THE DEATH OF DEATH
Gospel of Mark
Mark 15:40-16:8
INTRODUCTION:
Welcome to Easter service at Lake Wylie Baptist. It’s a pretty safe Sunday to attend church because you already know what the preacher is going to talk about.
And there will be no surprises today. You’re going to get a fairly traditional sermon on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, though we will approach the resurrection from a slightly different angle.
Most of us understand Easter to be a day of joy, a day of hope. The short, gloomy days of winter are ending. The trees are in bloom. Everyone buys pastel clothes and dyes colorful eggs.
My kids have been gearing up for this morning with excitement. You can see it build throughout the week. Every day they keep asking, “When will it be Easter?”
But the first Easter was not like that. The first Easter was not a day of joyful anticipation.
It may shock you to hear this, but the first Easter was a day of fear.
In a moment we’ll read about the resurrection from Mark’s gospel, and Mark tells us that Jesus’ disciples left the tomb of Jesus not singing, but silent. In fact, they fled the tomb, Mark’s says, with fear and trembling because they were afraid.
In other words, the resurrection of Jesus… is it a cause for joy? Of course. But it is just as much a cause for trembling.
Why? Why would something as wonderful as the defeat of death be a cause for fear?
Here’s why: if the resurrection of Jesus really happened as a fact of history, it changes everything. It changes the way you think of life and death, your work, your family, your very existence.
And if you will believe in the resurrection—yes it will bring you joy—but it will cause you to go out in fear and trembling because it will turn your life upside down.
In this passage we see that the resurrection caused fear because it defied the disciples expectations, it defied their conventions, and it defied death itself.
So turn with me to Mark 15:40
You can find the passage on page 853 of the Bibles under the chairs.
THE TEXT
42 And when evening had come, since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, 43 Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. 44 Pilate was surprised to hear that he should have already died. And summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. 45 And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the corpse to Joseph. 46 And Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock. And he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. 47 Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.
16 When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” 4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 6 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. 7 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.” 8 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.
The resurrection of Jesus…
- DEFIED THEIR EXPECTATIONS
Notice that no one in the passage was expecting a resurrection. Mark goes to great lengths to show you that Jesus was dead. His physical life had expired, and no one was expecting a resurrection. Not Pilate. Not Joseph of Arimathea. Not the Disciples. The resurrection defied all expectations.
Pilate
Did you see what happened when Joseph comes and asks Pilate for the body?
44 Pilate was surprised to hear that he should have already died. And summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. 45 And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the corpse to Joseph.
It was Jewish custom to bury the dead, even the dead of their enemies before sundown on the day of their death, so Joseph has come to claim the body, but Pilate is surprised that Jesus has already expired because it normally took 2-3 days for victims of crucifixion to die.
Pilate sends for a member of the execution squad and receives confirmation that Jesus was indeed dead. Understand, that the centurion was an executioner by trade. And, allowing a man sentenced to capital punishment to survive would have meant he forfeited his own life.
So, Pilate has every reason to believe Jesus is dead. And grants the body. So, let’s consider Joseph of Arimathea.
Joseph of Arimathea
He didn’t expect a resurrection either. Joseph was a member of the council—that’s the Sanhedrin which was the ruling civic body in Jerusalem. Matthew’s gospel tells us that Joseph was secretly a disciple of Jesus. Which means he likely wasn’t a party to the midnight trial of Jesus. But here Mark says, he “was looking for the kingdom of God.”
And yet he’s coming to Pilate, asking for the body. He has a tomb. He purchases a linen shroud. John’s gospel tells us that Joseph was met by Nicodemus who helped wrap Jesus body and anoint it for burial.
Finally, Mark tells us, with a note of finality, “And he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.” Joseph wasn’t expecting a resurrection.
The Disciples
And neither were the disciples. As strange as it may sound. And, as many times as Jesus predicted his own resurrection, this passage shows us that the disciples never saw it coming.
