Empty Tomb

THE EMPTY TOMB

'So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.' Mark 16.8

With those few words, St Mark concludes his gospel.

Unlike the other three gospel writers, who used Mark's narrative and added their own material, there is no reference to the risen appearances of Jesus.

For Mark, the focus of the resurrection is upon the empty tomb, which Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discovered, when they went to anoint the dead body of Jesus, when the Sabbath was over.

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When the Romans crucified anyone, they let the body stay on the cross to rot or be eaten by vultures. But the Jews had a law in their own religion that the bodies must be buried before sunset. Such bodies were usually thrown into a common grave. So within a few months, no one would be able to remember precisely, where they had been buried. They just ceased to be, without any record of their life, no head stone, no epitaph and no flowers.

Fortunately, the dead body of Jesus was saved from such a fate by the courageous act of a man called Joseph, from Arimathea.

Who Joseph was we do not know for certain. It is suggested that he was a secret Jewish disciple, and that he was probably a member of the Jewish ruling body called the Sanhedrin. Fortunately, he was sufficiently well known to the Roman Governor, Pilate, for him to be able to ask for the body of Jesus, so that he could give it a decent burial.

As regards the location of the tomb, Mark does not tell us where it was. Luke tells us that the body of Jesus was ‘laid in a rough-hewn tomb in which no one had ever been laid’. John goes further, and says: 'As to the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, into which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there'.

The tradition that the tomb was cut out of the rock by Joseph, for himself and his family, is given some support by Matthew, and from the fact that there was a garden in Jerusalem known in antiquity as ‘Joseph's Garden'.

Today, if you go to the Holy Land, you can see two possible locations. One is in the Holy Sepulchre, which goes back to the fourth century, which Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, was responsible for discovering and preserving. However, I have also visited another site, known as the Garden Tomb.

The one thing of which we can be certain is that the body of Jesus was laid in a tomb, and that it was sealed by a large stone.

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The second thing of which we can be certain is that when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome went to the tomb it was empty.

I say certain, though there have been various theories which have been put forward, which seek to deny this, but none of them have I found to be totally convincing.

For firstly, it has been suggested that they went to the wrong tomb.

But my friends, is that really possible, when you bear in mind that, according to Luke, 'the women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how the body was laid in it’ only three days before? Could they have forgotten so soon? I think not.

Furthermore, if it was the wrong tomb, all the authorities had to do would have been to produce the right body from the right tomb to shut up the early followers. But they did not, or could not, because it was the right tomb.

Secondly, it has been suggested that the body of Jesus was removed secretly by person or persons unknown.

There is certainly evidence that the chief priest and elders had placed a guard outside the tomb, and given them a large sum of money to try and persuade them to say that the disciples had come during the night and stolen the body whilst they were asleep.

But is this suggestion plausible? How could a handful of dispirited men have evaded the guards, moved the stone away, and taken away the body of Jesus, without waking them up?

Furthermore, even if the disciples had succeeded in taking away the body of Jesus, do you think that they would have allowed themselves to be subsequently martyred without ever confessing that their faith had been built upon an enormous hoax?

The only other people who knew the tomb in which Jesus had been buried, would have been the members of the Sanhedrin, the procurator and Joseph himself. There seems no reason to suppose that any of these would have profited from presenting to the world an empty tomb.

Anyway, all these authorities had to do, to disprove that the tomb was empty, would have been to produce the body, but they could not because the tomb was empty.

Finally, the third alternative is to suggest that Jesus was not really dead, and that he subsequently recovered in the tomb.

But just stop and ask yourselves this simple question: how could a man, who had struggled to Calvary, been nailed to the cross for six hours, who had been pronounced dead, and whose body had been speared by soldiers, before spending three days in a cold tomb without food and water, - how could such a man free himself from the heavily laden spiced clothes, roll an enormous stone away from the entrance, pass the guardian soldiers unnoticed, and walk on pierced and wounded feet? Such a suggestion beggars belief. It is just too fanciful to be believed.

lf the disciples did not go to the wrong tomb, and if person or persons unknown did not remove the body of Jesus, and if Jesus did not revive inside the tomb, we are left, I would suggest, with no alternative to that which St Mark records in his gospel, namely, that God raised Jesus from the dead and that the tomb was therefore empty.

No wonder Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, after looking in to the empty tomb, 'went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid’.

They obviously could not believe what they had seen or should we say not seen. They were dumbfounded. They were speechless. It was only later, as they reflected upon their experience that they came to the conclusion that God had raised Jesus from the dead.

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And we, some two thousand years later, who accept the testimony of the women in St Mark’s Gospel, look back with thanksgiving that Jesus is not dead but alive, no longer restricted by time and space, and that he meets you and me in the here and now, and never more so than in this Eucharist, in the form of bread and wine, which we believe becomes his body and blood.