Full Transcript

Thank you for joining us for this edition of Share the Word, the podcast that explains the big ideas in the New Testament chapter by chapter. Whether you’re just beginning to explore the Bible or have been a Christian for years, we believe that you’ll get some great insight from our podcast as our teachers unpack the big ideas of the New Testament in a down-to-earth language. So let’s listen in to today’s lesson and go a little deeper. Resurrection: Fact or Fiction? John chapter 20. In all societies where honest judicial systems look for the truth, eyewitness testimony is among the most persuasive factor to a judge or jury.

Because the human mind is able to record, store, and grade detail events we witness, eyewitness testimony is very powerful. When a prosecutor can present even one eyewitness who can confidently affirm they saw someone commit a crime, and that witness cannot be impeached, that’s often enough for a jury to convict. We’ve all heard of situations where an eyewitness was wrong for whatever reason. But what if there were two, or three, or even more unconnected eyewitnesses all telling the same story, multiple eyewitnesses all giving the same testimony? Then it’s a slam dunk. Juries will convict 100% of the time in such a situation.

Hold that thought. In today’s chapter, John is retelling what happened a couple days after Jesus’ death and burial that changed absolutely everything for him and the other early followers of Jesus. And it explains, and only adequately explains, the explosive growth of Christianity from its very outset. In today’s chapter, John describes the greatest sign imaginable, which he claims to have personally witnessed along with many others. A sign which convinced him, and he hopes will convince us, that Jesus was undeniably the Messiah, the Son of God, and the Savior that God sent. After Jesus’ very public execution, John tells us two well-connected, sympathetic admirers got permission from the Roman governor to give his body a proper burial.

One of these men we’ve already met, the important rabbi Nicodemus, and the other was a wealthy friend named Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph owned a new tomb near the execution site where no one had yet been buried. John learned later these men brought about 75 pounds of perfumed spices, aloe and myrrh, along with the necessary linen wrappings to prepare Jesus’ body for a proper burial according to their traditions. This combination of spices made a gluey, aromatic substance that was used both to hold the strips of cloth wrapped around the body in place, as well as just to smell pleasant. The two men got possession of Jesus’ corpse sometime after he was taken down from the cross, so sometime after 3 p.m. Friday afternoon.

Some of the women followers of Jesus accompanied them and may have also helped them. They had up until 6 p.m. because that’s when the Sabbath began, and no work on a dead body could be done after the Sabbath began. So Jesus’ corpse was carried to Joseph’s new tomb near Calvary, and they hurriedly prepared his body, washing it, wrapping it in the strips of cloth, generously slathering the gummy ointment between the layers. Fastening a face cloth around his head before they left, they released the wedge that held back the large disc of stone, allowing it to roll down into place, covering the stone’s entrance. But somehow, by around 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, 36 hours later, that tomb had no body in it.

The Apostle Paul, a trained legal mind, makes the point in 1 Corinthians 15 that everything about the Christian faith rises or falls upon the veracity of what John writes about next here in chapter 20. Paul puts it this succinctly: If Christ was not raised from the dead, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith. I admit that’s absolutely true. If the explanation John gives us for the empty tomb, that Jesus was in fact resurrected, is not true, then Christianity has no factual basis. But if he was, how then could we not believe it? So let’s consider the evidence.

The first person we meet in chapter 20 is Mary Magdalene. This woman was a serious follower of Jesus and close to his family. She was one of the handful of believers who was actually at Calvary and witnessed his crucifixion. She knew where Jesus’ corpse was laid out because she was there watching, if not helping Joseph of Nicodemus Friday afternoon at the burial. Mary Magdalene returned to that tomb very early Sunday morning after the Sabbath was over, must have been 5 or 5:30 a.m., because she told John it was still getting light outside. She saw the tomb’s covering stone well away from the entrance.

Startled by that, her first reaction was to run back into the city to find and tell some of the disciples what she saw. Her assumption was someone, for some reason, had moved the body of Jesus. The disciples she found first were Peter and John. Hearing her story, they immediately ran out to the site. John, the younger man, outran the older Peter and arrived at the tomb first, but he was afraid to go inside. He was peering through the low doorway, and he could see what looked like grave wrappings on one slab of stone.

