Luke 24:-12 Commentary

Jesus Has Risen
1 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 'The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.' " 8 Then they remembered his words.

9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. 12 Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.


Dig Deeper
When you’re part of a church family you experience almost all stations of life on an ongoing basis because it seems that someone in your church family is always going through some aspect of life whether it be graduation, marriage, child birth, starting a new job, and so many other things. I love to be around a young married couple that is about to have their first child. They are so excited and so hopeful, and some of them start, at some point, to think that they finally have a good handle on what is coming and they are ready. We’ve spent time with several couples like that over the years and it’s almost a little amusing when they get to that stage. Granted, some couples never feel prepared and have a good dose of healthy fear right up until the day of the birth of the child as to what they have gotten themselves into, but for every one of those couples there is another couple who starts to get confident that they are ready. You can try to tell those couples that having a baby is a much bigger life event than they think and you can try to tell them what they are in for, but once someone is over-confident it’s hard to move them from that position. So you warn them that having a new child is great but it is going to be more demanding on them than they can imagine, and you try to warn them that they cannot possibly prepare for every possible situation no matter how organized they are. And you try to warn them that they are going to be more tired than they they could ever have dreamed was possible, but they just confidently smile and say they are ready.

Then the day comes and they have their wonderful child. Once they’ve had a few weeks to experience the real deal, they usually come back exhausted, worn down, and much wiser. They realize that people told them these things all along but they had such a perception built up of what things would be like that they simply couldn’t comprehend what they were being told. They couldn’t grasp how hard it really is until they went through it and experienced it for themselves. Only then could they look back and see that this was what people had been saying all along.

It seems that throughout his ministry, especially near the end, Jesus continually told and warned his disciples that bad times were ahead. He was going to Jerusalem to die. They had such powerful expectations for the Messiah, however, that they simply could not grasp or embrace the full reality of that. But that wasn’t the end, Jesus didn’t just tell them in many ways that his death was coming, he also hinted at, alluded to, and even talked openly about resurrection and about his own exaltation and vindication after his death. His disciples were listening but they just could not understand what he was saying because it didn’t fit into the categories that they had already created in their own expectations. They just had no idea. No, they would have to go through it and experience if before they could fully grasp what Jesus was talking about. Only then would they be able to look back and see that this was what Jesus had been saying all along.

Luke quickly jumps ahead from Jesus’ burial to Sunday, the first day of the week, quite early in the morning. But I can’t help but wonder what that Friday and Saturday would have been like for Jesus’ disciples. It appears that it would have been full of fear and uncertainty. What would they do now without Jesus? What of all of the promises that he had made? How were they to interpret all of the incredible things that they had seen with the fact that he was now clearly dead? Should they stay together as a family or split up and go back to their old lives? The one thing that seemed to be in short supply was hope. If Luke and other Gospel writers were making up this story, as some critics have claimed, we would expect to find descriptions of faithful and hopeful disciples waiting anxiously for the return of Christ. That’s not at all what we find, though. They were confused and defeated. Their leader was dead and they were now reduced to sending the women of this family that Jesus had formed to the tomb to properly prepare his body. They weren’t going there with spices just in case he was still dead but hoping secretly that he wasn’t. In their minds this was it, and what that meant for this supposed new family was anyone’s guess.

The tomb where the women watched Jesus be laid three days before was a typical Jewish tomb that was cut into stone and would have had a large wheel-shaped stone that was rolled in front of the open doorway in a groove that was cut into the ground. As the women approached, it would have been quite out of place to see that the stone was rolled back from the entrance. Mark includes the detail that they worried on the way how they were going to get that stone moved (Mk. 15:3) but Luke either assumed that readers would know that detail already or didn’t find it necessary to add to his account. Wondering what was going on, they peered into the tomb and did not find Jesus’ body as they were expecting. What could have happened? Who would have done this? In the midst of their wondering, two men, gleaming like lighting, appeared in their presence (Luke doesn’t say for sure here but will confirm in verse 23 that these two men were indeed angels). Everywhere we look in this chapter, Luke seems intent on provided the necessary two witnesses to provide a proper testimony (Deut. 19:15): the two angels; the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, two appearances of the resurrected Jesus, and a double appeal to the witness of Scripture.

