The Resurrection of the King | Mark 16:1-8
Brian Hedges | April 20, 2025
For this morning’s message, let’s turn to Mark 16. I’ll be reading from Mark 16:1-8 here in just a moment.
There is something about resurrection that captivates our hearts and our imaginations, and we especially see it in popular literature and in films. I love fantasy and science fiction—Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Star Wars, all the rest—and when you watch those films or you read those books, you see resurrection as a recurring theme. So maybe some of you remember that old Star Trek movie Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. It was the best of the bunch, and it’s the film where Spock dies. But then, in Star Trek 3, he comes back, and there’s resurrection.
I could just go through example after example. Think of E.T. There’s a resurrection at the end of that movie. Think of the comic book films that so many of us have loved in the last ten, fifteen years, and so often there’s a resurrection.
But this is fantasy, this is science fiction; and even though it captures our hearts, there’s something maybe deep within us that asks, “Could this really be true?”
When we start thinking about the claims of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is it true? There’s something in us that wants resurrection. We want death to not be the end. We want another chapter. We want hope. But in those stories, it’s just fantasy. It’s just science fiction. Not real.
But what is it we find when we come to the New Testament, to Mark 16? We find something that’s actually quite startling. It’s not fiction, it’s not fantasy, it’s history; but it’s history that surprises us, because unlike the other Gospels, Mark ends his Gospel abruptly.
Almost all New Testament scholars agree that the original text of Mark’s Gospel ends with verse eight. What we find is not a long reunion with Jesus—no comforting words, no closure, just women running from an empty tomb afraid and startled, but with news to share.
I think this passage invites something from us this morning as we enter into the story of what they discovered. This is the final message in this short little four-part series we’ve been doing called “The King and His Cross: Encounters with Jesus in the Gospel of Mark.” Let’s read the passage, Mark 16:1-8.
“When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?’ And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. 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. 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.’ 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.”
This is God’s Word.
This is one of the earliest records of what happened on that morning when the tomb was empty. We celebrate this every year when we gather for these Easter services, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and today I want us to ask three questions about it:
1. Why Should We Believe It?
2. What Difference Does It Make?
3. How Should We Respond?
1. Why Should We Believe It?
Christianity stands or falls on this single claim: that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified in A.D. 30, also rose from the dead, that he came out of the tomb on that Sunday morning; and it wasn’t just that his spirit was raised, it was that the body, the corpse, the very same body that had been nailed to the cross, that body came back to life and walked out of the tomb. Christianity claims that this is not fiction or fantasy, not metaphor or myth, but that this is verifiable history.
Is it true? Are there reasons to believe it is true? Skeptics want to tell us that this was just a hoax, that it was just a legend, that this was common among the mythologies of the ancient world, or maybe that several hundred years later the church invented these stories in order to solidify their power. So they invented stories about Jesus rising from the dead. They would say the burden of proof is on the Christians.
But there’s also a burden of proof on the skeptics, because you have to come up with some reasonable explanation for what happened. We do know that Jesus’ followers, after he had been crucified, claimed to have seen him, and they were so convinced that they had seen him that a whole new movement began, the movement that we now call the Christian church. Those first witnesses to the resurrection believed it so strongly that they were willing to give their lives for it.
Are there reasons to believe it’s true? I think there are, and I want to point out several from this passage.
(1) The first one is just the expectations of the disciples. You see it in verses 1-3, and what’s actually really clear in this passage is that they were not expecting the resurrection. No one was expecting the resurrection! The women weren’t expecting it. They were going to the tomb in order to anoint the body of Jesus with these spices to complete the burial process. The disciples—the men—were not even there. The apostles, they’re nowhere to be seen. Nobody’s expecting Jesus to be raised from the dead.
In fact, in the ancient world, no one expected resurrection. This is kind of a false idea that some people have that this was just a common mythology of the ancient world, and, you know, people back then, they didn’t understand science, and so they were more gullible. Of course they were ready to believe in miracles. They were ready to believe in something like resurrection. But in fact, when you look at history, that’s just not the case.
There’s a wonderful book, written by a scholar named N.T. Wright, called The Resurrection of the Son of God. It’s an 800-page book, and it’s history. It’s not just theology, it’s not just commentary on Scripture, although it includes that, but it’s actually history, taking a historical method looking at the history of what happened in that first century in the cultural context of the day.
