’t go in.
6 Then Simon Peter arrived and went inside.
He also noticed the linen wrappings lying there, 7 while the cloth that had covered Jesus’ head was folded up and lying apart from the other wrappings.
8 Then the disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in, and he saw and believed—9 for until then they still hadn’t understood the Scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead.
Throughout the course of the Gospel of John, John refers to Himself in the third person: “the disciple Jesus loved.”
I love the fact that John thought it important to note that he beat Peter to the tomb. . .
just for the record!
John stopped outside the tomb, perhaps out of reverence or concern of possible impurity.
Peter did not have either problem.
He went right into the tomb.
What he saw is the graveclothes of Jesus (the strips that had been wrapped around him) and the cloth that had be placed around his head lying apart from the other wrappings.
This makes this story different from the raising of Lazarus.
When Jesus called Lazarus from the tomb, the people on the outside opened the tomb and then had to unwrap Lazarus.
Neither was the case with Jesus.
Some suggest, and I like the suggestion, that what Peter and John saw was the graveclothes of Jesus looking like someone had simply vanished from them.
Listen to what one scholar writes,
What Peter saw in the tomb was quite remarkable.
When we studied Jesus’ burial, we noted that the Jewish practice was to wrap a corpse in scented strips of linen that were bound around the body.
In addition, a separate face cloth was wound around the head and chin to keep the head in position.
These are the wrappings that John and Peter saw in Jesus’ tomb.
Apparently when Jesus was resurrected, his glorious body passed through the linen cloths wrapped around him so that they were not cast aside.
Instead, when the body was removed, the weight of the spices caused the wrappings to collapse into a neat pile.
John says that the strips of cloth that had been spiced and wrapped close around Jesus’ body were “lying there” (John 20:6).
The Greek word that John used for “lying there” (keimena) is used elsewhere of things that are carefully kept in order.
In addition, “the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, [was] not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself” (20:7).[1]
In other words, the tomb of Jesus was not broken into and then Jesus was unwrapped and taken away.
It seemed more like He must have “evaporated.”
This was why when John saw this, He believed.
He remembered what Jesus had said.
John believed this was not a crime . . . it was the miracle of miracles!
Our text tells us they were just starting to put the teaching of Scripture together.
The disciples headed toward home.
I imagine they were excited, confused, and maybe numb.
Meanwhile, Mary, who was deeply distraught returned to the tomb.
Let’s continue with our text,
10 Then they went home.
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