This tomb, and many have been excavated from this period, was a man-made cave cut into a rocky hillside. They contained carved stone slabs or niches where the bodies would be laid out. When Peter arrived, huffing and puffing, he brushed right past John and entered directly inside. And yes, there were grave wrappings on one slab, all right. John then followed him in to get a better look himself. He noticed that the linen cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ face, it was set to one side and it was neatly folded up.

When John saw what he saw in that tomb’s interior, he says at chapter 20, verse 8, he believed. He believed that Jesus had been resurrected, and probably by extension believed a whole lot more, like he now believed all the claims that Jesus had been making that seemed so outrageous. They must all be true, for a man who could say, Kill me and on the third day I’ll rise again, and make good on that. I think John decided then and there that man was to be believed, no matter what he said. I’ve thought a good bit about what John and the others at the tomb site that Sunday morning saw that they found so convincing. None of them, John nor any of his fellow disciples, were predisposed to believe Jesus would actually physically come out of that tomb alive.

After his crucifixion, all of them were dejected and confused, stunned really, at how quickly it had all happened. I mean, less than a week before, large crowds of Passover worshipers had welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem, and then in a matter of only days, he was arrested and summarily executed. Except for him, the other disciples had all scattered from Gethsemane the night of his arrest and were in hiding, fearful of the Sanhedrin. They were thinking, They’re coming after us next. Yet when John saw what he saw that morning, as his eyes adjusted and he looked around that tomb’s interior, he suddenly realized that the resurrection was the only plausible explanation for what he was seeing. Why?

What did he find so convincing? Let’s think it through, because this is a huge question. Remember, the apostle Paul admitted Christianity can be judged true or false just on this one pivotal question alone: Did Jesus actually rise from the dead? I don’t think John gives us all the things that figured into his conclusion in this account in chapter 20. For one thing, we learn from the Synoptic Gospels that Pontius Pilate had actually stationed round-the-clock guards at Jesus’ tomb at the request of the high priest. To be absolutely sure Jesus’ corpse stayed right there, he went so far as to seal the tomb, meaning globs of hot wax were melted and placed around the edges of the covering stone, impressed with Pilate’s official imprimatur.

That meant, Don’t anyone dare disturb or enter. To break that seal would be a capital offense. Jesus’ enemies were imagining the unlikely scenario where disciples of his might come back to the tomb, remove the body, and spread a lie that Jesus, in fact, had risen, which could make the Jesus cult even more of a problem for them than it already was. So Pilate, to placate them, took these extra measures. Yet when John and Peter arrived there at 6 a.m. or thereabout on Sunday morning, there were no Roman soldiers in sight. The seal had been broken, and the stone that had to have weighed more than a ton was up and away from the entrance to the tomb.

The tomb itself was gaping wide open. Something had occurred that caused highly disciplined, heavily armed Roman soldiers to leave their post. What was it? They were later bribed to say Jesus’ disciples stole the body somehow, but John certainly knew that was not true, since he was with the others and they were all hiding in fear. So once inside the tomb, what exactly did John see? He saw the grave wrappings that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea had wound around Jesus’ corpse still lying on the stone slab.

Imagine a kind of cocoon of linen wrappings, but with nothing inside them. Would grave robbers, for any reason, have carefully removed a dead corpse from all the gummy, sticky strips of linen cloth that had been wrapped around it? I don’t think so. They would have snatched the whole bundle and gotten out of there as fast as possible. There’s no reason under the sun why Jesus’ disciples or anyone else illegally tampering with this tomb would linger, taking the time to go through the mess of unwrapping Jesus’ corpse. And that face covering, how neatly it was folded, like a hand towel in the bathroom of a nice hotel.

Grave robbers would do that? Grave robbers could overcome a heavily armed Roman watch, risk breaking the governor’s seal, then inexplicably take the time to carefully unwrap Jesus’ corpse, leaving the gummy wrappings on the burial slab, and neatly fold up the head covering like their mom taught them, and take the body somewhere else. Where? Why? Who? John knew none of that made any sense.