One of the things N.T. Wright does is he looks at the beliefs of both Gentiles and Jews—the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews—in the ancient world, their beliefs about resurrection. What he shows, looking at the original sources, is that the Greeks actually did not believe in resurrection; in fact, Greeks embraced a kind of dualism. They believed that the soul was good and the body was evil, the body was bad. So for the Greek mind, salvation meant escaping from the body, not returning to it. The whole idea of bodily resurrection was not just implausible to them, it would have been laughable. It would have been offensive.
In fact, when the apostle Paul, some time later, preaches in Athens, the capital of philosophy in the ancient world, and he preaches the resurrection, when he starts talking about resurrection, they laugh at him, they mock him, they scorn him. None of the Greeks or Romans were looking for resurrection.
The Jewish people, while they believed in a resurrection, what they believed was in the general resurrection, a future collective event at the end of human history. But nobody expected Jesus to rise from the dead. No one expected a man to rise in the middle of history.
So when we talk about the rise of resurrection faith, we can’t say that’s just what people believed back then because, in fact, they didn’t. You see, the disciples were not predisposed to believe this. They were predisposed not to believe. That’s why they’re not there. Their very expectations are an indication of the reality of what happened.
(2) Then you have the empty tomb. That’s the second line of evidence. You see it in verses 4-6. The women come to this tomb; they’re expecting to find the body of Jesus, they’re looking for someone to roll away the stone. When they arrive, the stone has been rolled away, and Jesus is not in the tomb, but instead there’s this young man clothed in white, an angel. And he says, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here.” The tomb is empty. Jesus is not there. Jesus’ body is not there.
The empty tomb requires an explanation. Now again, the skeptics might say, “Well, the body was just stolen.” But if the body was stolen, then why is it that the disciples would have been willing to lay down their life for this? If they’d stolen the body, why would they die for a lie that they themselves fabricated?
Others would say that the women came to the wrong tomb. But if it was the wrong tomb, couldn’t someone have just produced the corpse of Jesus of Nazareth from the correct tomb?
The empty tomb is not easily dismissed. If Jesus’ body had still been in the grave, Christianity would have died before it ever began. But the tomb was empty.
(3) Then you have the eyewitnesses. There are good reasons to believe that the gospel records are eyewitness accounts, eyewitness records of what took place.
But what’s really fascinating is that the very first eyewitnesses to the empty tomb, and even to Jesus himself risen from the dead as we find in some of the other Gospels—the very first eyewitnesses were actually not the apostles, not the male disciples, but the women, the female disciples of Jesus.
The reason this is significant is because in the ancient world, both in Jewish and in Roman jurisprudence, the testimony of women was not even allowed in court. I mentioned this Friday night, but it bears repeating, because this actually was a critique against Christianity when it first began. In fact, the first known published critique of the Christian faith, written in A.D. 175, was written by a guy named Celsus, and he attempted to discredit the whole story of the resurrection by saying this was just witnessed by hysterical females.
Now, of course, today that would not discredit the story at all. We actually would value the testimony of women, but in that day it was actually a mark against it.
All of that just shows that if this was invented, they wouldn’t have invented this. If it was just an invention, a fabrication of the church, they wouldn’t have done this. If they’re trying to pass a lie over the eyes of people, over the hearts of people, they wouldn’t have invented this. They wouldn’t have made women the first and the primary eyewitnesses. The only plausible reason for recording this is because this is actually what happened.
(4) Then finally, there is evidence of what happened next, and that is the movement that followed, the birth of the Christian church. Here’s the significant thing: The Christian movement was born out of Jewish monotheism. Monotheism means that you worship only one God, and this was central to the faith of Israel. They were to worship only Yahweh, only the God of Israel. They didn’t worship a pantheon of gods like the Greeks and Romans. They only worshiped the God of Israel.
Yet, you have these Jewish followers of Jesus, the Messiah, and after his resurrection, they start gathering to worship him, because somehow they believe that he was one with this God, the very Son of God.
One of the interesting things is that—and N. T. Wright, by the way, shows this in his great book—there were lots of would-be messiahs in the first century. I mean, we have the records. We can read the records. There was a Judah, there was a Simon. There are others who were would-be messiahs in the first century. But N.T. Wright says,
“In not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers of a would-be messiah claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option; unless, of course, he was.”
