Mark 16: Jesus is risen!

Mark 15:42-16:8

What does the average man in the street believe about Jesus? Probably something like this: “Jesus is a myth. You seriously believe all this stuff?! Why would you do that? Obviously some guy just made it up. When? Uh, I’m not sure.”

Maybe if they know a little bit of church history they’ll say “Oh, ja, I think it was when the church leaders got together, all the bishops and stuff around 300 A.D. and, like, made the Bible by taking out all the documents that made Jesus look normal and selected all the ones where he’s like, God and stuff.”

If they know a bit more they might say “Do I actually believe Jesus DID exist? No! I, um, I dunno.”

Well, that seems to be what the average man in the street knows about Jesus. Not very much. And almost all of it is wrong. I’m going to spend a bit of time on this now, so bear with me. First, we’re going to look at the argument that the evil bishops made up the Bible at the First Church Council. Then we’ll examine if there’s any historical evidence that Jesus actually lived and died and rose again from the dead. And then we’ll examine what Mark chapter 16 tells us: that no-one expected Jesus to rise from the dead! “They ran away and were afraid” is not the way I would have written a document to convince people that Jesus was God! Unless that’s what actually happened!

1. The message of the resurrection powered the growth of the early church

Let’s take the Church Council argument first: the evil bishops got together and edited the Bible to favour Jesus’ divinity (that is, that Jesus is God) and throw out all the stuff that said he was merely a man. The council they’re talking about was the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea under Emperor Constantine. This was the Council that met decide two major arguments: 1. Did Jesus claim to be God. 2. Which documents that were floating around the churches were actually historically reliable, written by the apostles, and therefore should be included in the Bible.

So did the bishops all get together and decide to make up a powerful myth about Jesus?

Well, the first problem is that the Council met in 325A.D. THREE HUNDRED YEARS after Christ’s death and resurrection. So, where did all these bishops come from? Where did the church come from if they only made up this powerful message in 325AD? Because in 300 years it rose from being a tiny sect in a tiny part of the Roman Empire, utterly despised and hated by the Roman authorities because they worshipped the Emperor of Rome as a god, and Christians claimed there was only one God, Jesus, and did not worship the Emperor - to being the official religion of the entire Empire. That’s incredible growth. From a handful of Christians to millions! That’s real power at work. Whatever the message that was being preached – it was powerful! It took over the entire known world in a few hundred years.

So, if these bishops really were evil and just trying to grab power for themselves, and if Constantine was trying to find a message which was powerful enough to control his entire Empire, which message would they choose? Some rubbish about a dead man coming back to life? They would have been laughed out of the Roman Empire! Romans and Greeks, the intellectuals of the Ancient World, believed in the resurrection even LESS than we do! It was nonsense to them. So why would the Church Council have settled on that message: that Jesus rose from the dead and is now seated on his throne in heaven; unless it was that message which had spread so powerfully through the entire empire.

And what people forget is that we don’t have to guess what the bishops were doing at that council. We have records of the meetings. We know what they were talking about and what their decisions were! The major argument was, indeed, about Jesus’ divinity (that he is God), and those arguing that Jesus was not divine lost, because the earliest manuscripts, the one we have in our Bible, clearly state that Jesus is God. They lost the argument on the basis of evidence. There’s was weak. The evidence that Jesus is God was overwhelming. And that is the message that turned the world upside-down.

The Apostle Paul writes in his letter to the church in Corinth, written around 55A.D. – only 20 years after Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection: 1 Co 15:17–20 (NLT) If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 18 In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! 19 And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. 20 But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.

Christ is risen from the dead. That is the message the early Christians went out with. That is the message that got them killed and tortured for almost 300 years by the Romans. Christians were being killed up to the Edict of Milan in 307AD issued by Emperor Constantine. Nobody, I mean, nobody became a church leader to grab power – it was a death sentence, not a life of luxury. Between around 30AD when Jesus died and rose again and 307 AD over 880 THOUSAND Christians were martyred (killed for their faith in Jesus). Dan Brown’s idea of the powerful Church fathers meeting together in luxury and wealth, sniggering through their beards as they decide how to rule the world is pure nonsense.

