John 20:1-10

The Empty Tomb
1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put him!"


3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7 as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. 8 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) 10 Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.



Dig Deeper
One of the truly cool ways to honor people in our culture is with a surprise birthday party. Our youngest son recently had his sixth birthday and birthday party but it wasn’t a surprise at all. Almost every day since then he has asked if he can have a surprise party. I keep trying to explain to him that he can’t have a surprise party if he keeps asking about it but he doesn’t quite get all of that yet. When you throw a surprise party for someone and they truly don’t know it’s coming, though, it’s fantastic. The look of shock on their face and their complete lack of preparation for the event are often priceless. That’s the great thing about surprises. You don’t know they’re coming. We recently were part of a surprise birthday party for a good friend of mine. It was a huge party thrown by his wife that had probably close to a hundred people there. The best part was that he truly had no idea that it was coming. When he arrived at the house, he wasn’t dressed in any special way, he didn’t have any party food or anything else with him. He simply wasn’t expecting a party and was completely surprise and unprepared.

If it seems like we’re stressing a simple point here, it’s because we are. The point is you don’t prepare for what you don’t know is coming. In fact, my friend thought he was going to watch the Superbowl with his wife and a couple of friends for his birthday. He wasn’t preparing to have a huge party with his house full of friends and family. How could he? In the same way. The disciples, both the men and the women, weren’t expecting anything beyond the normal when they woke up Sunday morning. They weren’t preparing to find an empty tomb. The women were going to the tomb to mourn and prepared with more spices and to make sure that the body was properly prepared after the hasty preparation it likely received before the Sabbath. This certainly gives this story the ring of truth, a true surprise. If they were making this all up, as some later critics have claimed, we might expect them to describe themselves as waiting in eager prayer and anticipation of Jesus resurrecting just like he said he would. But that’s not what we get. We get a group of people who were not expecting what they found. They found the biggest surprise of their entire lives.

With the long dark week nearly over, Mary wakes up early in the morning and heads off to Jesus’ tomb. It is the first day of the week, which is unusual because we might expect John to stress that it is the third day from the crucifixion. It’s a new week with a new beginning. In the last week, Jesus was presented on the sixth day, Friday, as Pilate uttered the ironic words, "here’s the man." Truly he was the man, the true Adam presented to the world on the sixth day, just as Adam had been introduced to the world on the sixth day of creation. Creation had reached it’s culmination and God rested. In the week that John has described, Jesus is presented as the true Adam but he is put to death by those who are in the fallen image of the original Adam rather than the image of God. Again in this week, though, there was rest on the seventh day but now, John wants us to see, there is a new week. The new creation has ripped into the darkness of the old creation.

The synoptic Gospels tell us that Mary had other women go with her and that they were going presumably to finish the job of preparing Jesus’ body (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:1; Lk 24:1). This was likely due to the haste with which his body was prepared before sundown and the onset of the Jewish Sabbath. As Mary approaches the tomb, it must have felt like insult being added to injury. Jesus has been killed and now someone has messed with the body. Why would someone do that? What has happened? Mary’s first response is to run back and breathlessly tell Peter and John what she had seen. Confused and full of adrenalin, no doubt, John and Peter raced to the tomb, with the younger John reaching it first.

As they arrive they find something exceedingly strange. If tomb robbers had come by, why would they leave the linen and the spices which would have been worth money? That would be like breaking into a bank and leaving the money. The strips of linen are still lying on the shelf as though a body had passed right through them. Why would thieves have done that? What’s more, the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head, was folded or rolled up neatly (the NIV strangely has "lying in its place" which loses the intended original meaning). Imagine the confusion and emotions that were welling up inside of them. What was going on?

With the detail of the grave clothes that are lying in their place and the cloth neatly folded up, John has painted us an incredible picture of contrast. In chapter 11, as Jesus called Lazarus out of the grave, John described his grave clothes as well. They were still wrapped around Lazarus as he came out, though, and Jesus called for someone to help him take them off. When Jesus had arrived, he told Martha not to fret about Lazarus’ death because he would rise. Martha is a little frustrated and not consoled by this news, because, of course, she knows as does everyone else, that God’s people will all be raised on the last day. But this is not what Jesus is talking about. She’s wrong. Only those in Christ, those who believe in his life, will be raised and to show that he is the resurrection, he calls Lazarus out of the tomb. But this is not resurrection, it is a sign that points to resurrection. Lazarus will still die again one day physically. He still has the grave clothes wrapped around him. He is still bound by the clutches of death which will grab hold of him again one day. This, John wants us to see, is different. The grave clothes have been cast aside. They have no hold on Jesus, nor does death. Something new, something entirely different has happened on this first day of the new creation. Death has been defeated (1 Cor. 15:54) and will one day be completely destroyed (1 Cor. 15:24). In the resurrection, God has dealt with the ultimate enemy of humankind.

As John views all of this, being the first one in the tomb, he clearly has something welling up inside of him. At first John might not have known what to make of all of this, but then he felt that surge of faith. He saw and believed. He had seen and believed before, of course. He believed that Jesus was the Messiah, that Jesus was sent by God to speak the words of the Father. But this was much bigger than all of that. He believed that Jesus’ disappearance wasn’t just some strange mistake or that his body had been stolen. He believed that somehow Jesus had defeated death. Someway, somehow he had walked into death and out through it. He didn’t understand from the Scriptures. His faith didn’t yet come from the word, it came from seeing. That is better than no faith at all, but as John will stress, faith that comes from belief in the word of God without seeing is superior (Jn. 20:29). Andreas Kostenberger says that the fact that John admits that he did not understand what was happening because of Scripture, "proves that the disciples did not fabricate a story in order to fit their understanding of Scripture; rather they were confronted with certain facts without initially relating them (or being able to relate them) to Scripture."

But this raises a practical question. Daniel 12:2 says, "Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt." Jews clearly believed in resurrection despite the fact that no one else in the ancient world did. So, why was this so difficult to process? Why could they not understand from Scriptures like Daniel 12:2 that resurrection was not just a possibility but had happened? It wasn’t that they didn’t believe in resurrection, it was all about timing and scope. Jews that believed in resurrection believed that the resurrection would include "everyone whose name is found written in the book" (Dan. 12:1). They believed that this would happen at the end of time, when God would restore his creation, deal with the enemy of his people, and exalt Israel. What they did not yet understand is that Jesus was the book, that the enemy was death not Rome, and that Jesus was the true Israel (Jn. 15:1, etc.). They never envisioned that the new creation would be made available through the resurrection and in the life of Jesus now, in the middle of the present age, anticipating the full consummation of the age to come.

It wasn’t that the disciples couldn’t comprehend resurrection. It was that they couldn’t envision that God was going to work like this, now. As soon as John sees it, though, faith begins to well up inside of him like the living water that Jesus had promised to those who would believe. The wells of the new creation, the living water, have begun to break open. He admits that they didn’t understand that all immediately, but with the help of the Spirit, they will soon enough. Our job, over 2,000 years later, is to believe, not because we see like John did, but based on the logos. Our job is to let the streams of living water that flow from the new creation, from this first day of the new week, to flood our lives and overflow into those around us.


Devotional Thought
Is the word of God enough for you. If you see something in the Scriptures, does that settle it, or do you need to constantly see proof that it will be beneficial to you? Make a determination that you will be obedient to the Scriptures rather than needing to see evidence that what they are calling you to will work.