Jesus’ resurrection initiated a fresh start for the entire cosmos, including us! On Easter Sunday, our Grace family of churches gathered in unity with believers all over the world to proclaim and worship the risen King who has triumphed over sin and death.
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Grace Fellowship Church
Jon Stallsmith
Series: The King in the City
April 20, 2014
Easter: The King Has Risen!
Mark 16:1-8
Good morning. People just keep coming! This is amazing. This is like our fourth gathering this morning. Everything has been packed. It is great to see you. Yesterday, I was a little bit bummed about the rain. I wanted to get out and do a little yard work, but then I got here this morning, and lo and behold, the stage has been landscaped! It is fantastic. Let’s just thank our worship team, the production guys.
We baptized about 45 people at the 7:00 service. They got the video footage and put it together and we showed that video at 8:30 to the congregation. They’re amazing. We have some really talented folks around here. It’s a privilege to serve alongside that team and all of you guys who volunteer who are a part of all the stuff around Grace. It is just good to be together to worship the Lord.
If you have your Bible, open it up to Mark 16. We are going to wrap up our The King in the City series. If you do not have a Bible, slip up your hand, and one of our extremely well-dressed ushers will put a Bible in your hand. If you don’t have a Bible at home, you can keep it as long as you read it. Also if you need a note sheet, we can give you one of those. This is what we do here at Grace. We open up the Bible every week. We read it and we ask God to speak to us.
Of course, these last six weeks have been a real joy, looking at Mark chapters 11-16, Jesus’ final week in Jerusalem before going to the cross. If you haven’t been with us during those weeks, that’s okay because everything has been leading to this very story. If you have been with us, I’m so glad. It has been an adventure seeing what Jesus is doing. I’ve been just so honored to be a part of preaching and walking with you through that passage.
I can’t wait actually. Next week, we are going to kick off a new series in Nehemiah. I just can’t wait to start digging into that, seeing what the Lord has for us as a community in that Scripture also. But before we start reading here in Mark 16, just as a reminder to set the stage, on Friday Jesus had been crucified. He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He yielded his spirit.
In the moment he died, the veil of the Holy of Holies in the temple was torn from top to bottom. A centurion who was there at the cross looked up at Jesus and said, “Surely, this was the Son of God.” Joseph of Arimathea, one of Jesus’ followers who was also a religious leader and a wealthy man, petitioned Pilate for the body. After it was ascertained that Jesus was in fact dead, Joseph went and took the corpse off the cross to a tomb that had been freshly hewn for his own family. He laid Jesus there. They sealed the tomb with a stone and went home for the Sabbath.
Friday night, of course, the Sabbath begins. All day Saturday. But then on Sunday is where we pick up the story. Mark 16:1: “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)
This is a fascinating story of the resurrection. This morning, we’re going to be asking a very simple question…What will we do with the empty tomb? How will we respond to the reality of the resurrection? As we ask that question, we’re going to get our direction and guidance from the response of these women.
What can we say about them? Well, obviously, they’re very devoted to Jesus. They had gone out and they purchased spices, probably on Saturday evening when the Sabbath had ended after the sunset. They were bringing the spices to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body, really for the smell, not for any embalming purposes.
Along the way, they realized that they are not very good at making plans without Jesus in the picture. They get about halfway on the walk, and they go, “Who’s going to roll away the stone?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah, rats! All the disciples ran away too, so we don’t have anybody to help us with this thing.”
They’re discussing all of this. We could be very confident actually that when they arrived at the tomb they were not expecting to find it to be empty. They weren’t expecting resurrection. Then they got there. The stone was rolled away. You can imagine them looking at each other, going, “What?” Then they poked their heads in and there’s a young man dressed in white.
From the other Gospels we know that this is an angel. They see the angel and it’s like, “Ah!” which naturally you would do if you walked into a tomb and what you were expecting to be there is not there and what you weren’t expecting to be there is there. You’d be startled. Then the angel gives the good news, “He is risen! He’s not here. Go tell the disciples and Peter he has gone before you to Galilee.”