I can hear you now, “The disciples? But they aren’t even in the story! Peter, Matthew, John… they’re all strangely absent” Precisely. They are nowhere to be found. They’re still cowering. But Mark introduces us three times to these women: Mary from Magdala, Mary the mother of Joses, and Salome. First we’re told they were eyewitnesses to the death of Christ in verse 40, the burial of Christ by Joseph in verse verses 47 and finally, the resurrection of Christ in verses 1- 8 of chapter 16. We’ll learn more about who they were in a moment, but for now I want you to see that they had no expectation that Christ would rise again. How do we know that?
Because on the third day, when Christ had predicted that he would be raised these women aren’t coming to the tomb with a fresh change of clothes and sandals for Jesus.
No, they’re bringing spices. They have every expectation to finish the process of embalming and burial that Joseph hastily began before the Passover.
Saturday evening, at sundown, the Passover was complete so they went into the market and purchased spices. Then, Sunday morning, the first day of the week they went to the tomb.
Notice their main concern: “Who will roll the stone away?” They’re fully convinced that when they arrive at the tomb it will be sealed with a 1,000 pound rock.
They fully expected Jesus’ body to be decaying. And the reason they flee the tomb in shock and fear is because the resurrection defied all their expectations!
Friedrich Nietzsche, the German atheist philosopher, once said this about belief in the supernatural:
One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it…
He basically says, the problem with Christianity is that it demands “blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
Do you hear what he’s saying? He’s saying the only way you embrace the doctrine of the resurrection is if you drown your reason. You have to be blind and intoxicated.
The problem is that Christianity wasn’t invented by people who were blind. They weren’t superstitious people. No! They were rational.
These women stood from a distance and saw Jesus breath his last breath. They watched Joseph remove the body from the cross and wash off the blood. They watched as Joseph and Nicodemus wrapped the body and laid it in a tomb, sealing it with a rock.
And it was because they were rational that the evidence for the resurrection terrified them! Christianity wasn’t invented by blind people. It was proclaimed by people whose eyes were opened by evidence they never expected.
Now, why are the disciples absent in this passage? Why did Joseph bury Christ? Why did the women bring spices to embalm him?
They were living as if the resurrection wasn’t true. They didn’t expect it because they didn’t believe it—not down to the depths.
In John’s gospel, even after Jesus had appeared to Peter, he still went back to fishing. Why? It’s because even though he believed in the resurrection, the implications and the ramifications hadn’t sunk in.
Here’s the question I want to ask you: in what ways are you living today as if you don’t expect to be resurrected? In what ways are you living as if the resurrection isn’t true?
Put it another way… are you living as if this life is all there is?
We all do it. Every disciple from Peter and Salome, to us at Lake Wylie Baptist. All of us who say we believe in resurrection have ways of living that signify to the world that we do not actually expect a resurrection. Our stated belief doesn’t match our lived convictions.
When Christ died, they expected him to stay dead. And the resurrection defied that expectation. In doing so, it transformed their life. They couldn’t be the same after.
Not only did the resurrection defy their expectations… The resurrection of Jesus…
- DEFIED THEIR CONVENTIONS
As we dig a little beneath the surface of the passage, I want you to see that the resurrection defied all conventions. It defied spiritual and social conventions.
First, it defied the spiritual conventions of the day.
Now, many today who are skeptical of the supernatural claims of the Bible will say, “I understand why they accepted the resurrection back then. They were pre-scientific. They believed in mythologies.”
But I want you to see that not only does that claim misunderstand the spiritual conventions of ancient Greeks and Jews, it’s dishonest.
One of the reasons the resurrection of Jesus created fear and awe is because it cut against grain of the religious and spiritual conventions of that day.
In fact, most scholars tell us that in all of world history, the first century Greek and Jewish cultures are some of the least predisposed to accept the doctrine of bodily resurrection.
Greek Conventions
So, the resurrection cut against Greek conventions: the Greek convention was essentially still rooted in Plato’s philosophy, that the spiritual and immaterial was good, and the physical and material was corrupt.
So, for the Greeks, death was the release from the corruption of the material world and the freedom and liberation of the spirit.
