Much Afraid

Mark 16:1-8

July 26, 2026 • Mount Pleasant UMC

I would imagine that, after a short time of running, fleeing really, they stopped to catch their breath. In the warm, moist air of a Middle Eastern springtime, they probably stood across from each other, saying things without saying a word. What did they just witness? What happened back there? And, most importantly—where was his body? They were headed back to the place where all the disciples had spent the night, where the men were still sleeping, but before they got there, they had probably better get their story straight. What were they going to tell the men?

This they knew for sure: they had gotten up early Sunday morning to finish the burial of their friend and teacher, Jesus, who had been brutally murdered on Friday. He had been put in a borrowed tomb before sundown Friday night so that they could honor both him and the Sabbath, the day of rest. Saturday had been a long day, and as soon as they could barely see outside, they had headed for the tomb, armed with spices and all the things needed to take care of his body. But when they got there, the stone had been moved (and they had watched the men put in place on Friday evening) and the tomb was empty. They knew for sure it was empty because they had gone in to look. And that was when things got weird.

“The man, in the tomb…” began Mary mother of James. She was still breathing hard. “What about him?” Salome asked. Mary looked up at her friend. “Was that an angel?” she asked. Salome didn’t answer, though they both knew the answer. After all, angels always begin by telling people not to be afraid, just the same as this young man had done. Mary looked back down the path they had just come along. “The young man said Jesus was risen,” she stammered and Salome nodded. “What does that mean?” Then fear overtook them again and they began running some more, thinking distance would somehow erase the fear. But it didn’t. Running away just made them much more afraid.

All of the Gospel resurrection accounts differ slightly, just as eyewitness accounts usually do, but there are some constants to all four of the stories. First of all, the women were the first ones to the tomb and the first ones to find out and tell about the risen Jesus. The women. So, a note to all of the churches who think women can’t proclaim the Gospel: if they had not, we wouldn’t know about the resurrection, at least not until much later in the day. The men are still sleeping when the women come back from the empty tomb, and the men only go to check things out because the women tell them about it. Can you imagine if the women hadn’t come to the tomb? The angel would be sitting there, checking his sundial, wondering when the men are ever going to get up and come see what has happened. A second thing that is consistent is the involvement of Mary Magdalene. The Gospel accounts have differing numbers as to who went to the tomb that Sunday morning, but for sure Mary Magdalene was there and she is the first to actually encounter the risen Jesus. In our Gospel reading this morning, Mark says there were three women, but since we know Mary stayed behind (cf. John 20:11-18), it seems logical to assume that when he talks about women running away “trembling and bewildered…[and] afraid,” he must mean the other two: Salome and Mary the mother of James.

The question then becomes: why were they afraid? There are actually all sorts of emotions in this passage; understandably, the women seem to have quite a lot of feelings about the things that have happened here. In verse 4, the text we read says they are “alarmed” when they see the angel inside the tomb, but the word Mark uses is something closer to “terrified” (16:5; cf. McKnight, Mark, pg. 271). Well, I think I would be too if a tomb that was supposed to contain a dead body instead had a living angel! I’d be pinching myself to make sure I was actually awake and then I’d be terrified that I was! Then, after the angel speaks, they are “trembling,” “bewildered,” and “afraid” (16:8). That last word is “phobeo,” from which we get the word “phobia.” I’m betting if you asked them right at that moment, they wouldn’t have really been able to describe what they were feeling. Fear, awe, reverence, more fear, and what in the world just happened? They come to the tomb and they leave the tomb with “absolutely no expectation that Jesus will rise from the dead. It’s almost as if he had never spoken of it” (Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 188). But Jesus had spoken of it. He had told them repeatedly that he would rise again. And we shake our heads, with the benefit of two thousand years of history, and wonder why the disciples didn’t understand it, why they didn’t get it. But let’s put it in context: such a thing had never happened before. It was a widely held belief that dead men don’t rise from the dead. By the way, it still is. Dead men and women don’t come back. It might be easy to look down on the disciples for not understanding, but we’re not that different. We don’t go to the cemetery expecting someone to be raised from the dead. We go to visit a dead friend. That’s what they were doing—until they weren’t. Because he is risen. And that freaked them out; they didn’t know what it meant. I think that is really why we’re told they said “nothing to anyone” (16:8). What could they say? People would think they were crazy and they couldn’t (yet) begin to explain it. What does all of this mean?

