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 gave way like a dream to the reality that His body was gone, so if He had been raised, where was He? It was hard to believe that life could have been restored to His battered body that had been drained of its life fluids, and if by some miracle it had it was equally difficult to believe He had somehow escaped falling back into the hands of His enemies due to the guard that had been posted at the tomb. For as yet they could not have conceived of the spiritual nature of the actual body to which He was in fact raised as the first-born from the dead and the first-fruits of the resurrection. It wasn’t until later that morning that Jesus, appearing as a gardener, called Mary Magdalene by name so that she recognized Him, thus beginning the slow understanding that who He was and how he would establish His kingdom were very different from how she and His other disciples had conceived of these. To be sure, He was real and not a ghost; they could touch Him, and He would appear to many others to establish the fact of His resurrection. But He was ascending to the right hand of the Father from where He would now reign through His disciples, who must no longer cling to Him as they had come to know Him according to the flesh, but now more fully as He truly is, according to the Spirit. For they were no longer to be servants, or even friends, but brethren, to join with Him in establishing His kingdom so as to become partakers with Him of its glory. As the only begotten Son of God, He was ascending to His Father, but by His death and resurrection by which we could be adopted into Their communion, He was also ascending to our Father; Joh 20:17. He was ascending to our God to intercede on our behalf, but also to His God, in demonstration of what our own relationship to God was always meant to be—not as a slave to the forced will of a master, but as a child who in glad submission can even unto death entrust himself to the loving authority of His Father, participating, like Christ, in the restoration of all things.
What is the last thing John records in His account of Jesus’ first resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene? See Joh 20:18. In contrast to the vision of the angel announcing the resurrection which quickly gave way to the thought that Jesus’ body must have been removed from the tomb (Joh 20:2), how much more real and memorable was her experience with the risen Jesus, and hence her more bold and certain announcement to the disciples? In what other way was her reaction to the resurrected Jesus very different from her reaction to the angel earlier that morning? Contrast Mat 28:5, Mar 16:8 with Joh 20:16-17. Although Jesus taught that resurrected men are like angels (Luk 20:35-36), what might the different impressions that the two experiences left upon Mary indicate about there being a difference, at least to men, between angels and a resurrected man? In what other ways are angels different from resurrected men? Cf. 1Co 6:3, Heb 1:14, 2:5-7.
Recall that Mary herself had a hard time believing Jesus had risen from the dead even after the angelic vision announcing the resurrection; cf. Joh 20:2. How does the longer ending of Mark’s gospel say those responded when Mary told them that she had seen the risen Lord and He had told her that He was going before them into Galilee and ascending to heaven? See Mar 16:10-11. How does Luke, while consolidating the women’s accounts, describe the same reaction? See Luk 24:10-11. What else does the longer ending of Mark say was the reaction of those to whom the two men who were on the road to Emmaus reported that Jesus had appeared to them in a different form? See Mar 16:12-13. What does John say was the similar reaction of the apostle Thomas even after Jesus had appeared to the other apostles but He wasn’t among them? See Joh 20:24-25. Although Jesus had repeatedly taught that He would rise from the dead, why was it still so difficult for His followers to actually believe it when it really happened? Cf. Act 26:8. What does this teach us about the power of death as an impenetrable veil through which we cannot otherwise see that the devil had used since the fall to enslave mankind? See Isa 25:7-8, Heb 2:14-15. How does this also help us to understand why God raising from the dead Jesus’ battered body that had been drained of its life fluids was the singular event to remove that veil so that “through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death”? Cf. Mar 3:27, Luk 11:21-22. How does this help us to better understand the great significance of Jesus’ death, perhaps not as Luther taught to pay the penalty for our sins so we could be forgiven, which forgiveness comes from true repentance (Luk 24:47), but to demonstrate the power of God to raise the dead and so remove the veil of death and “deliver those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives”? See here for more.