“1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7 as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. 8 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)
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What would you say is the most popular symbol for Christianity? The cross, right? What would change if the empty tomb was the most popular symbol? The cross communicates the relationship between guilt and grace, and it should be popular, but why not the empty tomb? Please pull up the first slide.
Why shouldn’t this be the symbol? Imagine seeing this in sanctuaries, on jewelry, and on forearms as tattoos. Maybe you like this second one by the same graphic designer better.
As Christians, we put a great deal of focus on the cross, and, as we saw on Thursday, that’s in line with the apostles. However, we don’t give enough attention to the empty tomb. We are resurrection people.
The cross is our symbol, but the empty tomb is our symbol too. Neither symbol makes any sense without the other. Try to imagine Good Friday without Easter. Try to imagine Easter without Good Friday. Neither would make any sense.
If you claim Christ, you need to ask yourself if your life makes any sense without the cross. You also need to ask yourself if your life makes any sense without the empty tomb. You have to ask yourself if these two symbols are the symbols of your life. Is the cross your only hope? Is the empty tomb also your only hope? Christians are cross people. Christians are also empty tomb people. That second one is the claim of this sermon: Christians are empty tomb people.
We will see this in two points. First: Mary and the empty tomb. Second: Peter and John and the empty tomb. We see Mary and the empty tomb in verses 1-2. We see Peter and John and the empty tomb in verses 3-9.
First: Mary and the empty tomb. On Thursday night, Shirley and Brenda played “Where You There?” near the end of worship. Near the beginning of this morning’s worship, Bill sang “Where You There?” Having that song on the night we studied the cross and on Easter morning is fitting because that song is about both. They go together. Imagine that they didn’t. Imagine the last words of the gospel of John being the last words of chapter 19, “since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.” Imagine the last words of the gospel of Matthew being the last words of chapter 27, “they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard.”
That would be a disaster. The cross without the resurrection is a disaster. As Paul told the Corinthians, “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” The Christian life is not an ethical system designed to make you good. It is your participation in what has begun by Christ dying and rising again. You can try to be good without the cross and the empty tomb—people do it every day—but you can’t have grace without the cross because that’s where God gives it, and you can’t have the hope of all things made new without the empty tomb because that’s the beginning of it.
As you open John 20, you have the cross but no empty tomb and so nothing makes sense yet. That’s part of what’s going on with Mary walking in the darkness; verse 1, “while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.” John is a highly stylized author just like Alfred Hitchcock was a highly stylized film director. Light and colors and shadows mean something to men like this. Darkness means something in John’s gospel. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood/overcome it.” “They got into a boat and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.” “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” “I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.” Darkness is the absence of light, and who is the light? Jesus. Darkness is the absence of Jesus. That’s Mary’s situation as she walked to the tomb. The most noticeable part of her life is the absence of Jesus.
That’s also the state of those who don’t know Jesus. They live in darkness. “I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.” The world without Jesus is a place of darkness.
Life without resurrection is a place of darkness. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre saw that. He said, “life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” Sartre wasn’t saying that he believed in eternal life and so he had hope; he was saying that if you want to have any hope, you have to trick yourself into pretending there is eternal life. He said that eternal life was an illusion, but it was a necessary illusion to hold if you want to have meaning. Since you can’t trick yourself into believing something you don’t really believe, it should come as no surprise that most of Sartre’s books are about the fact that life is hopeless and meaningless. That’s life in darkness. That’s life without any reason for believing in the possibility of resurrection.
What today marks might matter a whole lot more than you think. The alternative to it is meaningless and hopelessness because that is life without the hope that only God can give, and He gives it by way of this resurrection. The alternative to that is darkness.
This is about hope. This is about the possibility of something new. You see that in the inclusion of the time marker at the beginning of the chapter; verse 1, “Early on the first day of the week.” That’s unexpected. What we would have expected as, “on the third day.” We expect John to mark time in terms Jesus’ death—“a few days later” or “on the third day.” John doesn’t. Matthew doesn’t. Mark doesn’t. Luke doesn’t. Every gospel writer marks this day in terms of the first day of the week. Something new is underway. A page has turned in the story of creation; the seven days are past, and something new has begun.
This is why we worship on Sunday rather than the Sabbath Saturday like the Jews. We worship on what we call the Lord’s Day because it is the first day, the resurrection day. If you know your Heidelberg Catechism, you might hear that phrase “Lord’s Day” and think about the 52 Lord’s Days of the Catechism—52 Sundays in a year, the 52 days we mark the resurrection by public worship. We are resurrection people. This is our day. We are empty tomb people.
We are empty tomb people who didn’t expect the empty tomb; verse 1, ‘Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”’
It’s clear that Mary wasn’t expecting to find the tomb empty. When she did find it empty, resurrection wasn’t an option that even entered her mind. She immediately assumed that someone had taken the body. Now Mary knew her Scriptures. Mary had doubtlessly heard Jesus’ incessant teachings about the fact that he would die and rise again three days later, but on that Sunday morning, none of those wires connected.
This is the sort of detail that lends credibility to this account. In God’s word, God’s people are rarely all that impressive. They are a lot like the sort of people we meet every day out and about and in the mirror. They are bumblers who need to be picked up and carried along by God.