It means, to use the words of our “Illumination Station” bottom line, that Jesus is the proven Son of God. The resurrection is the proof that Jesus is who he claimed to be. And let’s be clear: Mark does not say the empty tomb is the proof. These women did not see that the tomb was empty and immediately conclude that Jesus was risen. We know from the other gospels that their first conclusion was that someone had stolen Jesus’ body. Grave robbing was a common occurrence in first century Palestine, and you can certainly understand why they would be so upset if that had happened. All of the indignity that had been done to Jesus in the crucifixion—the beatings, the torture, the trial, and the rejection by everyone—and then this was just one more indignity. The tomb was empty. The body was stolen. That’s what they assumed. The empty tomb did not, by itself, prove that Jesus was who he said he was. At first, it doesn’t even seem to have reminded them that he had predicted (or promised) he would rise again. “The empty tomb is not the final proof; it is only a piece of evidence…Only Jesus is the final proof” (Card 191). Again, in the other gospels, for most of the disciples, it’s when they see Jesus that everything changes. In Mark’s gospel, the women are left running, wondering about what they angel said: That Jesus has the power of life over death. They are afraid.

Maybe the question should be not why are they afraid but why aren’t we afraid. Not afraid as in terrified and wanting to run away from Jesus. But we do get way too comfortable with the resurrection. We celebrate it on Easter as if it’s just like any other historical event. And it is historical, but it is not like anything else. The tomb is empty means Jesus is loose in the world. It means that the thing that was always so certain—death—can be defeated, and in fact has been defeated. And if Jesus can defeat death, if Jesus can overcome the worst thing in this world, then there isn’t anything he can’t do. That makes every difference in the world, especially in the way we live. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, talks a lot about the resurrection, and he says if Christ has not been raised, then “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19). Everyone should feel sorry for us because we believe a lie. When people talk about Jesus just being a great moral teacher, they’re missing the whole reason he came. His teaching only makes sense in light of the resurrection. Living the way Jesus tells us to only makes sense in light of the resurrection. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” Paul says (1 Corinthians 15:26), and if that has been overcome, then what else is there to fear, women at the tomb? That’s what the early Christians came to believe, that the resurrection proves Jesus is the Son of God, that the resurrection validates everything he said and did before then, that the resurrection changes everything. Why aren’t we much afraid?

The original Gospel of Mark, we think, ends here. The other verses in your Bibles were added later, and it’s a strange ending until we really contemplate what has happened. “They were afraid” (16:8). Of course they were! They had just encountered the power of the life-changing God and everything from now on would be different. Jesus is not our buddy; he is the powerful, proven Son of God. We take his presence too lightly, too calmly. I appreciate the way author Annie Dillard puts it. I think she has a word for us: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” The women running from the tomb “have been overcome with something beyond their imagination and experience…They have no way to comprehend the incomprehensible” (McKnight 272). Neither do we. Why aren’t we much afraid?

I do believe that women running from the tomb were experiencing true fear. As I’ve said, it’s understandable. But I don’t believe we’re supposed to live in that kind of fear. Once these women (and the others) encountered Jesus, their fear turned into something else—a passion for telling the world. All throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus heals people or teaches them something or performs a miracle and then tells them not to tell anyone. Of course, just like us when we’re told not to tell anyone, they go and blab to anyone they can find. They can’t wait to tell what they know! The irony here at the end of Mark is that when they are specifically told to tell others (the disciples and Peter), they say nothing to anyone (16:6-8; McKnight 273). We do know that eventually they told others. They passed on this “stupendously good news.” And so should we. The kind of fear we should have is a fear of the kind of world we would live in if this news doesn’t get passed on. The kind of fear we should have is a healthy fear of a God who can literally defeat any enemy we have, including death. The kind of fear we should have is one that compels us to worship and honor that God with everything we do. We have the greatest news of all time. Jesus is the proven Son of God  and he is risen from the dead. Why do we keep silent?

I like the way Dr. J. D. Walt puts it: “Without the resurrection, all we’ve got is at best another self-help strategy… With the resurrection, we have the whole gospel. Without the resurrection, if we even happen to discover Jesus in the stacks of history’s library, we may at best find some help so we can try harder to become better people. With the resurrection, comes the power of the Holy Spirit to not only cleanse us from guilt and heal us from shame, but to supernaturally empower us to overcome sin, which has lost its power. Without the resurrection…our t-shirts might say something like, ‘We came. We saw. We died.’ With the resurrection, we have…the sure hope of our own resurrection because we have given our lives to the Risen One. And far more than a T-shirt slogan, we have the proclamation which goes like this: He is risen!” (The Gospel of the Holy Spirit, pgs. 313-314). In other words: the resurrection changes everything in our lives, in our world, in the universe. Everything is different because Jesus is the proven Son of God.