So if not that, he realized, Jesus must have arisen as he predicted. I love the next part of the story John tells, not only because it’s cool to imagine how it played out, but because of one small detail that makes it strike me as unquestionably authentic. I’ll paraphrase for you how John records it starting at verse 11. Mary Magdalene, who sometime after Peter and John left the tomb site had herself returned and was standing outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she stooped and looked inside and saw, as it turns out, two angels, one sitting at the head and the other at the foot of the place where the body of Jesus had been lying. They spoke to her, Dear woman, why are you crying?

Because they’ve taken away the Lord, she replied, and I don’t know where they’ve put him. She turned to leave, probably because she didn’t know who these strange men were. When she did, she saw someone else standing nearby. It was Jesus, but at first she did not recognize him. He said, Dear woman, why are you crying? Jesus also asked her, Who are you looking for?

She assumed he was the caretaker. Sir, she said, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him so that we can go and get him. Mary, Jesus said. She turned now and looked at him more closely. Then she cried, Rabbi! and she ran to him, and she fell down before him and she embraced his legs.

And Jesus said, Don’t cling on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go find my brothers and tell them I’m ascending to the Father and your Father, to our God. So Mary Magdalene found the disciples and told them, I have seen the Lord! I like that she kept being asked, Dear woman, why are you crying? She was not only in deep mourning as a close follower of Jesus, but now it appeared someone, for some inexplicable reason, had taken his body and she was distraught. Who would do such a thing?

She certainly didn’t realize the two men who spoke to her from inside the tomb were angels. She’d never seen an angel. She also reasonably assumed the man she spoke to outside the tomb was the caretaker of the place. That’s why she asked him, Where is the body that was in the tomb? But then she heard his voice. Wait a minute.

Jesus? I can just see Mary Magdalene when the risen Lord told her, Go tell my disciples. She’s shaking her head with a confused, Is this real? Once realizing she was not dreaming or hallucinating, that this was in fact happening to her, she turned and ran back to tell the others what she had seen and what she had touched and even whom she had talked to. Can you imagine her bursting into the house, running up the stairs to the upper room, breathlessly calling out, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him!

Jesus is alive! So what is the detail there that gives this part such authenticity to me? In that time and place, the testimony of a woman was not given a great deal of weight. If John or anybody else was making up a story about a supposed resurrection, this is not how they would have told it. Mary Magdalene would certainly not have been the first person to have found the empty tomb, or the first person to interact with the risen Jesus. So why did John tell the story this way?

Because she was! Later that same day, in the evening, John and most of the other disciples of Jesus were in the upper room. This is that same place where they’d celebrated Passover only a few days before. It was an upstairs apartment used like a safe house above a home of some Jerusalem friends who were followers of Jesus. The disciples were still nervously staying out of sight, trying to process several things that they had heard and the report of Mary. I imagine them animatedly discussing all of these things when, with no door opening, suddenly he was there.

Jesus was in the room. Don’t be afraid, he assured them. He showed them the wounds on his body to prove it was really him. Wow, can you imagine that scene? I’m sure they were all shaking with both fear and excitement. A lot more, I’m sure, was said between them at that appearance, but it’s not all germane to our big idea today, so I want to skip ahead a little bit.

One of the disciples, for whatever reason, was not there at that hour when Jesus appeared. His name was Thomas. By the time he rejoined the others, Jesus had gone. They all told him, Thomas, Jesus is alive. We’ve seen him. He was here a few moments ago.

But Thomas doubted them. Sorry, that’s too incredible. Unless I myself can see and touch the wounds in his body, I can’t believe that. He wouldn’t be convinced, and to make matters worse, none of them apparently saw or interacted with Jesus anymore over the next several days. They must have all started to wonder, can ten or eleven, counting Mary Magdalene, people have the same hallucination? But then, eight days later, at the same place, around the same time, they were together again, and this time Thomas was there.

Suddenly, without a door opening, and John makes the point to say the doors were in fact locked, Jesus was again there. Right off, he eyes and then addresses Thomas directly. You wanted to see my wounds, Thomas? Come examine my hands. Feel the place in my side where the spear pierced me. Stop doubting and believe.

