Gone!
Introduction: It’s great to be back with you on this glorious Easter morning.
Some sharp, creative realtor came up with the idea and scores followed suit. I refer to the practice after the sale of a house of placing one word, four simple letters, over the “for sale” sign. The old word which was used to indicate that a buyer had been found was the word “SOLD.” The emerging new, more picturesque word in vogue in some areas today is “GONE.” It is direct, succinct, and conveys the idea of quick and efficient success. It’s the kind of sign that makes other potential house sellers say, “I want to list my house with that kind of action-oriented, get-it-done realtor.”[i]
“Gone” is also the kind of word believers can place in front of the empty tomb of Jesus Christ. The tomb was empty and Jesus was gone. His absence was not the result of the absurd “swoon theory” held by some, which suggests that Jesus never really died on the cross. They would have us believe he simply revived in the dampness of the tomb, un-bandaged himself, had the strength to move the stone that sealed the tomb and, when no one was around, simply walked away. Nor was his body removed by followers and placed in hiding, as others have theorized. What foolishness comes from the minds and pens of those who deny the existence of God and his supernatural power to raise the dead![ii]
The angelic messenger had it right that day when he said, “He is not here; he has risen.” The tomb was empty. Jesus was gone. Most of the major world religions are based upon mere philosophical propositions. Of those that are based upon a great person, only Christianity claims an empty tomb for its founder. Judaism doesn’t claim resurrection for its founder, Abraham. Buddhism doesn’t claim resurrection for its founder, Buddha. Islam doesn’t claim resurrection for its founder, Mohammed. And the same is true of modern religions. Over Joseph Smith’s tomb is the word OCCUPIED! Over Mary Baker Eddy’s tomb is the word OCCUPIED! Over Herbert W. Armstrong’s tomb is the word OCCUPIED! But over Jesus’ tomb the words are carved by the finger of God—EMPTY! He is not here; he has risen! GONE!
But if we are going to distinguish Christianity from every other religion on the basis that only Christianity has a resurrected founder, then we’d better be pretty sure of our facts. Fortunately, we know more about the details of the hours immediately preceding and following the death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other person in all the ancient world. In other words, there is a good deal of evidence for us to examine.
Let’s read the story as found starting with the burial of Jesus in Luke 23:50 and continuing through the 12th verse of chapter 24:
Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea and he was waiting for the kingdom of God. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid. It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin.
The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it. Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment.
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.'” Then they remembered his words.
When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.
I want to begin this morning by taking note of the fact that …
The Tomb of Jesus was as secure as it could be made.
Four physical aspects of the tomb stand out in relation to this security: the tomb itself, the stone, the seal, and the guard.
The tomb. The passage we just read describes the tomb of Jesus as a new tomb in which no one had ever been buried. Luke also notes that it had been hewn out of solid rock. Matthew tells us that it was Joseph of Arimathea’s own tomb and inasmuch as he was a rich and powerful man, one can be sure this tomb was secure. No ordinary grave robber would violate this man’s resting place.
The stone. The stone that was placed at the entrance to a Palestinian tomb was another factor in keeping it secure. It was a protection against both man and beast. Normally there was a depression directly in front of the opening, and while one or several men could roll the stone into the depression, it took a great deal more effort to roll it out of the depression. Several of the Gospel writers take pains to inform us that the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb was unusually large and consequently very heavy. Mark observes that when the women came to the tomb early Sunday morning, they were debating among themselves how they might move the stone. Obviously it was too large for three women to move.
The seal. Tombs in Palestine were not normally sealed. There had to be good reason for the Romans to take such action. The reason why it was done in this case is clearly stated in Matthew 27:62-66:
The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”
“Take a guard,” Pilate answered. “Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.” So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard.
Note the wording, “make it as secure as you know how.” I would suppose that if the normal way of sealing a tomb was by means of a cord laid across the stone, set in wax at both ends and stamped with a Roman seal, the Jews probably used several such cords. Anyone attempting to move the stone would break one of the seals and the vandalism would be obvious.
It is ironic that in sealing the tomb the Jews did their best to prevent theft, but they inadvertently provided additional witness to the miracle that took place there. But there is a fourth factor in the security provided for the tomb.
The guards. They are also mentioned in Matthew 27. The Jews were going to leave nothing to chance. They were going to keep that body in the grave until the fourth day if it was the last thing they did. So they were delighted at the posting of Roman guards. Commanding these guards there would have been a centurion. These soldiers would have been well-trained and quite aware that the punishment for sleeping on one’s post or allowing a prisoner to escape, presumably even a dead prisoner, was immediate execution.
There was no danger of these soldiers collaborating with Jesus’ disciples either. The Roman seal affixed to the stone before Joseph’s tomb was far more sacred to them than all the memories of a man who “went around doing good.” Soldiers cold-blooded enough to gamble over a dying victim’s cloak are not the kind of men to be hoodwinked by timid Galileans or to jeopardize their Roman necks by sleeping on their post.