Their response is very interesting after they hear the good news. You’d think they’d go, “Yippee! Hooray! He’s alive!” But instead, the words we hear from Mark that describe their response to the empty tomb are words like trembling and astonishment and afraid. Christians for years and years and years have greeted each other on Easter. You guys know how it goes. I say, “He is risen.” You say, “He is risen indeed.” Very good. Let’s do that again. “He is risen.” “He is risen indeed.” Very good.
If this were our only gospel text of the resurrection and we were following the model of these women, perhaps our typical Christian greeting on Easter would be to have someone walk up to you and say, “He is risen,” and your response would be, “Ah!” because that’s what they did. What’s their response to the empty tomb? “Ah!”
What do these words mean? Well, of course, they’re not the first times they have appeared in the gospel of Mark. In fact, they have been regular in usage. You think about that word trembling. It appears when there’s a woman who was dealing for 12 years with an issue of bleeding. She saw Jesus walking along in a crowd, and she wheedled her way up close enough where she could actually grab his garment, because she thought if only she could maybe touch him she could be healed.
Lo and behold, when she touched that garment, healing flowed out of Jesus and into her body and she knew immediately she’d been healed. Jesus also, it says, was aware that power had emanated from him. He turned around and he said, “Who touched me?” It says the woman, with trembling said, “It was me.”
Elsewhere, the word astonishment used to describe these women at the tomb, this word appears when Jairus has a little girl, 12 years old. She dies. Jesus comes to the little girl in Mark 5. He says, “Little girl, awake,” and she comes back to life. It says everybody in the room was astonished.
Throughout the gospel of Mark, these words are used to describe the reaction of people when God’s power breaks into our everyday lives. When Jesus teaches with authority, or when he heals, or when he casts out demons, it says the people are amazed, astonished, sometimes even trembling.
Afraid is an interesting word too. This occurs when Jesus is in the boat with the disciples. Remember the storm on the Sea of Galilee has whipped up. Everyone thinks they’re going to drown. They cry out, “Jesus, don’t you even care?” He stands up and he says, “Peace, be still,” and whoosh the whole sea goes calm. It says the disciples are sitting in the boat, looking at Jesus, and they were afraid, because the power of God and his kingdom was breaking into our everyday lives.
That’s what’s happening here with these women. It’s this moment when they get to the tomb and they find it’s empty, and it’s alarming. It’s a little shocking. It’s producing awe and wonderment. If you’ve been in church for many years, it’s possible that like me you come on Easter Sunday, and it’s wonderful. It’s a great time to get together to worship God, to hear a nice sermon on the resurrection. But maybe you’re lacking that raw wonder and amazement that Jesus who was dead is now alive.
When we read this story, it is just drenched with awe at what God has done. Jesus is who he said he was. Jesus has conquered sin and death. Jesus is alive. This is good news. So this is the women’s response. As the women are responding, they hear the angel, and it says they flee or they go from that place. It says they don’t talk to anyone. This is a way in the language of saying that they were so committed to obeying what the angel said, to go tell the disciples that Jesus is alive and he’s waiting for them in Galilee, that they didn’t stop along the way to chat.
In the ancient world, it was very important to greet people as you went along, or if you had a neighbor or a friend you would stop and talk with them. They don’t talk to anyone. They’re going straight to the disciples. So what do the women do with the empty tomb? Well, they respond in awe and obedience. That’s their response. But what’s ours? What is our response? What will we do with the empty tomb? As I’ve been thinking and praying about it this week, I think there are three main possibilities. What will we do with the empty tomb?
1. Deny it. One option is to simply deny it. To deny that the tomb is empty. To deny that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. In our experience oftentimes, dead people stay dead, and so this seems like a fanciful invention, a fairytale. This is the approach the Jewish leaders had after they found out Jesus had been resurrected.
They got some money together, it says in Matthew 28, and they went to the soldiers who were in the area at the time, and they paid them off. They said, “Listen, start telling a false story that the disciples came and they broke into the tomb and they stole the body. Make sure everyone does not think that Jesus rose from the dead.” So it says in Matthew 28 that that story is still told among the Jews until this day.
