April 8, 2012 · John 20:11–18

Resurrection? Are You Kidding Me?

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?" "They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him."

“This is on the first day of the week, if you notice it. People wonder why we worship on Sunday. We call it the Lord's Day, because Jesus came alive from the dead on Sunday. That's why the first Christians started to celebrate and gather on that day — the day that gave proof to Christ being the Son of God. And it all begins with a woman. Mary Magdalene is the first one — she's the first one to see that the tomb of Jesus was empty. There's a very early tradition in the church — and there's kind of a debate and argument about how this all goes — that Mary was a prostitute. The Bible doesn't say that anywhere. And so there's kind of different traditions. And actually, if you go to some churches and you say that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, they take it as a deep offence. The other people take it as a great sign of the glory of the grace of Christ. Whenever — what's going on there — there's one thing that's true: that one of the very first disciples of Jesus was a woman. And actually, we see in the Scriptures that she financially supported him. The ministry of Jesus probably wouldn't have continued as it did, or in the way it could have, if they didn't have the financial support of someone like Mary. What's her reaction? She comes to this tomb. She sees it empty. And she thinks, "I don't know what to do.”