An empty tomb that all four report, women who were not believed, a Gospel that stops mid-sentence, a road to Emmaus, a locked room, and a commission
The Third Day: Four Endings
The four accounts end as they began, differently. They agree that women went to the tomb on the first day of the week and found it open and empty, and that the men did not believe them. After that Mark stops, in the oldest manuscripts, with the women too afraid to speak. Matthew has an earthquake and a mountain in Galilee; Luke has a walk to Emmaus and an ascension; John has a gardener who says her name, and a breakfast on a beach. The word the four share is the word for waking.
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Lesson 12 of 12 · The first day of the week
All four Gospels say that early on the first day of the week women went to the tomb and found the stone moved and the body gone, and that a messenger told them he had risen. All four make women the first witnesses, which no one inventing a story in that century would have done, since their testimony was not accepted in court, and Luke records that the apostles thought it nonsense. From there the accounts part. Mark, in its oldest form, ends at verse 8 of chapter 16 with the women fleeing and saying nothing; the twelve verses that follow in most Bibles were added later, and the reader should know it. Matthew has the risen Jesus meet the women and then the eleven on a mountain in Galilee, where some doubted, and give them the whole world. Luke has two disciples walk to Emmaus with a stranger who explains the Scriptures and is known in the breaking of bread, and ends at Bethany with the ascension. John has Mary Magdalene mistake him for the gardener until he says her name, Thomas demand wounds and get them, and Peter asked three times whether he loves him. The claim is the same in all four, and it is the one this life has been leading to since the voice at the river: the one called Son did not stay dead.
The tomb
Mark’s account is the shortest, and in the oldest copies it is the whole of his ending.
He said to them, “Don’t be amazed. You seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him! — Mark 16:6 · WEB
Read the comment on He Is Risen; He Is Not Here
Don’t be amazed. You seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. Three women, with spices, worrying about the stone, find a young man in white and receive the message: he has risen, and he goes before you into Galilee. Two verses later Mark stops: they fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had come on them; they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid (Mark 16:8). The two earliest complete manuscripts end there, and the church fathers who mention the matter knew copies that did. The longer ending, verses 9 to 20, is in a different style and stitches together scenes from the other Gospels; most Bibles bracket it, and this series treats Mark as ending at fear. Whether he meant to, or a last page was lost, no one knows. As it stands, the Gospel that began with "the beginning of the Good News" ends with the news delivered and not yet told, and the reader holding the book is the one who knows it.
ἐγείρω egeírō G1453
probably akin to the base of ἀγορά (through the idea of collecting one's faculties); to waken (transitively or intransitively), i.e. rouse (literally, from sleep, from sitting or lying, from disease, from death; or figuratively, from obscurity, inactivity, ruins, nonexistence):--awake, lift (up), raise (again, up), rear up, (a-)rise (again, up), stand, take up.
To waken, to rouse from sleep; to raise up, and so to raise from the dead. It is the word the messenger uses in Mark, he has been raised, in the passive, which is the New Testament’s usual way of saying it: God raised him. The other word, anastasis, a standing up, gives the noun resurrection. The image under both is a sleeper getting up, which is why the New Testament calls the dead those who have fallen asleep. Paul’s summary in 1 Corinthians 15 uses this word, was raised on the third day, in a formula he says he received, which puts the claim within a few years of the event itself.
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Not believed
“These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them.” Luke 24:11 · WEB
These words seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them: the apostles’ response to the women, recorded by the Gospel written to give a Gentile certainty.
“When they saw him, they bowed down to him; but some doubted.” Matthew 28:17 · WEB
When they saw him, they bowed down to him; but some doubted: on the mountain in Galilee, in the presence of the risen Jesus, Matthew records doubt.
“Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”” John 20:29 · WEB
Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed: to Thomas, who had asked for the wounds and been given them, and the sentence is addressed past him to the reader.
“For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred brothers at once, most of whom remain until now, but some have also fallen asleep.” 1 Corinthians 15:3–6 · WEB
He was raised on the third day, and he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to over five hundred brothers at once, most of whom remain until now: Paul’s list, written while the witnesses could be asked.
The accounts do not describe believers who expected this. They describe people who did not believe the first report, did not recognize him when he came, took him for a gardener or a ghost, and in one case doubted while looking at him. A reader who finds the claim hard is in the company the Gospels themselves keep.
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Emmaus and the locked room
Luke and John each give a scene of recognition, and each is about how the risen one is known.
When he had sat down at the table with them, he took the bread and gave thanks. Breaking it, he gave it to them. Their eyes were opened and they recognized him; then he vanished out of their sight. — Luke 24:30–31 · WEB
Read the comment on Known in the Breaking of the Bread
When he had sat down at the table with them, he took the bread and gave thanks; breaking it, he gave it to them; their eyes were opened and they recognized him, then he vanished out of their sight. Two disciples have walked seven miles with a stranger who explained from Moses and all the prophets the things concerning himself, and did not know him until the gesture of the supper. Luke’s point is in the order: Scripture first, then bread, then sight. John’s recognitions are by name and by wound. Mary, weeping at the tomb, turns when he says "Mary" (John 20:16); the disciples behind locked doors are shown his hands and his side (John 20:19-20); Thomas is offered the nail marks. Luke’s Jesus, too, insists on the body: see my hands and my feet, that it is truly me; a spirit does not have flesh and bones (Luke 24:38-39), and then eats a piece of fish. The accounts are unanimous that this was not a vision. It was a man who could be touched, who ate, and who was, at first, not recognized.
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Go
Jesus came to them and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen. — Matthew 28:18–20 · WEB
Read the comment on All Authority, and All the Nations
All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I commanded you. Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. The word the priests asked about in the temple is the first word of the sentence, and Matthew, who began with a genealogy of Israel, ends with all nations. Luke ends his Gospel at Bethany with hands raised in blessing and Jesus carried up into heaven (Luke 24:50-51), and begins his second book with the same scene and a commission of his own: you will be witnesses to me in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the uttermost parts of the earth (Acts 1:8). John ends on a beach, with Peter asked three times whether he loves him, once for each denial, and told each time to feed the sheep (John 21:15-17). Three endings, three sendings, and the last word of each is not the tomb but what the people who found it empty were to do next.
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What the four accounts ask
Twelve lessons, and the life has been told four times at every step: a birth in two, a baptism in four, a confession in three and its echo in the fourth, a supper with bread in three and a towel in one, a cross with seven words scattered across four writers, and a tomb that all four found empty and none described being emptied. The accounts ask to be read as they are, four and not one, by writers who each saw the same man and chose. They ask the reader to stand where the disciples stood, at the river, at Caesarea Philippi, at the table, in the garden, at the foot of the cross and at the door of the tomb, and to answer at each place the question of the seventh lesson. The four writers answered it by writing. What they wrote was not a biography. It was, each of them said, good news, and news asks one thing of the person who hears it.
Read Mark 16:1-8, then John 20:1-18. Write down what the women in each account were told, what they did, and what the reader is left holding when each account ends. Then answer the question Jesus asked in Mark 8:29, in your own words, as your answer and not Peter’s.
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