He is Risen, Indeed
From the Hosts
Join us this week as Greg, Emily, and Rachel discuss the removal of the body of Jesus from the cross, His burial, and the miraculous events of the following days.
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are continuing our essay, our foray, our journey – choose a metaphorical verb/noun – through the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We talked last time about his death and the nature of crucifixion but we did not aspire to get Jesus off the cross in one episode, so that’s where we are today. We left Jesus on the cross, with people having observed him and saying this was truly the Son of God. And having pierced his side to fulfill the prophecy, I think now we’re going to get him off the cross, or whether we’re not but I believe the soldiers would do that, is that correct?
The soldiers would do that. Normally with the death of a criminal the body would be taken to a common dumping site, a common grave as it were, and thrown in and maybe not covered but just left to rot, but Jesus’ friends – quiet subdued friends, friends who didn’t come out into the open until now but at least they came out in the open – one we’ve met before is named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews who came to Jesus by night in John 3 in the whole “You must be born again…for God so loved the world” stuff. The other who is acknowledged more in the gospels is Joseph of Arimathea, a small town somewhere.
They’re both members of the Sanhedrin, but the gospel writers let us know that these did not consent to the verdict in Jesus’ trials. Presumably they weren’t even invited. I wouldn’t invite them because they’re just going to cause trouble.
You don’t invite your opponents to participate in the coup, although if they’re secretly disciples maybe they would just…
Well, Nicodemus had caused a little bit of trouble. “Does the law condemn anybody before it hears him?”
“Are you also a Galilean? Look and see out of Galilee arises no prophet,” and they began to watch him.
Joseph of Arimathea we haven’t even heard of. The name Joseph is significant and we can talk about that later. Joseph is a wealthy man and this is where the providence of God that we call coincidence begins to compound. The place where Jesus was crucified, wherever it was, is a garden – surprise surprise.
It’s verse 41 – “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulcher wherein was never man yet laid.”
Yes. It was a clean place and it just so happened that Joseph of Arimathea owned it. In fact, it was destined to be his own sepulcher, so it would be an easy matter to carry the body of our Lord from the cross over or down or around or wherever, and ensconce it in this unused ceremonially-clean sepulcher or grave. But in order to take possession of the body, Joseph needed permission.
Now there was a man named Joseph, a council member, a good and just man. He had not consented to their decision and deed. He was from Arimathea, a city of the Jews, who himself was also waiting for the kingdom of God…
Whatever that meant to him. He knew that it was wrapped up in the coming of Messiah, and he like so many others had firmly believed that Jesus was the Messiah, and yet Jesus is dead so what are we supposed to do with that?
One of the gospels says he went in boldly. He comes out of his shell. He comes out of hiding in the shadows and goes to the governor and makes himself known as a disciple of the preacher from Nazareth. This is where Pilate is a little surprised and orders that they check and make sure Jesus is really dead, and he is. Somewhere in here Nicodemus joins him.
Back to John. Nicodemus, who had first come to Jesus by night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about 100 Roman pounds – in other words, a lot.
Then took they the body of Jesus and wound it in linen cloths with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.
So he participated in removing the body and laid it in the tomb that was cut in stone that no one had laid in. It was the Day of Preparation. The Sabbath was drawing nigh. It was a High Sabbath we’re told elsewhere.
From Mark - When Pilate found out from the centurion that Jesus was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. He brought a linen cloth and, taking him down, wound him in the linen cloth and laid him in the tomb which had been cut, and rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.
From Matthew – This man went into Pilate, asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate commanded the body to be given up. Joseph took the body and wrapped it in clean cloth and laid it in his own new tomb which he had cut out in the rock. Then he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb and departed.
Matthew says they wrapped the body, so apparently the tradition was that you start at the feet and you wrap and you pour the ointment and spices, then you wrap some more and pour more ointment that’s spiced, and you wrap some more, and so on until you get to the head, and the head gets its own separate covering.
Basically, by the time the oil begins to set in you’ve cocooned the person. Even if he suddenly opened his eyes and wanted to get out, he would have a problem because he’s tucked in real nice with hardened oil and spices. But Jesus is dead so we’re not worried about that.