And therefore, to preach that Jesus Christ, once dead was raised—not just spiritually but bodily would have cut entirely against the grain. In the earliest centuries, the gospel of bodily resurrection in Christ overturned the ancient Greek philosophy.
Jewish Conventions
But the gospel didn’t just cut against the grain of the Greeks, it cut against the grain of Judaism as well.
First century Jews either didn’t believe in a resurrection at all (we have seen that in the Sadducees), or like the Pharisees, they held to a general resurrection of the righteous and the just at the end of the age when God renewed all things.
What they didn’t have a category for was an individual, bodily resurrection in this age when sin, suffering, and death were still surrounding us.
Why were they afraid? Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ defied their spiritual conventions. These people were predisposed to disbelieve in the resurrection.
Listen to me… the resurrection didn’t gain traction because these were gullible, pre-scientific dimwits. That’s not fair criticism.
The resurrection of Christ wasn’t invented, because it wouldn’t have been plausible. It would have been the least convincing argument to make.
Why did the resurrection cause fear and trembling? Because it happened, and it overturned and defied their religious beliefs.
As one scholar put it: these women were terrified because when they saw the empty tomb they realized they now had to restructure their entire lives around this new reality.
Social Conventions
Not only do we see religious conventions overturn, but we even see social conventions turned upside down. What do I mean?
Well, it may not strike you as odd that Mark names three women as the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection, but this would have been utterly unacceptable to the social conventions of the day.
In the ancient world the testimony of women wasn’t considered valuable, and in some cases, it wasn’t admissible in court.
In other words, if you were inventing a false narrative about the resurrection to convince first century Greeks and Jews you would never have chosen women as the first eye-witnesses.
But Mark does. He even includes their names. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Joses, and Salome. And he records names three separate times. Why? It’s because Mark is writing his gospel account within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses themselves.
He gives names, and locations, and sons names so that the first readers could vet his work. He isn’t concocting fake news—he’s attaching names and places to bolster confidence.
Listen… the resurrection happened. And because it happened it defied their personal expectations. It defied their religious conventions. It defied their social standards.
One historian put it like this:
“The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the meetings of sightings of Jesus. Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion experience would have invented it, no matter how guilty (or how forgiven) they felt, no matter how many hours they poured over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and enter into a fantasy world of our own.”
You must wrestle with this. Don’t ignore it. He deserves more than that—and so do you.
- You say, “Well, I don’t like the moral teachings of Jesus.” Fine. But did he rise from death?
- You say, “I don’t like Christians.” You know what… there are a few I don’t care for. But did Jesus Christ defeat death?
- You say, “I would have to change my life.” Friend, if Christ is raised then forget your life and think about your eternity.
If right now, the God-man Jesus Christ sits at the right hand of the majesty on high, holding every molecule in the universe together, then every convention is turned over. Our lives are turned upside down.
And you must make a decision.
You must either crucify him as your enemy, or you must worship him as your King. But don’t patronize him by treating him like one more in a long line of human teachers.
What are you going to do with the evidence for the resurrection?
There are two possibilities: either the resurrection happened, or it didn’t, and both are equally terrifying. Why?
If the resurrection of Jesus didn’t happen, then this life truly is all there is. That’s terrifying.
But if the resurrection did happen… it means we have to now reorient our lives in light of that truth.
The resurrection defied expectations. It defied conventions. Finally, the resurrection of Jesus…
- DEFIED DEATH
And go back to verse 4:
4 And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. 5 And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 6 And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.
And now the 7 most astonishing words in the passage:
He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him.
Throughout Mark’s gospel you see people amazed and speechless at Jesus:
1:22 – amazed at the authority of his teaching.
1:27 – amazed at his ability to exorcize demons.
2:12 – amazed at his ability to heal a paralytic.
4:41 – amazed at his calming the storm.
And here, in the final chapter, amazement reaches its pinnacle.
The one who taught and prayed, who cast out demons and invited in the marginalized—he performs his own resurrection. By the time the disciples get there he’s already gone.
