God’s Word for You
Mark 16:1 Arise, O Lord
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, March 31, 2024
16:1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic spices, so that they might go and anoint his body.
For anyone else, the account of the burial would have been the last chapter of their story; a longer historical account would move on from someone’s burial to the next person, such as we find over and over again in books such as 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. But this was not the end of the story of Jesus. In fact, the crucifixion and death of the Lord are not even the climax of the story. Those things simply brought the penult (the next-to-last chapter) to a close. Now the great moment had come! Now the culmination of the prophecies was at hand. And as the backdrop for the great news to be announced, we begin with the hushed and frightened quiet of the dawn, and the approach of the women to Jesus’ tomb.
In fact, the hushed hours of the night moving toward dawn are also how the birth of Jesus Christ was announced. Then, the event was followed by angels announcing the news to shepherds out in the fields nearby (Luke 2:9). Here, the event is followed by an angel (or angels, Luke 24:23; John 20:12) announcing the news to women who were approaching the tomb. In both cases, the day has not yet begun to unfold; the news of the day takes place before any other event, and the day is changed forever in the hearts and minds of believers everywhere: Christmas and Easter, his birth and his rebirth! This message turned pagans away from their idols, “to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the coming wrath” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). This message nullifies the anger, the jealousy and the plotting of the Jewish leaders, for the Apostles preached: “the God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 5:30). This message is about the care God took in choosing just who would see the risen Christ, for only those who would testify as witnesses were chosen, as Peter confessed: “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day and permitted him to be seen. He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—those of us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead” (Acts 10:39-42). This message is the power of eternal life: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification” (Romans 4:25).
The Sabbath ended Saturday at sundown, but the women needed light to do their work, and so they waited until the night was almost past and went early in the morning. These were some of the same women who were there at the cross. We don’t know how many women there were; Luke adds another name, Joanna, and there might have been more than those. They had seen Joseph and Nicodemus remove the Lord’s body from the cross, and they knew where his tomb was.
They “bought” (many English readers mistake this for “brought”) spices. This would have been done on Saturday evening, because many shops opened in the evening after the Sabbath was over on Saturday and remained open for a few hours. They planned to pour these spices over the body of Jesus. The spices, various aromatic liquids, were expensive. The bottle of nard that Mary had anointed his body with more than a week before had been “very expensive perfume” (Mark 14:3), and it would seem that they bought even more than that for his burial.
It was part of their usual practice to honor their dead loved ones by washing and perfuming the body for burial. When John the Baptist was killed by Herod, John’s disciples prepared his body and buried it. There hadn’t been any time at all on Friday to do this for Jesus—Joseph had barely had enough time to secure the right to take Jesus down from the cross and then go and remove the nails and lower him down. It is most likely that the round stone disk was rolled into place on the hillside just as the round disk of the sun sank behind the hills in the west.
They clutched their precious and expensive perfume as they made their way outside the city as the light began to climb into the sky. The expense of the perfume was about to vanish from their minds. What was costly would soon be forgotten, for the priceless was about to appear.
Two thousand years before this morning dawned, but on this very hill, a father took the son who was about to be sacrificed on an altar and said to his servants:
“Stay here with the donkey
while I and the boy go over there.
We will worship,
and then we will come back to you.” (Genesis 22:5).
“Arise, O LORD!” (Psalm 3:7)
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.