Mary ran and told Peter and the disciple Jesus loved—almost certainly John the author of this gospel—what she saw. If we were studying Matthew on the resurrection we would focus on the women’s testimony and how it lends credible to the resurrection because if you were to invent a story in that time and place, you wouldn’t put it into the mouths of women. Here in John, though, we are going to focus on these two men, Peter and John, and what it meant for them to serve as witnesses because the Old Testament theme of having at least two witnesses—men in that situation—was what’s in John’s mind. That’s our second point: Peter and John and the empty tomb.
Eyewitness testimony was crucially important in that culture and one wasn’t enough. That makes sense. It’s easy for one person to invent a story, but it’s quite difficult for two people to invent a story and independently keep it straight. Chuck Colson understood that. Thinking about the resurrection of Jesus and his time in prison for the Watergate scandal he wrote, “I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world, and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.” That’s what’s going on with this account here of these two disciples. The message is that we’ve got two witnesses.
The story of these two witnesses rings true as to their personalities; verse 3, “So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside.” Peter was Peter on that resurrection morning. He barged in. John was John. He pondered.
Some think that John arrived first because he was younger, and that could be, but the reason these details about who got there first were included ultimately was because that’s exactly how eyewitness testimony goes. Just listen to children tell a story about what happened at recess—“Ruth, Bobby, and me ran to the gaga ball pit. I was in the lead but then Ruth got there first. I got there just before Bobby, but he said he got there first.” That’s the ring of authenticity. This account has the ring of authenticity.
Peter and John saw something that Sunday morning and what they saw was strange; verse 6, “he saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the burial cloth that had been around Jesus’ head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen.” A number of commentators have pointed out the wording seems to imply that the linen was still in bodily form kind of like a string easter egg balloon. If you could please bring up the third slide.
You make these by mixing liquid starch and flour, soaking thread in the solution, blowing up balloons, wrapping the soaked strings around the balloons, letting the string dry, and then popping the balloon once the thread is dry. It retains the shape of the balloon. It seems that this is what was going on with the linens that had been wrapped around Jesus’ body. They retained the shape of his body, but, of course, without the stiffness of these glued balloons. It’s as if his body simply slipped out of them, which is exactly what we see with Jesus’ passing through the wall later that evening. There are theories as well on why Jesus would rearrange the headpiece.
What matters is that John seems to be saying that there was no easy explanation as to how the linens could be arranged in that fashion other than something miraculous, which is, most likely, what’s going on with verse 8, “He saw and believed.”
John saw the arrangement of the linens and the wires in his brain finally connected. The word for “see” gives us a hint in that direction. There are different words for “see” in this passage. When Mary saw that the stone had been rolled away the verb used was “blepo.” When John got to the tomb first, he peeked in and the verb used was also “blepo.” However, when he entered and saw and believed, the verb used for seeing is “orao.” The difference is a bit like the difference in the use of the word “see” in the Eagle’s lyric, “you can see the stars but still not see the light.” Mary saw the stars but not the light yet. John saw the stars and the light; “he saw and believed.”
That’s not to say that Mary didn’t see the light. It’s simply John’s way of talking about his experience at the empty tomb. It’s John way of describing what happened in him the moment he first begin to understand. This is huge. This is a firsthand, day of, description of what it was like to recognize that Jesus had been raised from the dead without seeing him. This is key to the gospel of John because it is leading up to Jesus’ words to Thomas in verse 29, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”, and the whole purpose of the gospel of John is that people like you and me might believe and have life in Jesus’ name.
You need to decide if you will believe. You need to decide if you will believe based on the evidence just as John did. You have these two eyewitness accounts. These eyewitness accounts are particularly important because they were based on experience and not any expectations from Scripture; that’s verse 9, “They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” Neither Peter nor John were expecting the resurrection. They didn’t concoct this story out of some misguided desire to fulfill the Scriptures. Their testimony is that they were blindsided by the resurrection and only later came to see the resurrection in passages like Psalm 22:17-22, which we saw on Thursday, “All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me. Deliver me from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dogs. Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the wild oxen. I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you.” They were blindsided by the resurrection and only later came to see it in, Psalm 16:9-10, “Therefore my heart is glad, and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead, nor will you let your holy one see decay.”
The message of John’s testimony is that they didn’t see the resurrection coming before it happened; verse 9, “they still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” They first believed because of what they saw at the empty tomb and because they saw Jesus. In other words, they weren’t looking to be empty tomb people. The empty tomb forced itself on them. The resurrection happened and the disciples did what people do whenever events do happen; they say it happened. They lived as if it happened.
It was only once the disciples became convinced of the empty tomb that they came to understand what had happened on the cross. Remember the cross and the empty tomb need each other. What John said about Paul Sunday could also be said about the cross, “Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.” It was only once they became empty tomb people that they became cross people.
Are you an empty tomb person? Are you a cross person? Is your hope as alive as Jesus? Is your sin as dead as Jesus was? If so, that will change you. It will change you like it changed John and Peter and Mary. You will be actually be different because new life came out of this day. That’s what Christ came to do. Amen.