So what does this mean for our lives today? All of this is good but isn’t this just about having hope for when we die? I’ll get to that in a moment, but in a word, no. Resurrection changes everything. Jesus isn’t just the proven Son of God who came so that we could go to heaven when we die. Jesus is the proven Son of God whose triumph over death changes everything for us right now. For one, resurrection changes the way we work. For some people, work is just the thing we sludge through to earn money to stay alive until we retire. But what if work is more than that? What if our work is actually an act of worship and an expression of love to God? From the beginning, we were given good work to do, and the Scriptures indicate we will have work to do in eternity. What you do matters. As Pastor John Mark Comer puts it, “Right now we are learning the skills we’ll need forever in God’s new world” (Garden City, pg. 258). I don’t know entirely what that looks like, but the Bible says we will reign with Jesus forever (2 Timothy 2:12). Reign over what? I have no idea. All the Sunday School pictures of my childhood seemed to show people in heaven sitting on a cloud, strumming a harp and singing hymns but I just don’t see in the Bible. Because of the resurrection, we will live forever and what we do now and who we become now will carry over into then. Revelation 14:13 says, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord…for their deeds will follow them.” The word translated as “deeds” actually means “work.” In light of the resurrection, your work matters and it will matter for eternity. That’s why Paul says our focus should be on things that are noble, right, pure, lovely and admirable (cf. Philippians 4:8)—because what we do now, what we work on now, is preparing us for eternity (cf. Comer 260). The resurrection changes everything.

It also changes our relationships. When Jesus was raised, he came back to his friends, and while they seem to have expected to just pick back up where things left off, things were different. Richer, somehow. Jesus was present to them in a new way, but the relationships they had were also different. If Jesus is the proven Son of God, and if he is the one who binds us together, then we can’t help but have different and deeper relationships. I mean, look around. Just take a moment and look around. How many people near you would you have known if it weren’t for Jesus bringing us all together in this place? And how many would you probably not choose to be around if it weren’t for the faith in Jesus that you share! Stop pointing! My point is this: we have a bond that we would’t have if it weren’t for Jesus. And we wouldn’t be here together if it weren’t for the resurrection. More than that, the resurrection changes everything about everyone else, too, whether they have faith in Jesus or not. We’ve quoted C. S Lewis a lot during this series, but it’s because he says things so well. Like this: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit…” (The Weight of Glory). Because of what the proven Son of God did, every person has the potential and possibility of living forever. And every person deserves to hear the good news about the resurrection. Every single person is a beloved child of God. Now I don’t know about you, but sometimes I have to remind myself of that truth. When that person cuts me off in traffic, when the customer service person on the other end of the line is rude to me, when someone cuts in front of me in line, when someone is unkind or threatening to me, or someone disagrees with me about politics or theology, it takes a lot of energy for me to remember: “That person is a child of God. I have never talked to a mere mortal.” But remembering that changes everything. I may still struggle to like who they are, but at that moment I am reminded that even if I struggle to love them, God already does. The resurrection changes everything.

Including our hope. Here’s where we get back to eternity and the truth that we all settle for far too little hope. Somewhere along the way we got the idea that in eternity we will be a spirit floating in the clouds, going to a place called heaven and singing in an angel choir forever. But, honestly—is that really what you want to do forever, time without end? I mean, I like singing and I even enjoy singing in a choir—but for eternity? Friends, that is not the promise of the Bible because resurrection changes everything. That is not a Biblical idea; it’s a Greek idea called “the immortality of the soul.” Your hope is much better than that. The Biblical authors describe life in a three-stage process. Stage one: life here on earth. Stage two: life after death, with or without a body isn’t clear. And stage three: resurrection (cf. Comer 246). N. T. Wright calls it “life after life after death.” When the earth is made new. When we receive new bodies, just as Jesus did, bodies that are somehow consistent when our bodies now but also somehow different. I mean, Jesus could walk through walls and appear wherever he wanted to. How cool is that? Paul describes Jesus’ resurrection as the “firstfruits” of our own (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20; Romans 6:5). Our faith is not about “going to heaven when you die.” Our faith is about living resurrection life with Jesus in a world made new and that’s a much better hope. That’s Biblical hope, and God’s promise is always better than anything we can come up with. Resurrection is the hope that compels everything we do, and that hope is possible all because Jesus is the proven Son of God.

That hope is what compels me to spend every night this week in this sanctuary and in this building with kids who are loud and rowdy and full of energy and did I mention loud? It’s why I give up my nice, quiet evenings at home and allow myself to be jumped on and hugged and high-fived and completely worn out (and maybe even slimed) by the end of the week. It’s because I want each and every one of them to know that Jesus is the promised, perfect, powerful and proven Son of God. I want to do my part in shining a light on who Jesus really is. VBS is one of my favorite weeks of the year because we get to share laughter and love and life and hope with all these kids. If you can’t be here, I hope you will be praying for those of us who are. Because I can’t wait to see what God is going to do and how he’s going to change lives this week. And because, I don’t know if you’ve heard or not, but the resurrection changes everything. Let’s pray.