In summary, everything that human ingenuity could think of, from the tomb to the stone, the seal, and the guard, was arranged to make sure that the body of Jesus did not get out of that grave before Monday morning. And yet, despite all their precautions, …
On that first Easter morning some things were missing from the tomb.
The stone had been rolled away. We read in Luke 24:2 that when the women went very early on Sunday morning, they“found the stone rolled away from the tomb.” Only Matthew tells us how the stone was rolled away. In chapter 28, verses 1-6 he writes,
“There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.”
So the stone was not rolled away by any man or group of men, but by an angel of God. Nor was it rolled away to let Jesus out, but rather to let the disciples in. By the time it was rolled away, Jesus was already gone.
The guards were missing. When the angel first appeared, the guards were stunned, as most of us would have been. Utterly powerless and perhaps even unconscious, they shortly “came to” and hastily left the area of the tomb, presumably because of fear. By the time the women arrived at the tomb the guards had vanished. I would give a lot to have been privy to the conversation of these guards. I imagine they had a vigorous discussion of the options open to them, which were few. One option was to run, but where does a Roman soldier hide in Palestine? A second option was to turn themselves over to Pilate’s mercy, but Pilate was not known for his mercy.
The third option was to seek help from the Jewish religious leaders, and this is the action they took. Matt. 28:11 informs us that some of the guards came into Jerusalem and reported to the chief priests what had happened. Perhaps they reasoned that the Jews hated Jesus so much that they would have a vested interest in suppressing the evidence. If so, they reasoned correctly, for the religious leaders readily agreed to buy off the soldiers and in turn put in a good word with Pilate should the story reach his ears.
And so an alibi is established for the soldiers. There is something pitiful, even humorous about it; only the White House spin masters could have equaled this story. They are told to say, “His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.” If they were asleep how did they know who stole the body, or even what happened to it? This is just another illustration of how far men will go in an effort to deny the truth.
Not only was the stone missing and the guards missing, but more importantly, …
The body of Jesus had disappeared. It was gone, not because someone stole it, not because he had escaped; it was gone because Jesus had been raised from the dead. The angels said to the women, “Why do you seek for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!” That proposition, friends, is the lifeblood of the Christian Church. Christianity does not hold the resurrection to be just one among many tenets of belief. Without faith in the Resurrection there is no Christianity at all!
If you have your doubts, think about it this way: If the body of Jesus was not really resurrected, how is it that his disciples could make thousands of converts in that very city of Jerusalem less than two months after his death by proclaiming that he had risen from the grave? After all, it was a very short walk to the tomb—no more than ten minutes from any place in the city. Anyone could have visited the tomb during his lunch hour to disprove the disciples’ contention, except that there was no body there to disprove it.
Further, any one of the Jewish leaders could have muzzled these disciples forever simply by finding the body of Jesus wherever the disciples had allegedly hidden it. But there is no record that they even looked for it, because in their hearts they knew there was no natural explanation for the missing body.
But while focusing upon these things that were missing from the tomb, we must not overlook the fact that one thing was not missing; the tomb was NOT QUITE EMPTY!
The fact that the tomb was not quite empty led Peter and John to believe in the resurrection.
Luke tells us that Peter saw the strips of linen lying “by themselves,” but we need to look at John’s account to understand the significance of this. Please look with me at John 20:3-8.
“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 (John), who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.)”
Isn’t it curious that whereas the fact that the body of Jesus was missing did not produce faith in the disciples, the sight of the graveclothes which were left there did cause John to believe? There was something so striking about these graveclothes that it produced faith in the resurrection, whereas all of Jesus’ predictions that he would rise again did not, nor did the Old Testament prophecies, nor did the report of the angels via the women, nor even the eyewitness account of the women themselves that the body of Jesus was gone.
What was it about these graveclothes that would change a person from gloom and doom to hope and faith? In order to answer that we need to understand something about Jewish burial methods. In Palestine bodies were neither embalmed nor cremated. They were wrapped in linen bands that enclosed dry spices and placed face up without a coffin in tombs. The face, neck, and upper part of the shoulders were generally left bare, but the upper part of the head was covered by a cloth twirled about it like a turban.
What do you think we would have seen had we been there in the tomb at the moment Jesus was resurrected from the dead? Would we have seen him stir, rub his eyes, sit up, yawn, and begin to struggle out of his bandages? Not at all. That would have been a resuscitation, not a resurrection. No, if we had been present in the tomb at the moment of the Resurrection, I think we would have seen the body of Jesus simply “vaporized,” being transformed into a resurrection body with an entirely different life principle. Then I think we would have seen that new resurrection body simply pass through the stone walls of that tomb.