It’s amazing if you think about these two men how much they gave monetarily for this. I’m sure creating a tomb like this cost Joseph quite a bit, and then Nicodemus brings all of these oils and spices that again were a pricey commodity. We think back to Mary who breaks the spices over Jesus, and he said, “She’s doing this for my burial,” and now Nicodemus does as well. Both would be very expensive for them to give these things in honor of Jesus.
This is at a point when they are really wrestling with what this all means. He’s dead. We can think of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. “We had trusted it would be him who had redeemed Israel” – had trusted, past tense or progressive to this point, but he’s dead. We have a problem here.
When we think of myrrh we tend to go back to the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life when the wisemen brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but it’s also true that myrrh, like aloes, was used for the celebration of marriage – see Psalm 45 and other like places. There are some interesting intersecting things and images here.
Here’s a man named Joseph and he’s wrapping Jesus in linen cloth. At the beginning of Jesus’ life Joseph, probably on more than one occasion, or Mary, depending on who was awake at the time, wrapped the baby Jesus in swaddling clothes which is strips of linen cloth.
We’ll come back to the name, but before we do there’s one other thing. The synoptics record one other thing about the burial before they move on, and in order Matthew, Mark, Luke.
Matthew – Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb.
Luke – The women who had come with him out of Galilee followed after and saw how his body was laid and they returned and prepared spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.
So we’ve got two Marys and a Joseph, and Jesus is being wrapped, effectively, in swaddling clothes. But there’s something else. The New Testament Joseph on the warning of the angel took the Holy Family and departed and went down into Egypt, leaving a spiritual Egypt for the physical geographical Egypt.
Almost 2000 years before, another Joseph had escorted God’s son, his firstborn, Israel, down into Egypt. So it’s fitting that there would be a Joseph here to bury Jesus as he departs this life into the next, and that there be a Mary here at the end, because once the resurrection passed – not so many Marys. Historically they were there and yet the gospel writers didn’t have to highlight their names so much but they did. They want us to realize, “There were Marys here, guys. Get a clue.”
Do we want to comment on the supposed identifications of where the tomb was?
The most popular view of where Jesus’ tomb was is of course the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox or Eastern Orthodox view, that being that the Most Beloved Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is built over the tomb, hence Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
By the way, if you Google things related to Jesus’ burial, Google AI overview will tell you that Jesus is buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, according to Christian tradition.
My argument against that one has always been that if you’ve actually studied the map of Jerusalem, the church is in the middle of the city, which goes against the idea that Jesus was crucified, and if he was buried where he was crucified he should be outside the city, not in the middle of the city.
But I was reading something and actually found out they have been allowed to do some archeological testing and such on the mortar and such of the burial chamber that they claim is Jesus’ burial chamber, and they dated the mortar to construction in the 4th century.
Yes. Then there is a garden tomb that was discovered in the late 1800s and became popular in the early 1900s, but apparently there’s been a lot of scholastic scandal around it because the people misrepresented things. One of the guys who claimed to have found it also said he found the ark of the covenant nearby.
Or in Area 51. So that one doesn’t have as much credibility just because of the men that have been associated with it. Granted we would probably look for a garden tomb, but it doesn’t sound like the one that they found is what we would want.
The other one that has got some attention was in the 1980s but it was a tomb down south of the city and it was a family’s burial site from the first century. That doesn’t really make sense because Jesus’ family is not from that area and it doesn’t say that it was Joseph of Arimathea’s whole family, but rather one for him.
Maybe there was a family buried there after the events of the gospel. I don’t know. It’s a perfectly good tomb and Jesus wasn’t using it anymore.
My general guess of many things, thinking of the body of Moses and such, is that the Lord probably purposely had it destroyed or we just can’t find it, because what have people done with what they think they’ve found? They use it as a shrine, as a place of worship, and feeling somehow closer or holier because they’ve sat next to the tomb of Jesus. So my guess is it’s probably not there to be found, or if it is we’re going to miss it.
Who was it that destroyed the bronze serpent that had become a snare to Israel?
I’m just seeing a time travel movie where someone goes back to take the dynamite and blow up the tomb, while the women go and rest. They have just enough daylight left to assemble some herbs and spices and oils and such and then they rest, because the Sabbath begins at sundown and they rest through what for us would be Friday night and all day Saturday.
Then early Sunday morning – and yes, it was Sunday morning we’re told – when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, and then later on when he appears in the evening to the disciples, it’s still that same day, the first day of the week. So we shift from a Hebrew calculation of time – evening to morning to evening – to a Roman reckoning that we’re more familiar with, from midnight to midnight.