The resurrection of Jesus is the greatest sign that he isn’t simply a good teacher or a gypsy miracle worker—he is God’s salvation.
What do I mean by that? Very simply:
The Bible teaches that God is the most perfect and holy creator of everyone and everything. We are not here by accident or chance. We are here because God made us and he upholds us.
And we, being God’s creation, owe him everything. We owe him our lives, our obedience, our love.
And yet none of us, not even the pastor of the church, has given God perfect obedience or perfect love. We have all loved other things more than we love God himself. We have all served other things more than we have served God. This is what the Bible means by sin… it means any action, attitude, or thought that does not fully love and obey God. And we’re all guilty.
God, because he is perfect, because he is just and good, cannot simply overlook our sin. He cannot and will not sweep it under the rug or ignore it. Our breaking of God’s law comes with a penalty, a punishment. Our separation from God and death.
And the reason that Christians celebrate so much at Easter is because we know God has dealt fully and finally with our sin. God sent his own Son, who took on flesh, and lived a perfectly obedient life in our place. In other words… Jesus lived as we ought to have lived.
And, at the cross, he took the penalty for sin that we deserved. He as forsaken and died. God placed upon him our sin, and on top of that he punished our sin.
This means that there is now no fear of condemnation under the Law for those who belong to Jesus. If Christ has taken our condemnation upon himself, there is none left for those who are in him.
Friends, not only is there no condemnation for those in Christ… the resurrection holds out the promise that there is life and joy to come beyond the grave.
Jesus Christ has defied death. The resurrection of Christ tells you that, in the end, everything will be made new.
When Joni Eareckson Tada was 17 she had an accident that left her a quadriplegic. She’s paralyzed from the neck down. As she was trying to come to terms with her accident she would go to church in her wheelchair.
The problem was that at a certain point in the church’s liturgy every week the priest would call everyone to kneel—which was a painful reminder that she was stuck, seated in a wheelchair. Once, at a convention, a speaker invited everyone to kneel and pray. Everyone did except Joni.
“With everyone kneeling, I certainly stood out. And I couldn’t stop the tears.” But she wasn’t crying out of self-pity. She cried because the sight of hundreds of people on their knees before God was so beautiful. It was a “picture of heaven.” And she continued weeping at another thought:
“Sitting there, I was reminded that in heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick, and do aerobics. And. . . . sometime before the guests are called to the banquet table at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus.”
The she adds:
“I, with shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness—powerful and dazzling. Can you imagine the hope that the resurrection gives someone who is spinal cord–injured like me?”
Listen… if the resurrection is true… then the gospel is more than a get-out-of-jail free card.
If Jesus is raised from the dead….
- Guilt doesn’t have the last word. Apart from him we stand guilty… but he took the full penalty for our sin on the cross and there is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ.
If Jesus is raised from the dead…
- Injustice doesn’t have the last word. Yes, we live in a world where bad things happen… but if God can take the murder of the only truly innocent person to ever live and turn it to our good, then he can overturn every wrong ever commited and redeem the world.
If Jesus is raised from the dead…
- Addictions don’t have the last word… in the resurrection, God has released a power on earth that can renew all that sin has destroyed.
If Jesus is raised from the dead…
- Pain and disease don’t have the last word. Some of you are facing medical procedures this week that cause anxiety. Some of you have conditions that doctors say cannot be cured… but if the tomb is empty… then earth has no sickness that Christ cannot ultimately cure in the resurrection.
If Jesus is raised from the dead…
- Death doesn’t have the last word. The promise of the Scriptures is that just as surely as Christ was raised, so also all those who believe in him and trust themselves to him will be raised on the last day.
Don’t you see… the gospel is not just a get-out-of-jail-free card…
If you know that Jesus Christ has died for your sins and has been raised… it changes the way you see everything else.
Friend, we invite you to believe this. There is nothing to do. There are no good works that can commend you to God. Simply look to Jesus Christ… trusting and resting in what he has done.