If so, what would have happened to the graveclothes? The linen cloths would have collapsed under the weight of the spices, once the body was gone, and the graveclothes would have been left lying undisturbed where the body had been. The turban which surrounded the head might well have retained its concave shape, lying by itself separated from the other cloths about 12 inches away—the distance of the top of one’s head from one’s shoulders.
This is exactly what John says he and Peter saw when they entered the sepulcher. It was strange that the clothes were there at all and amazing that they lay undisturbed. The turban was not piled on top of the other linens as one might expect if the body had been unwrapped by a grave robber or even if the person had been resuscitated and had shed the clothes himself. Instead, John says it was still “wrapped together,” or perhaps better, “twirled about itself.”
For John a glance at these graveclothes proved the reality, and even indicated the nature, of the resurrection.
The subsequent facts prove that Jesus indeed rose from the dead.
If all that we have shared so far does not convince you of the truth of the bodily resurrection of Christ, you may be a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic. But the fact of the matter is, there is still more evidence. The events that followed that early morning discovery of a not-quite-empty tomb prove that Jesus indeed rose from the dead.
His post-resurrection appearances. We will examine one of these appearances next Lord’s Day as we study the account of Jesus on the Road to Emmaus in Luke 24. But we are given a summary of these appearances in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.
“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also …”
The earliest post-resurrection appearances cannot be explained by the supposition that the disciples of Jesus wanted to believe so badly in the resurrection that they hallucinated. The fact is that none of them were even expecting a resurrection, and when Jesus appeared to them, they either didn’t recognize him or they feared him, thinking he was a ghost. There is simply no intelligent way to explain the numerous appearances of Christ after his death except by the fact of resurrection. A second confirming proof of the resurrection is …
The transformed lives of the Apostles. I think this is perhaps the single greatest evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. The following description of the change that occurred in the lives of the apostles after the resurrection is an interesting poetic portrayal:
On the day of the crucifixion they were filled with sadness; on the first day of the week with gladness. At the crucifixion they were hopeless; on the first day of the week their hearts glowed with certainty and hope. When the message of the resurrection first came they were incredulous and hard to be convinced, but once they became assured they never doubted again. What could account for the astonishing change in these men in so short a time? The mere removal of the body from the grave could never have transformed their spirits, and characters. Three days are not enough for a legend to spring up which would so affect them. Time is needed for a process of legendary growth. It is a psychological fact that demands a full explanation.
Think of the character of the witnesses, men and women who gave the world the highest ethical teaching it has ever known, and who even on the testimony of their enemies lived it out in their lives. Think of the psychological absurdity of picturing a little band of defeated cowards cowering in an upper room one day and a few days later transformed into a company that no persecution could silence—and then attempting to attribute this dramatic change to nothing more convincing than a miserable fabrication they were trying to foist upon the world. That simply wouldn’t make sense.[iii]
A third proof of the truth of the Resurrection is
The silence of his enemies. It is an astounding fact that nowhere do Jesus’ enemies challenge the claim of the Resurrection. They bribe, they badger, they persecute, they imprison, but never do they challenge the central fact that Jesus actually rose from the dead. The evidence is simply overwhelming.
Conclusion: Frank Morrison was an English lawyer who in 1930 wrote a bestseller called, Who Moved the Stone? As a young scholar Morrison was quite skeptical of the miraculous claims of Christ and was convinced that the resurrection was nothing but a fairy tale, a happily-ever-after ending which spoiled the story of this great teacher.
Therefore, he planned to write an account of the last tragic days of Jesus, allowing the full horror of the crime and the full heroism of Jesus to shine through. He would, of course, omit any suspicion of the miraculous, and would utterly discount the resurrection. But when he began to study the facts with care, he had to change his mind, and he ended up writing one of the finest treatises in support of the resurrection that has ever been written.
You see, God the Father has provided perfectly adequate evidence of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We conclude that if men fail to believe, it is because they will not believe, not because the evidence is lacking. God does not expect us to believe without evidence; he has given us evidence. He even gives us his Holy Spirit to help us understand the evidence. When we do not believe it is because we do not want to surrender our lives to Christ and to acknowledge him as our Lord.
Tragically, should Jesus return today, the response of most people would be the same as it was in Jerusalem during that first passion week. Millions would reject him outright. Some would condemn him to death. If he then would rise again from the dead, most would scoff and call it trickery. Human nature has not changed.
At the same time there are many today who believe, as there were on that first Easter morning. They have seen the evidence and have responded to it. These know that their faith rests not on wishful thinking but upon the power of God. Furthermore, they know that faith in the risen Christ brings forgiveness of sins and eternal life. I would urge you this morning to place your faith in Jesus. Trust him with your life, your future, with everything. Jesus Christ is risen; HE IS RISEN INDEED!
Tags:
Resurrection
Graveclothes
Easter
[i] Marvin Rosenthal, Zion’s Fire.
[ii] Rosenthal.
[iii]Josh McDowell, More Than a Carpenter, chapter 7