Thomas, I’m sure, amazed and ashamed, fell down before Jesus and exclaimed, My Lord and my God. Jesus said, Now that you see me, you believe. Blessed are those who did not see and yet believe. These eyewitness accounts of John are absolutely critical. Thomas and the many others who saw the risen Lord were completely convinced by the physical evidence of the resurrection that Jesus was in fact both Lord and God. These eyewitness experiences are the reason Christianity was born, the reason it grew like wildfire and in only one generation affected the whole Roman world.

And frankly, I am among those Jesus spoke about when he said, Blessed are those who will not see these same things, yet will believe. I hope you are too, because the eyewitness testimony of so many is impossible to explain away. It wasn’t just Mary Magdalene and the eleven remaining disciples either. Over the next six weeks, Jesus appeared to more than 500 people, according to the Apostle Paul. He wrote about that in one of his letters to the early church in Greece called Corinth. And none of those people were predisposed to believe it could happen.

Some of them, in fact, were not even followers of Jesus yet, like his half-brother James, who had once mocked Jesus’ claims. But James, after seeing Jesus very much alive, after knowing he had been very much dead, went on to become the leader of the first Jerusalem church. Or Saul of Tarsus, who in fact was a determined persecutor of the first followers of Jesus, another opponent, an unbeliever, until confronted by the risen Christ, turned into the greatest Christian missionary and evangelist the world has ever seen. If you do not want to believe in the reality of Jesus’ resurrection, you have to have some kind of explanation for the empty tomb, and there really isn’t a good one.

And you have to come up with some way to account for what radically changed these people, both followers of Jesus who were scared and in hiding after his arrest, as well as others who had no prior confidence in him at all. What changed them? What changed them from deflated, discouraged, fearful, and others who were openly hostile to Jesus, antagonists of the early Christians? What changed them into bold witnesses willing to endure hostility and beatings and imprisonments and even martyrdom because they would not stop telling their story that Jesus Christ had, in fact, risen from the dead? Would James, who thought his brother Jesus was somewhat off his rocker during his public ministry years?

Who then claimed he saw the risen Christ and went on to become leader of the church in Jerusalem, would that man really go to his death by stoning at the hands of the Sanhedrin in 62 A.D. if he had any question about the reality of the resurrection? Would Peter, who denied even knowing Jesus three times under pressure, who then claimed to have seen and interacted with the resurrected Christ multiple times, really have spent his life sharing the gospel through beatings and imprisonments, only to end up himself being crucified in Rome because he would not recant his testimony that he, in fact, had seen the risen Christ?

Would Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul, spend 30 years telling the story of seeing the resurrected Christ, planting Christian churches across the Roman world, again through imprisonments, stonings, left for dead, shipwrecks, flogged in one city after another, if he had any doubts, would that have been his life? Paul ended up in a dungeon called the Mamertine Prison in Rome around 64 A.D. because of his relentless testimony that he saw the risen Christ and was called by him to share the gospel, which some believed threatened the stability of the whole Roman Empire. Early one morning, Paul was led from that prison a short way up the Ostian Road west of Rome and was beheaded there. There is still a marker on that road to this day where it happened.

You tell me, would this have been Paul’s life and his end if he had any doubt that the resurrection was real, if he had any shred of doubt? That apostle, Paul, wrote in the passage to the early church at Corinth I alluded to a moment ago. And why should we ourselves risk our lives hour after hour if the resurrection is not real? For I swear, dear brothers and sisters, that I face death daily, he assures them, because the fact is, Christ has been raised from the dead. The fact is that one-time persecutor of Christians turned greatest of apostles wrote, with as much eyewitness testimony that this actually occurred as anything else we think we know from history. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is indeed factual.

It changed everything about what Paul and Peter and James and John and Mary Magdalene and Thomas and many, many others found possible to believe. And it ignited the Christian era. It’s the foundation, the factual reality that authenticates our Christian faith. Thanks for listening. This has been Paul for Share the Word. Thanks for listening.

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