I suppose that since this is a history podcast it’s kind of relevant. Someday we’ll have to talk about the religious presuppositions of time-keeping and all of that, things like BCE and CE and AD.
Also just actual time-keeping and calendars, because as we found in our earlier study there was often a lot of poor record-keeping in all of those reigns of Pharaohs and emperors and such, so it is relevant at some point.
Early in the morning on the first day of the week comes, and again the gospels say it a little bit differently.
Mark – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, who’s the mother of James and John.
John – Mary Magdalene, focusing just on her as if she’s the only one, and yet as you read it becomes clear that he knows she’s not the only one. She’s just the one he’s shining the spotlight on.
Mark says, “Very early in the morning on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen.” As they go they are concerned. They had seen – and the gospels tell us Joseph allowed for the stone that would be the doorway, the lock on the thing, to be rolled into place, which probably meant you remove the wedge that’s holding it where it is and it simply rolls into place and stays there.
The women wanted to honor the body of Jesus further, but now suddenly they’re realizing, “There’s this rock. It’s really big. What are we going to do about that?”
I think we skipped over the Jews saying, “Hey, we remember that he said he was going to rise from the dead, so you would you please seal things and set soldiers?”
I think as a kid when I heard “seal the tomb” I had the image of plaster or glue or something being used to literally seal the tomb like you would seal something from water damage of something like that.
With the governor or emperor’s insignia, meaning “You break this and you just made an enemy of the whole Roman empire – their army, their secret service, their bureaucracy, and they will pursue you, hunt you down, do nasty things to you and to your dead body afterwards, and to your house and probably to your family.”
The passage you’re referring to comes at the end of Matthew 27. It actually would have been the Sabbath day.
The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and Pharisees came together to Pilate saying, “Sir, we remember that that deceiver said while he was yet alive, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ Command therefore the sepulcher be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say to the people he’s risen from the dead, so the last error shall be worse than the first.”
They took better notes and had better memories than the disciples did. They remembered the three-day thing. It’s interesting that within that culture, “Just keep it for three days. After that it doesn’t matter.” Our modern Christian culture has trouble with that. “You know, four would be close enough, or five or six, as long as he’s alive in your heart and all that.” No, they were talking calendar history. “If he does not come back in three days he’s a liar, and whatever happens after that doesn’t count and it’s simply more evidence that he’s a liar. So we just need to guard it through the third day. It’s that simple.”
Of course, if the Pharisees and Sadducees had known what the disciples were feeling, where they were and what they were doing, they might not have worried quite as much, but they didn’t know and it never hurts to be safe.
Pilate said, “You have a watch.” He’s not telling them “You already have one.” He says, “You want it, you got it.”
This is kind of news to Pilate. “He said what? What didn’t anyone tell me this earlier? We already have a garden place. We don’t want that happening. We don’t want a revolution from the grave, so take the guard and go deal with it.”
It’s kind of like, “You mean this guy that we tried for crimes against the State and found no guilt in, you mean he predicted that we would kill him anyway? And there’s something else that he also predicted? Yikes.”
So they went and made the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone and setting a watch.
Josh McDowell in The Resurrection Factor, and I assume it’s probably in Evidence that Demands a Verdict as well, spends a good deal of time talking about the Roman guard. I won’t repeat everything he says but the bottom line is this. These were not a bunch of sissies in mini-skirts holding sticks. These were elite shock troops who were used to holding ground against incoming barbarians and not losing – slaughtering anything that hit them.
They knew that to fall asleep on duty was a death sentence. Whoever fell asleep would bear the burden, and if they didn’t know they’d draw lots and pick somebody or they’d execute everybody. So the idea that they got careless and all fell asleep at the same time up front is nonsense.
However, this time to anticipate what’s coming, once the angel descends in thunder and lightning and blows the stone door away, first the Roman soldiers faint – not a very Roman or soldierly thing to do – and when they get up and look around and see an empty tomb and say, “We are in such trouble,” at least some of them have the sense to go to the Sanhedrin and say, “You know the guy we were guarding? There was this angel, and when we woke up the body was gone, so what are we dealing with? If the governor finds out we are so dead. Can you help us, because no one else can.”