You have to explain it. How did Christianity even begin if this wasn’t true? I think the history is clear: the tomb really was empty, the body really was missing. Jesus was seen by multiple eyewitnesses on multiple occasions, and those eyewitnesses were transformed into the nucleus of the Christian church, people who were willing to die for their faith.
The resurrection is not a fantastic story, it is a historical event, and it’s the foundation to everything else.
2. What Difference Does It Make?
Now, what difference does this make? Let me just say this: even if you are not persuaded that Jesus really did rise from the dead, you should want this to be true. You should want this to be true, because if it is true, it is the best news in the world, and it has implications for every level of life. It has implications for us physically and psychologically and spiritually and socially. Let me show you some of these implications.
(1) First of all, physically. It means that death has been defeated. If Jesus rose from the dead, it means that Jesus of Nazareth, this human being in the middle of human history, did something that no other person has done: he overcame death and he actually came back to life physically.
Death, of course, is the great enemy. Death is that great spectre that we all fear in some way or another. Shakespeare called death “that great undiscovered country.” All of us at times in our lives wrestle with our mortality, and we wonder if there’s anything beyond death. Even those who have been marked by the most profound inner peace and spiritual insight have been shaken by the fear of death.
Let me give you one example from the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, of course, was one of the great spiritual leaders of the world in the twentieth century. He actually admired the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, he tried to live by the Sermon on the Mount, but he was not a Christian. He actually found his home in Hinduism.
He said, fifteen years before his death, “I must tell you in all humility that Hinduism as I know it entirely satisfies my soul. It fills my whole being, and I find a solace that I miss even in the Sermon on the Mount.” Not a follower of Jesus in terms of Jesus being the Lord, the King, the Son of God. He was a man marked by tremendous peace and serenity.
But shortly before he died, that peace began to unravel, and he wrote, “My days are numbered. I am not likely to live very long; perhaps a year or a little more. For the first time in fifty years, I find myself in the slough of despond.” He found himself in despair for the first time in his life as he confronted his own mortality. That’s telling, isn’t it?
But if Christianity is true, and if Jesus rose from the dead, it means that death is defeated and there is no longer any reason to be afraid, because death lost its grip on Jesus.
Do you remember these words of Peter in Acts 2, when he preaches the resurrected Christ? He said, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”
Jesus broke death’s grip, and that means that there’s hope for us in the face of death. This becomes really personal. The older you get, the more personal it becomes. When you have lost a parent or a spouse or a child, when you are confronted with a terminal illness, then these questions really matter.
Is there an answer to the problem of death? What Christianity teaches is that because Jesus was raised from the dead, there is hope that we will be raised as well.
Listen to C.S. Lewis. This is from his wonderful book Miracles. He said,
“The New Testament writers speak as if Christ’s achievement and rising from the dead was the first event of its kind in the whole history of the universe. He is the firstfruits, the pioneer of life. He has forced open a door that has been launched since the death of the first man. This is the beginning of the new creation. A new chapter in cosmic history has begun. Death is defeated.”
(2) There’s also a great psychological significance and benefit to the doctrine of the resurrection. It means that our sins can be forgiven.
There’s a hint of this in verse seven, when the angel tells the women to “go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee.”
That phrase, “and Peter,” that’s got to be one of the most beautiful phrases in all of Scripture. Why is it there? Why a special message for Peter? Well, it’s because of what Peter had experienced. Do you remember this? Peter, the night that Jesus was betrayed, and before Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter had sworn that even if all of the other disciples forsook Jesus, Peter would be true to the end. Yet, when the pressure mounted, Peter caved in cowardice and in fear, and three times with curses and oaths denied that he even knew Jesus. Then, when Jesus looked at Peter from across the courtyard and Peter realized what he’d done, he went out in deep sorrow. The text says that he wept bitterly.
You have to wonder what he was feeling, what he was thinking—the load, the burden of guilt and shame that he felt, that he had betrayed his best friend, his master, his teacher. He needed some assurance. Jesus knew he needed some assurance that Peter, even Peter, could be restored, that his sins were paid for, and that he would be welcomed back into the fold. So the angel says, “Go tell Peter.”