For a lot of us, perhaps it is a little difficult to really think about Jesus in the flesh being raised from the dead. But it is even more difficult to explain what happened in the aftermath of the resurrection if there was no resurrection, because very, very quickly the news that Jesus had risen from the dead began to spread.
The scholars, the archeologists who study such things, the historians, they say that in Jerusalem, a city of about 250,000 people, within 20 years after the resurrection, around 100,000-125,000 people in Jerusalem had embraced Jesus as their Savior and had embraced this idea of the resurrection.
Now why would so many people in Jerusalem say yes to Jesus? I mean, they’d all been there when he died, and the only real plausible explanation is that so many of them saw Jesus when he was alive. We get the eyewitness accounts…of course, the gospel of John…talking about the disciples seeing Jesus, Thomas even touching the scars on his hands and where he’s pierced in his side.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is talking about how Jesus appeared to the apostles and then even at one time to a group of 500 people. Acts 1:3 talks about how Jesus after his sufferings presented himself alive to them through many proofs for 40 days. A lot of people saw Jesus resurrected, the living, post-crucifixion, in-the-flesh Jesus. So they told people, “Do you know that guy who was crucified? Well, he’s still alive.” All of Jerusalem began coming to faith.
You can imagine. If you lived in Jerusalem, maybe you didn’t see the risen Lord, but maybe your butcher did or your uncle or your wife or your brother or your son or someone around you saw Jesus and came back and said, “He’s really alive.” They said, “Okay, we believe it.” Incredible impact. Immediate impact after the resurrection.
Another reason we believe the resurrection did indeed happen is that those 12 apostles, we know from history, 11 of them died a martyr’s death. They were literally willing to give their lives up for the conviction that they had seen Jesus indeed in the flesh resurrected, that this wasn’t some sort of scheme.
You can just imagine if this was some kind of plot the disciples had hatched, and they got together and they said, “Okay, listen. We all know he’s really dead, but let’s just pretend like he’s risen again,” then one of them is ready to be martyred, would he really die for what he knew to be a lie? These men, these women who gave their lives for their faith were so convinced of the death and the resurrection they were willing to die for it.
But even if you do find yourself in that place where you are skeptical about the reality of the resurrection… To be honest, I think all of us sometimes have some trouble grasping or getting our heads around the truth of this supernatural new body of Jesus rising on the third day. Even if you’re in that place, the encouraging thing from this passage is that doubt does not prevent God from working in your life.
You see here the women that when they get to the tomb, they’re not expecting anything. They don’t expect the resurrection. They completely deny the resurrection. “This is not going to happen.” But their lack of faith in what Jesus had said he was going to do did not prevent God from sending an angel to talk to them anyway and to invite them, “See the place where they laid him. It is now empty.”
Just because we doubt, just because we even deny does not keep God from bringing up opportunities in our lives where we can look once again and have a fresh consideration that perhaps Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. As we think about that, in my experience, people who deny the resurrection are rarely people who have actually sat down to consider the facts and the history and everything else, all the other reasons to believe in the resurrection.
Usually, people who have a problem with the resurrection are people who’ve had a difficult interaction with Christians or maybe a negative experience with the church, or maybe the perception of our faith in the general culture has turned them off. Usually, there’s a different reason. The encouraging news is that even if we doubt, God is there saying, “Hey, come see the place where they laid him.” Consider again that Jesus did rise from the dead.
2. Forget it. What will we do with the empty tomb? This is one we probably all fall into more often than we care to admit. It’s just pretty easy to forget about the reality of the resurrection. We don’t deny it; we just kind of forget about it. At some point in our lives we trust Jesus as our Savior, cleanse us of our sins by his death, and that, authentically, in that moment of trust, that moment of faith, we are born again. We’re trusting Jesus for our eternal destiny and that we will be with God forever. Eternal life. There is that moment.