Before we move on, it is important to point out that the way that Luke (and the other Gospel writers) has recorded this account is powerful evidence to the fact that they were telling a true story. Women were simply not respected as witnesses in the first century, so if he were inventing a story or trying to exaggerate one, he just would not have done so by describing women as the ones to find the empty tomb first. It would have weakened their case to use such sketchy testimony. Luke was presenting truth, and the facts were the facts. But it is possible that though many first century readers would have been initially displeased with women being the first to find the tomb, the discerning reader who was genuinely looking for truth would probably have understood Luke’s dilemma and would have realized, just as we can now see, that it was actually powerful proof that he was telling a factual story using real eyewitnesses.

As the women listened to the angels, they were urged to remember. “Remembering” in this context doesn’t just mean mentally recalling something but also to now have understanding and insight into what one is recalling. They had failed to understand God’s purposes through the Christ and his death and, as is always the case, the antidote to a lack of understanding God’s purposes is to return to his word. In this case it was the very words of Christ that they heard with their own ears, but now they needed to shed their preconceived categories and look again.

As first-century Jews, they were so conditioned to think of resurrection as something that would happen to all of God’s people at the end of the present age and at the time when God’s new age unmistakably broke into the world, ridding it of evil and exalting God’s people to rule over it, that they just could not comprehend anything else. Yes, Jesus had spoken of being resurrected but they just could not comprehend that in the new and meaningful way that he wanted them to see. And perhaps from Jesus’ perspective they didn’t need to fully comprehend it ahead of time, but if he told them, they would eventually be able to look back and see that this was what he was up to all along and their faith would be built up. But while he was still with them, they simply could not wrap their minds around the thought of someone resurrecting as a single event in the middle of the present age and somehow ushering in the age to come in some aspects while the rest of the world went on pretty much as normal. They had categorized Jesus’ words of rising on the third day under their paradigm that Hosea 6:2 and it’s talk of being raised and restored on the third day as a symbol for the time when God would resurrect all of his people. Now they needed to remember Jesus’ words and realize that their whole framework was wrong. That’s not what God was doing. Hosea 6:2 wasn’t a symbol it was a prophecy. Jesus had been cut off as a representative for all people and had now resurrected quite literally on the third day.

They did finally, Luke tells us, remember his words. The light was beginning to turn on for the women, but that stands in contrast to the men. When the women ran back to tell them, Luke makes it clear that they weren’t waiting in hopeful expectation either. They were together. They had at least stayed together as the family that Jesus wanted them to be, but when the women came back and told them that the tomb was empty, and no doubt told them what they now understood, that this was what Jesus was planning to do all along, that death could not contain Jesus, the men took it as nonsense. These poor grief-stricken women didn’t know what they were talking about, at least not in the eyes of the men. Even though they had seen Jesus raise people from the dead, they just could not wrap their minds around the idea that those miracles were pointing to something even greater. Jesus didn’t just get sucked back out of the clutches of death, only to die again someday as those he had raised did. This was something entirely new. He had resolutely made war with death and had now burst out on the other side. But Luke, the master craftsman, hasn’t etched all of those details in yet. His readers know something that the disciples don’t yet know.

He first builds the mounting tension even more as Peter races to the tomb to see what these “crazy” women were babbling on about. Perhaps he thought he could clear up their confusion. But when he got there, no body was to be found, only strips of the linen cloth that Jesus was wrapped in days earlier. What could have happened? Peter doesn’t have a revealing encounter with any angels, though. He doesn’t yet “remember” and understand. He is left to walk away even more confused than when he came. Where did Jesus go? What happened to his body? Luke has one more incredible pair of witnesses to tell us about before he will answer those questions.


Devotional Thought
When God does things or things happen spiritually that you don’t understand, what is your response? Do you get frustrated and give up for a while? Do you just ignore the issue and hope it will go away? Or do you remember back to Jesus’ words, those find in the pages of the Bible and search for understanding? If the Bible is not the sole arbiter of truth in your life, then what else is?