Listen, this is good news for you and me as well. Think about the load that you’re carrying. What’s on your heart? What’s on your conscience? Is there some secret sin, some deep regret, some terrible mistake that has brought heartache and pain into your life or into the lives of those you love? Is there some deep brokenness in your life? Do you feel like you’ve sinned one too many times to be forgiven, that God would never forgive you?
Listen, the world would tell you that sin isn’t even real. There are no moral absolutes, this is all socially constructed. It would give you some psychological tips for trying to deal with your guilt, but sin’s not really that big of a deal.
Religion will tell you that if you’ll just work harder, if you’ll just do better, then maybe your good can outweigh your bad and you can make recompense for the bad things that you’ve done.
But the gospel says, “It’s finished.” The debt has been paid, it’s been paid in full, and you are covered in grace, and the proof that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross covers our sins once and for all is that he rose from the dead.
Romans 4:25 says, “He was delivered over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification.” That means that because Jesus Christ is alive, you can be forgiven—fully and freely and forever forgiven.
(3) But it’s not just that we get forgiveness, it’s not just that it heals our conscience, but spiritually, the resurrection means that we are given new power, new power to change. Because if we come to Christ and we are united to Christ through faith and through the Spirit, it means that the very power that raised Jesus from the dead, the very power that filled his lungs with oxygen, with air, that made his heart start beating again, that made the brainwaves start firing again—that same power is at work in you, and it’s power that is so strong that it can set you free, that it can liberate you from sin and from addiction. It means that you are not stuck, you are not helpless, that if you are in Christ, you are not determined by your past. You get not only pardon for your sins, you get power for living. You get not just a clean record, you get a new heart. You get not just forgiveness, you get transformation.
“He breaks the power of canceled sin,
He sets the prison free.”
You don’t have to be determined by your temperament, your brokenness, your personality, or how bad your parents messed you up. You can live a new life because of what Jesus has done. There’s power to change us. This power is power that is at work in the whole world and someday will make all things new.
(4) This is the social implication. The world will be made right, because when Jesus rose from the dead in a real body, it showed that God had not given up on the project of creation, but instead is bringing about a new creation. The Scriptures talk about how all creation is groaning and longing and waiting for the day when all of this will be consummated and complete, when our bodies will be raised, and the world will be made new.
One time Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew that Jesus were returning the next day. He thought for a moment and he said, “I’d plant a tree.”
Why would he plant a tree? Because he knows that this world matters, that God has not given up on this world! Brothers and sisters, that gives us purpose. It gives us hope. It gives us reason to be about the work of pushing back against sin, and sickness, and death, and disease, showing compassion to the hurting, the poor, the oppressed. Because our labor in the Lord is not in vain. You should want this to be true. This is the best news in the world. It’ll heal your heart, and someday it’ll heal the world itself.
3. How Should We Respond?
So question number three, how should we respond? Well, obviously, I want us to respond with faith, trusting in this Christ and believing this good news. If you’ve never trusted in Christ, I hope you will today.
But I want to note two specific responses in the text. As I mentioned earlier, Mark 16 is unique among the Gospels. It was the earliest of the Gospels to be written. It’s actually the shortest of accounts of the empty tomb. But I think it speaks to us, and I think it invites a particular kind of response. We see two responses. These both come from the words of the angel.
(1) Number one, don’t be afraid. You see the fear in verse 5 as well as in verse 8, and then the command of the angel in verse 6. “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here.”
But the dominant emotion in the text is the emotion of fear. The passage is saying that since Jesus is alive, since Jesus has been raised, we should not be afraid.
I think this is important for us today because we live in an age of fear. In fact, there was a book written just in the last year called The Age of Anxiety, a very important book for our time. There’s so much anxiety in the world. There’s anxiety, of course, about sickness and death, and those are always with us, but perhaps even more so over the last five years.
There’s anxiety about economic instability and about the broader instability of the world. I was reading something a few months ago that was talking about how things have changed in the world. Where once there were coalitions and treaties and agreements and relationships that were kind of keeping the world together during the Cold War—it’s what kept us from going nuclear—all that’s gone now. Now you have nations, the great world powers, that are all seeking their own interests. The alliances are crumbling. What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen in the twenty-first century? Will there be a World War III? Will we face nuclear holocaust? What’s going to happen in our world? There are a lot of reasons to be afraid.
But listen, death is the worst thing that can happen to you, and if Jesus has defeated death, there’s no reason to be afraid, because we know the King who holds the keys of death and hell in his hands.