The Sanhedrin says, “Here’s a bunch of money. Tell anybody you run into that while you were sleeping the disciples came by night and stole the body away. And if this comes to the governor’s ears we’ll take care of you.”
When they said to tell people, they did not mean put this in your official report. I think it amounted to burn your notes, burn the report, lose the documentation, put it to the bottom of the tray, put it in the X files where no one will ever find it. But if it gets to the governor we will intervene. In the meanwhile, just tell your friends, “Yeah, we had this funny thing…we fell asleep.”
I’m beginning to think of JFKs assassination at this point. They took it because what else can they do? They took the money and did as they were told, “And this saying is commonly reported among the Jews unto this day,” Matthew writes. He doesn’t bother refuting it or even laughing at it. “So while you were sleeping you saw the disciples enter the camp, heard them move the stone, and watched while they took the body, all while you were sleeping? Pretty good.”
So that’s there. While we’re there, on the issue of apologetics, here are unbelievers, Roman soldiers, who come and say, “The body’s gone. There was an angel.” As far as we know they didn’t see Jesus actually leave. They just saw the angel come and blast the tomb open, and they saw the body was gone afterwards, and they go and tell the Sanhedrin.
The Sanhedrin does not say, “You bunch of liars.” They say, “Just keep this quiet. Here’s a bribe.”
I once had a student who had been listening to the wrong kind of apologetics. He said, “Christian witness is so easy. First you prove the resurrection. Then that proves that God is. Then you go on to…”
“First of all, tell me it’s easy after you’ve done it. It’s very easy when you’re listening to people talk about it.”
Exactly. Both of these groups of men, the soldiers and the Sanhedrin, had evidence of an eyewitness nature, and none of them as far as we know came to faith in Christ. In fact, just the opposite. Their first impulse is to cover it all up and to hide and not reckon with realities and spread lies. Evidence does not change hearts, a theme we keep returning to again and again, but here it was just too obvious not to throw it out there again.
Back to what happened that morning. Rachel, you have at least one version of a harmony in front of you so feel free to break in and offer alternatives, but this is my take on what probably happened that morning. It solves some of the problems, but it doesn’t necessarily tie up all the knots.
Here we have four men who are writing some time after the fact but, of the four, Mark is writing from Peter who’s as close as we get to an eyewitness. He actually ran to the empty tomb. John also ran to the empty tomb – John got there first – and Luke who’s had a chance to interview everybody relevant and obviously did get in all the little “this is what they were thinking” sections that appear in Luke and Acts, so we’re dealing with credible historians who were very close to the scene, and yet they didn’t sit down in a room and say, “All right, let’s get this right. What order are we going to say things happened in?” They simply told their stories and each one has a different emphasis and a different pacing and they’re moving to a different point.
John is focusing very much on Mary Magdalene, and maybe we can see later why that is. Matthew rushes quickly to his conclusion which is “All power is given to me in heaven and earth. Go make disciples of the nations.” Luke spends a little more time with people and what they’re feeling and what they’re thinking.
So as we read these we do need to harmonize but we also need to realize that they’re not setting out to plot a storyline. They’re recording what actually happened from their perspective with what they intend to write about, so some of it’s pretty easy to put together but every now and then there’s, “Wait, are we summing up? Are we moving ahead? Are we ignoring somebody?” but we can come close enough.
What seems to have happened, we know that the women had agreed to meet together to take their spices and do something to the body of Jesus with them, and that they had forgotten about the stone.
I also wonder what they were planning to do with the soldiers who are supposed to be guarding and keeping the tomb closed.
The soldiers weren’t put there until the day after the preparation, and being good Jewish ladies they weren’t at the tomb on that day.
But I’m wondering if the soldiers would have stopped them if they had come before the angel had descended.
I hadn’t thought of that before and went, “Oh, wait a minute. They had double things standing in their way, but the angel took care of both of them.”
I feel like these were Jewish women and they could have talked their way into the tomb. “You saw him die, dead body, let’s go.”
“Lady, see that seal? You know how much that’s worth? My neck! Get out of here.” But they come and they see that the stone has been moved. The language in Mark’s gospel is not simply that it was rolled a bit over so that you could squeeze through. It’s more the kind of language of picking up something and putting it in your pocket and walking off with it.
