Although God made clear first thing Sunday morning—the day of first-fruits—that Jesus had risen from the dead as the first-fruits of the resurrection (cf. Lev 23:10-11), it took time for His disciples to actually believe it. For thinking only in terms of the physical resuscitations from the dead they had seen, they had yet to…
Although we tend to equate the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearance of angels at daybreak on Sunday morning with Jesus’ resurrection, in fact it didn’t immediately add up that way for the women who had come to complete the burial custom for Jesus’ corpse. The singular nature of the angelic vison quickly…
On Sunday morning following Jesus’ passion—not at the breaking of the dawn when they discovered the tomb to be empty, but later after Peter and John had been informed and had themselves come to the tomb to see it was empty and then left—Jesus manifested Himself to Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James…
Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph were the first to discover the empty tomb, but that didn’t immediately equate for them into our present understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. While they understood from Lazarus’ example that mortal life might be restored to one who had died, it was difficult for them to…
Because of our familiarity with the resurrection of Jesus and its central importance to our faith, as we read the resurrection accounts we tend to focus only on the happy ending and forget that the disciples’ understanding of the resurrection happened in stages and was not what they were expecting at all. Although the tomb…
Very early on Resurrection Sunday Mary Magdalene and another Mary, the mother of James and Joseph, were the first to discover the empty tomb, at which time they also experienced an angelic vision announcing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. They were also the first to meet the resurrected Jesus, but not until after their vision…
We might imagine that the visions of angels announcing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead would be so dramatic that the women who had seen them could never come to doubt them. And yet, precisely because their experience was so singular and outside of the normal course of events, that is exactly what they did. For…
Three times John emphasizes Mary weeping outside the tomb of Jesus before He appeared to her, noting that both the angels and Jesus inquired why she was weeping before she came to recognize Him. Why such a question?
When most people celebrate communion they associate the breaking of bread with Jesus’ body that was in a sense broken for them. However, this is actually not what the Scripture associates with the breaking of bread. In fact, it seems that God went out of His way to make clear that this is not what we are to associate with the breaking of bread.
In the first written account of Jesus’ resurrection, Matthew highlights the initial discovery of the empty tomb by Mary Magdalene and another Mary, the mother of James and Joseph (abbreviated as Joses), and His subsequent resurrection appearance to them; see Mat 28:5-9. However, for his purposes in summarizing the account, he omitted details of the…