I love to tell the story of Donald Grey Barnhouse. He was a beloved pastor in the twentieth century. I often tell the story at funerals. Barnhouse lost his wife to cancer when she was very young, and he was left to raise his young daughter alone. One day, she asked him this heartbreaking question: “Daddy, if Jesus died for us, why did mama have to die?”
It’s a question no father ever wants to hear. He didn’t really know the answer, even though he was a brilliant pastor and theologian. He didn’t really know the answer to the question, so he had to think about it. One day they were in the car; they were driving together. They’d come to a traffic light, and a semi-truck passed by them, and the shadow of the truck passed over the car. Suddenly he had a thought, and he said, “Honey, would you rather be run over by the truck or by the shadow of the truck?”
She said, “The shadow, of course. The truck could hurt you, could harm you or kill you.”
He said, “When Jesus died, Jesus took the truck of death. But when mama died, she just went through the shadow of death.”
Isn’t that what Scripture teaches us? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” It’s just the shadow of death. In fact, Jesus, when he speaks about death, he calls it a sleep. It’s a sleep. Why? Because we’re going to wake up again! And that means there’s no reason for us to fear. Don’t let fear paralyze your soul. If Jesus is alive—and he is—then we know the end of the story. There’s hope.
“No guilt in life, no fear in death;
This is the power of Christ in me!
From life’s first cry to final breath,
Jesus commands my destiny.”
Do not be afraid.
(2) Then here’s the second command and the second response. Go and tell. You see it in verse 7. “But go, tell his disciples and Peter.”
Of course, the way the text ends in verse 8, it says that the women went out, fled the tomb, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. So there’s a tension here. They are told to go and tell, and the Gospel of Mark ends in silence.
Again, as I’ve already mentioned, virtually all New Testament scholars today agree that everything that follows, if you’ve got it in your Bible from verse 9 and on, it’s actually things that are assimilated from the other Gospels and were added in later. But this is how the earliest manuscripts end. It ends in silence.
What’s the reason for it? It seems an odd way for a Gospel to end.
I think the best answer I’ve seen comes from a New Testament scholar named David Garland. I want to read this to you. He puts it beautifully. He says,
“The Gospel of Mark leaves us with unfinished business. The ending, which is not an ending, becomes a neverending story, as the baton passes on to us to join in the race and spread the news. Mark’s stunning ending raises the question, Who will tell the story?”
Because there’s a commission: Go and tell. Who’s going to tell the story?
Listen, the resurrection demands a response, not just emotionally, not just intellectually, but it demands a response missionally. If this is true, and if this is the best news in the world, and if the world needs to hear it, then who’s going to tell the story? The Gospel of Mark is inviting us to step up and to answer that call and to say, “I will tell it. I’ll share that good news.”
Friends, some of us have believed in the resurrection for years, but we’re still living in silence. Fear keeps us quiet or insecurity holds us back. But resurrection joy should move us to resurrection mission and witness. And I want to ask you this morning as we conclude, who do you need to tell? Who do you need to tell? Maybe it’s a friend or family member who needs hope. Maybe it is a neighbor who is lonely and afraid. Maybe it’s a coworker who is burdened with guilt, wrestling with addiction. We have news to tell.
Tell them that Jesus is alive. Tell them that grace is free, that sin has been paid for, that death has been defeated, that everything sad someday will become untrue, because the tomb is empty!
Let’s pray together.
Gracious God, we thank you this morning for the truth of the resurrection and for the power of this Gospel that can change our lives. And Lord, many of us have experienced that power. This morning, we pray that we would experience it in a fresh and a new way, as by your Spirit you take this message and drive it deep into our hearts to bring increasing freedom and joy—freedom from fear and guilt and shame, and joy in this hope, that Christ is alive and there is hope for our lives and hope for our world. Some, perhaps, have never placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Lord, I pray for those this morning that they would have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the desire to believe, and minds that are convinced by the evidence, and that today they would cross that threshold into a new relationship with you.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we pray that by your Spirit you would continue your work in our hearts and in our lives as we remember what Christ in his crucifixion has done for us. May we come with our hearts full of faith and by your Spirit may we participate in a real encounter with Jesus Christ as we take the bread and the juice. So draw near to us in these moments, we pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