The words he uses distinguishes the grave from the whole sepulcher complex. In other words, and I’ve deliberately used the words a couple times, the stone had been blown away. When the angel came down he moved it a lot, sheer angelic force, miraculous power.
Mark in mostly having to read the Greek, and again Resurrection Factor by Josh McDowell, where he spends a good deal of time talking about the stone and the kind of stones that were used in those days, some scientists who did some work in terms of probable density and weight and the ability to move things, and the Greek words that differentiate the tomb itself from the whole sepulcher complex.
Again I refer you to The Resurrection Factor by Josh McDowell. I could simply read it all to you, but I think we’ve probably already violated copyright a few times. I’m trying to back off from that as best we can.
So they see that. At this point in my reading, Mary, who seems to have been younger than the others because at least two of the others are mothers of apostles, so if the apostles were around 30 the mothers were around 50 – Mary Magdalene seems to be younger because she turns around and runs all the way back to Jerusalem to find the apostles and say, “Something’s gone wrong.”
Maybe she got close enough to look in and conclude that it’s empty, but whatever, she goes back and finds Peter and John and says, “They…” – the ubiquitous they – “They’ve taken his body and we don’t know what they’ve done.” So Peter and John set out.
Meanwhile the other women approach the tomb and look inside and they see the shelf within the tomb where Jesus’ body had been laid, and a cocoon of linens and spices and oil is still there not unwrapped, but the handkerchief that covered the face has been folded up and put in a separate place, separate from the other things.
Side note, I’ve seen a lot of speculation about what that means. I don’t know if you ladies have come across anything. There’s an urban legend in the church that says that’s something carpenters did to mark a finished job, but apparently there’s no evidence that that actually was something carpenters did, so that’s why my best guess – and it’s simply a guess – is that when he was a little boy he was taught to make his bed. He has honored his mother all the way through his life so as a matter of habit he folded it up and left it there. Besides, it does show deliberate intention.
If you were trying to steal the body, you’d probably just pick up the whole thing and go with it. Even if you could cut the cocoon open and pull the body out and somehow glue it all back together so that no one noticed, why in the world would you take the time to fold up this thing and put it neatly in the corner? This implies deliberate human intention to detail.
There are a number of supposed explanations for what really happened on that Easter morning. One is called the swoon theory, that Jesus on the cross, rather than dying, went into some kind of unconscious swoon, and in the tomb he woke up.
Also he’s covered in 100 pounds of dressings, so to speak. If he swooned it’s because he’s really weak, and he was really weak. He had been beaten near death before he even got on the cross.
Even if he had survived the cross, then not having his wounds treated, the man would have bled to death.
So he gets up, hobbles over to the rock and leans on it and it gives way, and he attacks the Roman soldiers with his bandages and ties them up and goes off and presents himself to his disciples as the Lord of life.
It sounds like somebody in one of these spy movies. They seem dead and then they come out and do all this. He’s not Die Hard or something. That’s what it reminds me of.
Another one that comes to mind is the wrong tomb theory. The women went to the wrong tomb.
Then when they got the apostles, the apostles followed them back to the wrong tomb. And when the Sanhedrin came and checked it out, they also went to the wrong tomb. Apparently so did the angel.
The sheer desperation – you can see why it’s tempting to fall back on an evidentialist approach and show that nothing makes sense. One gentleman, and I don’t remember his name but he had been a rampant unbeliever rationalist, a hater of the gospel and the doctrine of resurrection, and he went to the Middle East and did the archeological work to try to understand what was going on at the time, the actual social conditions and such.
As he struggled with that and with the text, the answers he came up with were not wholly scriptural, but he did trip on one thing and he made it the title of his book – Who Moved the Stone? It wasn’t the Roman soldiers. It wasn’t Jesus, unless of course he’s God. It wasn’t the disciples. They were cowering elsewhere. Who moved the stone? Because if no one did and the body of Jesus is still there, and when the Sanhedrin heard from the soldiers, they would simply say, “Show us,” and they would go back to the right tomb. They would move the stone and there would be the body and they would parade the body through town just to show, “Look, we know what he said but he’s dead. It’s over.”
The fact that his enemies accept that his body was gone is the big demonstration that whatever happened, it really was not there anymore.
That’s also what I was thinking when you were talking about going to the wrong tomb. It made me think of one of the early episodes where they send them to the wrong container.