The reality is much better: heroic men who put their lives on the line to preach the truth about Jesus. Just like many bishops in Nigeria today, and in Myanmar, China, Pakistan, India, and so on. Praise God for men (and women) who are willing to follow in Christ’s footsteps and sacrifice even their very lives in order to preach the truth, the hope about Jesus: that though we are sinners, rebels against God, Jesus loved us when were his enemies, loved us enough to go to the cross and give his life. He gave up his life as a swap for ours, he swapped places with us, taking the punishment we deserved, going even into the darkness of hell for us. And we get his perfect life in return, his perfect relationship with the Father. In Christ our sins, all our sins, are gone. If we trust Jesus as Saviour and Master, King, we have full assurance of salvation – we are seated in Heaven NOW, says the Bible. That’s how certain it is. Because it depends, it rests, on what JESUS has done, not what we do or have done. That’s GOOD NEWS!

And, of course, Jesus didn’t stay dead. As we saw over the past few weeks in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus was innocent. He was sinless, perfect – he died because he took upon himself our sins. But he had no sin, and therefore death had no claim on him. Death is a result of sin – no sin, no death. So Jesus breaks the power of death because he is sinless. That’s why the resurrection is so important. You are not a Christian if you don’t believe in the resurrection. As Paul says, you are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. Jesus’ resurrection proves that he is sinless, that he defeated death, that he is God, that we can be saved. Without the resurrection, we have nothing.

So we’ve seen that the resurrection message powered the church from a band of 11 frightened men who had run away from Jesus when he was arrested, plus a bunch of equally frightened women, to a world-wide organisation, with churches in every major city, all the way up to the Emperor, with millions of people worshipping Jesus as God. And all this while under severe persecution. This was not faith by the sword – but faith in spite of the sword!

This resurrection message was not made up by the First Church Council, but simply affirmed by them. To find the truth we have to go deeper, earlier, to the earlier manuscripts. And the earliest is Mark. Maybe Mark is the liar. Maybe Jesus didn’t exist and he made him up.

2. The message of the resurrection is true: it really happened!

Well, let’s answer that by having a look at tonight’s passage. We continue where we left off last week: at the cross, just after the Roman soldier who put Jesus to death sees how Jesus dies and declares “Truly this man was the Son of God!” The first man to believe in Jesus is the one who put him to death. You have got to love the mercy of God! If that man can be saved, even you can be saved, even I can be saved! There’s hope for EVERYONE.

So, some women see him die, plus a religious leader, Joseph of Arimathea, who seems to have been a secret believer. He takes a risk and asks for the body, probably wanting to honour Jesus as a great teacher in his burial. Pilate is surprised as people normally took days to die on a cross – Jesus gave up his own life after a few hours. So he double-checks with the Roman officer in charge – is he really dead? Yes, says the officer.

This helps knock on the head the ideas that “it wasn’t Jesus on the cross” or “he didn’t die, he just fainted”. Seriously? The religious leaders hated Jesus so much they got him crucified. They didn’t make a mistake! And this Roman officer was an expert in death, in crucifixion. He wouldn’t be fooled by someone fainting.
No, Jesus died. He was dead. Truly dead. And he was buried. Even the Christians thought he was dead. They thought it was the end. Look at verse 1 of chapter 16: Saturday evening, when the Sabbath ended, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome went out and purchased burial spices so they could anoint Jesus’ body. They didn’t go with a sixpack of beer, party balloons, whistles, and a banner saying “Welcome back Jesus!”. They went with burial spices! They thought he was dead. Sure, he said he would rise again, but really, who believes that? When people die they stay dead!

There also wasn’t a plot to get the body. The disciples were depressed! Peter had denied Jesus! These guys were finished. They couldn’t even be bothered to help the women anoint the body – so they were worried about moving the big stone out the way - 3 On the way they were asking each other, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”

Of course, when they get there, they are “shocked” to see the stone rolled away, and an angel sitting there. And even when the angel tells them the good news v6 “He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Look, this is where they laid his body. 7 Now go and tell his disciples, including Peter, that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you before he died” – well you would expect Mark to report that they were rejoicing, singing the Hallelujah chorus! And if you were making this up, you certainly wouldn’t have them do what Mark writes that they do v8 The women fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered, and they said nothing to anyone because they were too frightened.

You see, you’ve got a real problem if you say this is all made up. Let’s pretend Peter and the disciples got together and agreed to make up this story about Jesus. Now, there’s a rather huge problem: the modern way of writing believeable stories, with real historical detail mixed in with fiction, made-up stuff, like Dan Brown or JK Rowling with Harry Potter or most of the authors today –that way of writing hadn’t been invented yet. It was totally unknown. Myths were myths and written like myths. History was history and written like history. No-one would ever or had even thought of writing myth like history. That would be the ravings of a madman!