But then on a day-to-day basis we don’t live in the reality of the resurrection. We don’t live as if Jesus is alive and he’s reigning on high. It’s just really easy to forget that Jesus has direction and guidance for us. It’s fascinating here because the message of the angel to the women at the tomb is not, “See, he is risen! He is not here! You can go to heaven when you die!” That’s not what the angel says. Do you know what the angel says? “See, he is risen. He is not here. Go tell the disciples he has gone before you to Galilee.”
That phrase gone before is a very powerful word in the original language. It’s the kind of word you use to describe what a shepherd does leading a flock of sheep. It’s the idea that Jesus has gone before them where they are supposed to be and is now inviting them to come with, that Jesus has direction and insight and guidance, that he knows where you’re going and he’s inviting you, giving you counsel and wisdom so you end up in the right spot. That’s what Jesus is doing here.
Yet so often we forget that the resurrection means he is alive…right now. Jesus is alive, and he has stuff to say to all of us, guidance for all of us. Yet we go through our lives and we get frustrated. We become anxious. We start feeling like we have to work, work, work, work, work, running the treadmill of life, can’t get off the treadmill of life, trying to make everything happen in our own power because we’ve forgotten that Jesus has been resurrected and is ruling on high and has insight and says to us, “My yoke is easy. My burden is light. Come follow me.”
This is the invitation of Jesus, and we just forget. But the resurrection is not just a past fact and it’s not just a future promise. The resurrection is a present reality. This is what Paul is talking about in Romans 8. He says, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.” (Romans 8:11)
The reality of the resurrection is not just something for our future and it’s not just a stamp of vindication that Jesus is indeed who he said he was; it is a present reality where the living Christ through his Spirit gives us guidance and gives us direction. Let’s not let Easter just be one day out of the year; let it be everyday out of the year.
3. Apply it. What will we do with the empty tomb? This third response is that we can apply it. What does it mean to apply the truth of the empty tomb? In our passage, the application is rather interesting. “Go, tell the disciples.” That’s what the angel tells the women. “Go tell the disciples that Jesus has gone before you to Galilee.” Basically, the application of the empty tomb in Mark 16 is get to Galilee.
Now for us, it’s already after 12:00, and it’s going to be hard for us to catch a plane and literally get to Galilee today. It’s going to be difficult for us to apply this literally in the exact same way as the women. But again, knowing the full story of Mark’s gospel, we see that Galilee is not so much a specific place; it has a very important meaning.
Remember. What is Galilee? What does Galilee symbolize, this region to the north of Jerusalem, this area where Jesus grew up? What does Galilee mean in the gospel of Mark? In Mark 1, it says that after John the Baptist was arrested came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God. The time was fulfilled and the kingdom of God was at hand. Repent and believe the good news.
The very next thing Jesus does in Galilee is he sees a guy named Simon Peter. “Come, follow me.” He begins calling disciples to himself. The whole first half of the gospel of Mark is the story of Jesus leading these guys around Galilee, discipling them. Galilee is the place of discipleship.
Now discipleship is one of those words. If you haven’t grown up in church, you might think that sounds pretty religious. “What is discipleship?” It’s pretty simple. It means to follow with the intention to learn. That’s what discipleship is. When Jesus said to the disciples, “Follow me,” and they said, “Okay,” they said, “I will follow Jesus with the intention of learning how to live life, with the intention of learning how to live in the kingdom of God.” That’s what they were doing. So with Jesus here, Galilee is the place of discipleship.
How do we apply this news of the resurrection, the empty tomb? Get to Galilee. That’s what the Lord is saying. “Come be a disciple.” Now this is somewhat shocking because very recently in the gospel of Mark, all of these disciples had pretty much just fled from Jesus. Total failure. Three years of investment. Jesus is pouring into their lives. They’re intending to learn, and then when the pressure hits and Jesus is betrayed in the garden of Gethsemane, they all flee! The sheep are scattered when the shepherd is struck.