So the women come upon the angels. There are two – one sitting at the head of the slab where Jesus laid, one at the foot. We are supposed to think here of the Holy of Holies and the mercy seat, the slab on the ark of the covenant that represented God’s footstool, the angels representing the cherubim of his throne. It’s where the body lay and it’s where any blood that leaked out would be left behind.
Their message was, “You’ve come looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He’s not here. He’s risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.” In other words, be eyewitnesses to a historical event. There’s no sleight of hand, no shenanigans, no “don’t step behind the curtain, you don’t want to see what’s back there, it’s only for the few initiated.” They’re invited to come and look and see for themselves that the body is gone, and to go tell his disciples and Peter that he’s risen and that he will see them in Galilee.
Again, my reconstruction of the thing is that they’re older so they’re taking their time, and somehow two paths diverge along the way to Jerusalem. Peter and John, followed by Mary, come back. John gets there first, a point he makes in his gospel. Peter comes and goes in and sees that it’s empty. John follows him and we’re told that John believed.
John at that point seems to have understood the historical reality of the resurrection and the doctrines involved in it. Peter comes out kind of shaking his head and they go their way. Then along comes Mary, in a very tender and beautiful scene.
Along Comes Mary is a song title. We had a rom-com title before. Now we’ve got a song title.
Mary stood without at the sepulcher weeping, and as she wept she stooped down and looked in the sepulcher because why not, and saw two angels in white, sitting one at the head and the other at the feet where the body of Jesus had laid. They said unto her, “Woman, why weepest thou?” She said unto them, “Because they’ve taken away my Lord.”
Notice her mind is very wrapped up in the Hebrew biblical doctrine of the nature of man. It was not that they’ve taken away his remains or his carcass.
Yeah, that. “They took away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him” – again the ‘they.’ And when she had thus said, she turned her back.
Whether she understood at the moment they were angels is open to debate. Looking back, John can tell us they were angels because of everything else that had been going on, but she is not interested in them. Strangers, foreigners, travelers, angels – it doesn’t matter. There’s only one person she cares about and that’s Jesus, so she turns her back on them and realizes something, that someone else has walked up on her.
And when she had thus said, she turned herself back and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.
She may still have been looking down, or the sun was in her eyes, or Jesus just was not letting her see him for who he was just yet.
Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener…
She was more right than she knew. Usually the Bible trivia question is – in Shakespeare the two clowns ask it in Hamlet – “Who was the first gardener? Who was the first gentleman?” and the answer we often come up with is Adam, but that’s not what the text says. God planted the garden east of Eden.
So here we are. We’ve come full circle. We have a new creation, a new garden, a new Adam, a new Eve – Mary, not in herself but representing the church – and she says –
Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him and I will take him away.
How she plans to do that is anybody’s guess but she figured she’d come up with something. Staking the claim was the important thing, not letting the body be further damaged – again, lessons about Christian burial.
Apparently she had turned away from him and she turns back now and looks at him and says –
Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not [don’t cling to me] for I am not yet ascended to my Father.
“I’m not staying. I’m going home. One day we’ll meet again and you can hold me then. Right now don’t think you can hold on. Go to my brethren…” It doesn’t say just the 12.
In a message I did for church not terribly long ago looking at 1 Corinthians 15 and trying to figure out when Jesus appeared to 500 brethren, here is background for that. He repeatedly doesn’t simply say, “Tell the 12” or “tell the apostles.” It’s my brethren. There were a lot more believers than just the 12. The place to find 500 of them probably was when he was in Galilee after all of this.
Go to my brethren and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my God, and your God.
Notice the pronoun distinction. He does not say our God, our Father. The Father is not Jesus’ father in the way he is our father. He is not Jesus’ God in the way that he’s our God, and yet the words are true.
Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.
Meanwhile the older women are on their way back, and the gospels say that Jesus met them. So after he saw Mary – and Mark says he appeared on that morning first to Mary Magdalene so that was the first visitation or revelation of himself after the resurrection – then he caught up with the women and said, “All hail. Greetings. Hi,” and it was the same thing. They want to hold onto him and he tells them the constant theme, “Go tell the disciples. I’m going to go to Galilee. We’ll have more time there. Get going.”