So if the disciples made up the gospels we have to assume that they were able to find a literary genius in the backwater province of Judea, a man so clever that he invented modern literature 1700 years early – but never wrote anything else and was totally unknown in his lifetime and afterward!

I think CS Lewis, Cambridge professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, sums it up well: “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, myths and legends all my life. I know what they are like. And I know none of them are like this. There are only two possible views of these gospel texts. Either this is reportage pretty close to the facts, or else, some unknown writer in the second century without known predecessors or any succesors suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative. The reader who doesn't see this simply hasn't learned how to read."

The other problem is all those pesky NON-Christian guys writing about Jesus within a few years of his death. You’ve got Mara bar Serapion writing in 73AD, about the Jews executing their own “wise king”. Josephus the Jewish historian mentions Jesus twice (around 100AD). Tacitus, also around 100AD, Rome’s great historian, mentions the facts about Jesus in an attack on Christianity. Pliny the Younger mentions that Christians worship Jesus as God in 110AD, and Suetonius, the Jewish Talmud, and Lucian of Samosata all mention details about Jesus’ death, crucifixion, and claim to be Almighty God.

Again the message is very clear that Jesus’ claim to be God was not a later addition but the very start, the very heartbeat of Christianity.

There are no professors of history at any university world-wide who deny that Jesus lived in Judea (Palestine) during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, that he was a teacher, had a reputation of doing miracles, was called the Christ by some, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate

And then we can’t simply ignore the Bible because we don’t like its message. You know, I admire Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, but when his biographer Walter Isaacson reports that he had a daughter from an earlier relationship I can’t just throw that out because I’d prefer to picture him with a happy perfect family life. We can’t just ignore what the gospels report about Jesus because we don’t like it! There is MASSIVE, overwhelming evidence that what we are reading today is what Mark wrote down 2000 years ago. Again, no professor of history would disagree.

There was a British documentary a few years ago where they had some “professor” on saying the gospels were unreliable and made up and blah blah blah. The truth was that this professor was, in fact, not a professor of history, but of some other, unrelated subject. Despite trying very hard, they couldn’t find one professor of history who would deny the reliability of the gospels. They are our most reliable ancient documents - so if you lose them, you lose all of history!

So what we are reading here is what actually happened. The message of the resurrection is true: it really happened! We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. We weren’t given that option. What we can do, must do, is decide what we do with Jesus. Because if he is who he says he is, then that changes everything.

3. What are you going to do with Jesus?

There’s some debate as to why Mark ended his gospel so abruptly (v8 and following were added later – see the notes in the Bible. They are a summary of parts of Luke and John and Acts.). Well, maybe it so that one of the apostles, who were still alive and actively preaching when Mark wrote his gospel, could appear at the end and give their personal, eye-witness account of meeting the risen Lord Jesus. There were many that met Jesus in the 40 days after his resurrection – a crowd of 500 people saw him and spoke to him at one point. It wasn’t a kind of there’s a man in the shadows speaking in a muffled voice saying “hey, I’m Jesus”. No, he was amongst them saying touch me, feel the scars in my hands and feet, he was with them in daylight on the beach eating breakfast, and he was with them on the mountaintop in Galilee when he rose up to heaven before their very eyes.

So maybe it was that – the eyewitnesses would fill in the gap. Or maybe Mark simply wanted to end with a punch, a challenge to us, the reader, the listener. What are we going to do with Jesus?

So what are you going to do with Jesus?

We can’t pretend he didn’t exist. Well, we can – a lot of our media, books, and so on pretend that he’s fictional. But that’s because it’s much easier than to face reality. But God gave us brain to use not to turn off! Look at the evidence! Make a decision! You don’t have to “just have faith” and believe in a fairy tale. No! The evidence is here. The fairy tale is believing what the media is saying. That’s where people are saying “just have faith”. Just have faith, believe the fairy tale that Jesus doesn’t exist!

No, friends, that is dangerous. For he does exist, and he demands a response. He came once as a servant, the Suffering King who would die to take our place, so that everyone, even me, even you, can be forgiven, can be set free. But that was once. Now he sits again enthroned in heaven, and when he returns he will return in glory as the conquering King – and if you’re still foolish enough to still be believing fairy tales, pretending he doesn’t exist, then you will feel the full force of his wrath, his anger, his judgement, and will be cast out of his sight forever.

This is not a game we’re playing. This is Reality with a capital R.

Make a decision. Turn to Jesus now. He is no fairytale. He is the King.

And if you already belong to him, well, praise him for his resurrection, thank him for dying for you, and have confidence in the truth of what you believe.