Yet here Jesus is after the resurrection saying, “Come to Galilee. Come be a disciple.” “But we’ve blown it. We’ve failed. We’ve messed up.” Jesus is saying, “No, come. I want you. This is what I want. Come to Galilee. Be a disciple again.” This is what Jesus is doing for the guys and for the ladies here. He’s saying, “Come for a fresh start.” That’s what the resurrection is about. It’s about a fresh start with Jesus.
If we’re honest, we all need fresh starts in life constantly. Last night, I decided I was going to wear this shirt and I figured I might as well wash it. It is Easter, after all. After I washed it, I went to iron it, and contrary to what you may have observed in my wardrobe these previous Sundays, I do know how to iron a shirt. My father actually is here. He taught me how to iron a shirt.
So I get the ironing board out and warm up the iron and put the shirt down. I start doing the collar. I lift up the iron, and there’s like brown stains all along the collar. I look at that iron, and I don’t know if it’s rust or what it was! “Oh, I’m wearing this shirt tomorrow.” So I put the iron down. Rush the shirt over to the kitchen sink. I start trying to scrub out the collar, but I don’t realize as the rest of the shirt falls into the spaghetti sauce pot. I look down and I go, “Ah!”
Amy goes, “Honey, what’s wrong?” She’s in the living room. She goes, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I need a fresh start!” So my wonderful wife comes and takes the shirt and starts washing out the spaghetti stains. She got all of them. I mean, it still smells a little bit like garlic, but other than that, it’s all good. I’m cleaning off the iron. We need a fresh start!
Or have you ever had those days that they start off and about five minutes into your day you realize you would prefer to just hit reset on the whole day? It’s that feeling where you’re about two minutes into a conversation and you’re like, “Could we just rewind reality for a minute? I’d like to do that over.”
I was asking Amy about this, if I had ever done this in our marriage…just needed a restart, needed a fresh start, and she reminded me of this time. She told me it was okay to share this story. About a year and a half ago we had just gotten a puppy. Her name is Olive. We got her at the Humane Society. Beautiful, sweet dog. Olive loves to sit with us at night on the couch.
One night, pretty early on in having Olive, Amy is in nursing school, so she had to do an assignment and stay up pretty late to finish it, and so I went to bed a little bit earlier. She came to bed probably 45 minutes or an hour later. Then the next morning, we woke up, and one of the first things we ask each other is, “How’d you sleep?” So I asked Amy, “How’d you sleep?” She goes, “Ah, pretty well. Pretty well.”
She goes, “How about you?” Listen to what I said. I said, “I slept all right, but you kind of smelled like dog.” Can you believe I said that? As soon as I said that, I said, “I need a fresh start,” because Amy is one of the most pleasant smelling people I have ever been around. In fact, most of the time I love the way she smells. All the time I love the way she smells!
I don’t even know why I said that! It was terrible. I didn’t say, “You smelled like our dog or a dog.” I just said, “You smelled like dog.” It’s such a harsh thing. I can’t believe I did that! I just remember in that moment going, “I need a fresh start. Oh man!” But it’s true, isn’t it? We need fresh starts all the time.
For some of us, it’s just from the morning till now. Maybe it was a tough time getting out of the house with the family. For others of us, it’s 5, 10, 15, or 20 years of accumulating mistakes and we just know we need a fresh start, and that’s what the resurrection is all about. It’s Jesus going to Galilee and saying, “Come meet me here in the place of discipleship. Come follow me again. I don’t care if you fled. I don’t care if you ran away. I’m alive. I’m here now. I want to be involved in your life. Come. Come.”
It says in Hebrews that Jesus, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, despising its shame. Do you know what the joy set before Jesus was? Hanging out with us after we blow it, after we fail. That’s what Jesus was looking forward to, that on the other side of the crucifixion, on the other side of our failure he, the resurrected one would be saying, “Come let’s have a fresh start. You need a fresh start.”
You know who needed an especially fresh start was Peter. I love this about Mark 16, because this is the only resurrection account that includes this little note. The angel tells the women, “Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee.” And Peter. Especially Peter. We know from the other Gospels that the disciples went to Galilee and there they did see Jesus resurrected.