Here some of the order is a little harder to sort out, but somehow at some point they all get together and they’re all saying, “Jesus is alive!” It’s really important for us to highlight and underscore that. That’s what “he is risen” means. It means he is physiologically alive. His heart is pumping. His lungs are breathing in and out oxygen. The blood is circulating. The nervous system is firing. He can see, he can talk, he can be touched. When he walks down the pathway he leaves footprints in the sand. He’s really alive, historically speaking. It will not do to say he’s alive in our hearts.
There’s a precious truth that Jesus is in the heart of every believer but that’s not this. He can be alive in the hearts of believers because, first of all, he is historically, physically, physiologically alive. That’s what this is all about. This is why this takes so much time.
We could suffice ourselves with 1 Corinthians 15, “If Christ be not risen, you’re dead in your sins,” but God chose to give us the four gospels, the four accounts, and then build the whole New Testament on that fact. The thing the apostles preach everywhere is “He is risen. He’s alive and he’s reigning.”
We should wrap up there. Let’s do so with some recommendations. Any volunteers to go first?
I can go first. I don’t normally go first. I have a simple recommendation because it’s a single song. I found a group, somewhat accidentally by Spotify just continuing to play things, that is called The Scottish Psalmist, but the song I’m recommending is not a psalm. Instead they’re the first group I’ve heard to put the song at the end of Habakkuk to music.
I really enjoy their song Habakkuk’s Prayer. I love that passage and actually when I was first getting to know David he was preaching through that book and he commented, “I wish somebody would put this to song someday,” so when I found it I was very excited.
I’m going to recommend a set of pens. If you’re a paper and pen kind of person – this tends to be girls and it tends to start showing up around the age of 10 or 12 – pens, gel pens, glitter pens, pens that feel nice on the page and have nice colors.
I am still one of these girls and there’s a set of pens called Zebra Mildliners. They’re like highlighters except they’re actually nice colors so I really like them. They’re double-pointed so one end is the chisel tip and the other end is a normal felt tip pen. When I’m doing my planner or anything I’m doing that requires color, it’s really nice to have a consistent pen that I use that is a color that I use that can act as a highlighter without offending my senses. That’s my geeky pen recommendation for the day. I found a nice set that was on clearance at Michael’s craft store so I’m enjoying it. I like clearance.
I’ve got nothing great so I’m going to fall back on something I’ve probably recommended a few years ago, the late-lamented sci-fi series Babylon 5, which I’ve watched through late at night mostly. I think I’m in season 4. It’s well-done television, pretty clean.
The creator, J. Michael Straczynski, is an atheist but he’s an atheist who admits that man is a religious creature, that religion is going to be around for a long time, so it’s artistically naïve and foolish not to give religion a place in your stories. In some of his stories Christianity plays a very high role. It’s not enough that you can say, “Wow, the man really understands orthodox Christianity,” but at least he talked to somebody who does, maybe.
Occasionally the images are not interpreted for us. The captain goes to what looks to be certain death and in fact dies and comes back. We see him returning in a spaceship that no one recognizes, and no one comments on this. It’s just a visual thing – you have to actually be watching – but it’s the shape of a fish.
So as we think of our Lord coming back from the dead, like Jonah he’s been swallowed by that great monster which God forces to cough back up, or Jesus in this case simply takes his divine power and walks out through the jaws of death. They’re powerful images.
Babylon 5 also borrows extensively from Lord of the Rings, and I’ll just mention this in passing. Do you realize that all three heroes – Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf – all go through hell and die, either figuratively or literally in Gandalf’s case? Death and resurrection, the prophet, priest, and king figures all go through hell and all face death and come back alive.
So some of our greatest sci-fi fantasy stories have the ability to deal with things that it’s hard to come up with in a cop show, not to say that some haven’t done a good job. Anyway, that’s my recommendation, Babylon 5.
Nice. Gretchen has been really interested in the book of Jonah lately. She’s 3-1/2 at this point so I was kind of like not sure how much she’s going to understand or not about the narrative, but it’s as straightforward as, “…and Jonah had a bad attitude,” and she gets it to the point where she’s started quoting certain parts of the narrative in her imaginative reading to herself. She’s like, “And it is better for me to die than to live, said Jonah as he unwrapped his candy bar.” I guess that’s not too far from the spirit of the text! Anyhow, fun times with Jonah in our house lately.
Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure as always. A big thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters for keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number, Listener, you can visit patreon.com/haltingtowardzion.
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