Isaiah 25:6-9; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Mark 16: 1-8
It has been a full year since the first lock-down for Covid-19 pandemic was set, and so this Easter we are emerging slowly but surely to a new reality; cautiously moving into new and untested ways of life. Such a long time in lock-down ought to have given us some challenges: firstly, to assess the claims of the good news of Jesus Christ and then, how we too should be emerging as Easter people in a hurting world.
On that first Easter Sunday, Mary came with Mary the mother of James and Salome to anoint the body of Jesus having bought some spices for that purpose. It was part of Jewish custom that the deceased should be prepared for burial; and the spices were used to anoint the body as a sign of love and mark of respect. We don’t know how much spices were brought by the women; but in John’s gospel, the report of Nicodemus reveals he brought enough myrrh and aloes to anoint a king (John 19:39).
It is very early on Sunday morning when the women set off for the tomb. John’s Gospel states that it was yet dark, as though the light of Good news was yet to dawn on the disciples; Mark instead chooses to tell us that the women came at the rising of the sun. Well, the sun may have risen, but the light of the gospel had not yet dawned on the women.
I warm to this report by the writer of Mark’s gospel, because it realistically portrays the women setting off with all good intention and rational understanding of what had just taken place. After all, it was the women who has remained by the cross as Jesus expired. Joseph of Arimathea very hurriedly wrapped the body, placed it into the tomb and had a stone rolled in the entrance.
But they were well into the journey when they realized that there was no way that they would be able to shift the stone by themselves. I can only guess at the frustration and anguish that this would have had on these devout women. And so the question they ask concerns a very real, practical concern.
- Two interesting thoughts
- The Greek word for tomb actually comes from the word for remembrance.
This is not dissimilar to the word cenotaph in English, which as we know usually is associated with a war memorial, with its connotations of Remembrance day services. In other words, a place to go to remember. So some writers have suggested that we could translate this sentence: ‘who will roll away the stone from the door of memories’.[1]
Someone told the most amazing story about my grandfather at his funeral service, who apparently looked up to see one of the stewards sat on a roof beam busy sawing away. Unfortunately, the man was sat further away from the wall and would have dropped twenty or more feet had grandfather not intervened. The speaker on this occasion was the very grateful steward who was saved from possible death. It was a brilliant memory and sparked plenty of others about my grandfather that day.
So maybe the women wanted to remember their friend Jesus and all he meant to them, and were looking for someone to help them in the grieving process. But on this occasion, the help they seek would move them into another dimension: Remembrance will no longer take place in a cemetery but round a table.
Read again to the short verses from Isaiah 25:6-9
So, if we think about the Lord’ Supper in terms of this banquet, it is rich with meaning. Death has been swallowed up, our waiting for God brings salvation through the sacrifice made on the cross by Christ, and the simple act of remembrance also becomes a cause for great rejoicing and thanksgiving for this amazing gift. We are invited to the celebration by the One who has conquered death.
Secondly, the women are must have been numb with grief; desperate and downcast in their anguish. But it is not until they look up that they notice that the one thing that has really worried them is simply not where it should have been: the stone is rolled way.
How often have we been overwhelmed by something that seemed so real, so pressing and we have hardly known where to turn, and yet when we change perspective, we see things in a completely different light?
Several years ago, someone gave me a copy of Who moved the Stone? by Frank Morrison.
Morrison – a pseudonym of English advertising agent and journalist Albert Henry Ross (1881-1950) – found the story of the Resurrection so strange, and influenced by skeptic thinkers at the turn of the century, he set out to write a short paper to prove that it was a myth. However, the more he examined the story the more his perspective was changed.
Morrison described the stone as ‘the one silent and infallible witness’2 to the fact that before the women arrived, someone or something had moved the stone. And went on to relate how some seven weeks later, the women and the other followers of Jesus were utterly convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead. No longer downcast but utterly transformed in their understanding of Jesus as the Christ.
In Mark’s Gospel the women meet a young man dressed in white, which sounds very much like an angelic messenger, for white clothes often depict holiness, and the women are alarmed or afraid (and who wouldn’t be if an angel appeared in the most unlikely place!)
The angel’s message is simple:
Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. Mark 16:6
What seems illogical is now becomes perfectly logical: Jesus has conquered death, the last enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26); what should be impossible is now the new reality: we look up and see that the stone is rolled away.
1 https://us8.campaign-archive.com/?e=85eb8af12d&u=3361cc005dc9708829c59703c&id=01773d1388 [accessed 27.03.21]
2 William Morrison, Who Moved the stone? (London: Faber & Faber, 1962) 147
μνημεῖον mnēmeion
a remembrance, that is, cenotaph (place of interment): – grave, sepulchre, tomb.
Worship at home 