What happened? Well, we have to go to John 21 to find out what happens when Peter sees Jesus again. Remember we’ve talked about it. Peter is the one who denied Jesus three times the night Jesus was betrayed. After promising full of bombast that he would never deny the Lord his courage withered when the pressure hit.
So the disciples are in Galilee there in John 21. They’re out on the boat. They’re fishing. They look up and they see on the shore in the dawn light the silhouette of a man probably hunched over a small fire cooking some fish. They realize that it’s Jesus alive. Peter can’t even wait for the boat to get to the shore.
He jumps out of the boat into the water, thrashes to be there with Jesus, and he’s sitting there. We know what happens. Jesus says, “Peter, do you love me? Feed my flock. Peter, do you love me? Feed my lambs. Peter, do you love me? Feed my sheep.” He’s taking Peter, the one who had denied him three time, and he’s restoring him three times.
But do you guys know how sometimes like a smell can take you to a memory? Just you can smell something and you’re there. I remember when I was growing up in Milwaukee in the wintertime there was a little park near our house with a pond that would freeze. There was this amazing warming house.
So we would go on Saturdays to go play hockey on the pond. We’d go in the warming house and put our skates on. There was this amazing wood fire in the middle of that warming house and there was a big round stone hearth all the way around it. When we were walking to the rink, I can still remember what it smelled like in that cold 15-degree Wisconsin winter air, when that whiff of the wood fire burning at the warming house would catch my nostrils. Sniff! Ah, yes, we’re going to play hockey.
To this day, on a cold day, if I smell a good wood fire, I’m in an instant back playing hockey on the pond. Ah, I love that smell. You guys know what it’s like. Maybe it’s a perfume or maybe it’s a food that’s connected to a meaningful time in your life. But you just catch that whiff of something and it takes you back.
Now there’s something very interesting that happens when Jesus is sitting at the fire with Peter. There’s a word used to describe this fire in the gospel of John that only appears one other place in the entire New Testament. It says that this fire that Jesus was cooking over and where he was restoring Peter was a charcoal fire.
Do you know the only other place where that very word appears in the New Testament? Three chapters earlier, John 18, the night Jesus was being betrayed, Peter denying the Lord. Do you remember where he was standing? Next to a charcoal fire. Here’s what the resurrection does. Jesus is taking the stench of denial and turning it into the aroma of restoration.
Jesus is taking the worst stuff, the things that stink from our past, and he’s saying, “Come sit with me. I want to redeem the charcoal fire. I don’t want you to stand at the fire of denial. Come here to this place for a fresh start. Peter, do you love me? Feed my lambs. Peter, Peter, you have a place in my kingdom. Failure is not final in my kingdom. The resurrection means that there is a fresh start available.”
So this Easter as we’re together and we’re reading this passage and we’re worshiping, some of us probably need a fresh start. Maybe in our marriages we need a fresh start. (We’re not talking about get-a-whole-new-spouse fresh start.) When Jesus came out of the tomb, he was the first fruit of the new creation, but he was still walking out in a messy world. It wasn’t like the whole earth was resurrected.
Jesus was the fresh start himself in the middle of the broken world, and that’s what he does with us. Even in our marriages, he comes. He can give us a fresh start. Jesus is saying, “Come be my disciple. Follow me. Learn from me how to live my life. Let me give you by resurrection power a fresh start in your marriage.” In our families. In our jobs. It’s possible in our work we’ve just become worn down, tired. Maybe you can’t even find a job and Jesus is coming to us and saying, “Hey, let me give you a fresh start.”
Maybe even in your walk with God. Maybe there was a time when your heart was on fire. Maybe you did trust Jesus as your Savior, but you’ve kind of forgotten about the resurrection. Here’s Jesus once again by the charcoal fire saying, “Hey, come. Fresh start. I have a place for you in my kingdom. I’m welcoming you. Come. Whatever stink is in the past is in the past. It died on the cross with me. Come now to Galilee and follow. Be a disciple again.” That’s the challenge for all of us to refresh our direction, to follow Jesus as disciples once again.