What Do You Do With an Empty Tomb?

There are two things in life that are certain: death and taxes. Tomorrow just happens to be the deadline for paying your taxes. Today I’d like to talk to you about the other issue: death.

Why talk about a morbid subject like death on Easter Sunday morning? Because you can’t avoid it. It’s part of the Easter story. When Jesus rose, he wasn’t waking up from a deep sleep, or recovering from a coma; he was rising from the dead.

At least that’s what the early Christians claimed. You see, they didn’t claim that it was just Jesus’ spirit that rose—they claimed it was a physical resurrection. His body rose, too.

Now that seems like a rather fantastic claim, doesn’t it? Is there any hard historical evidence that Jesus really rose from the dead? Or are there some holes in the story?

Suppose that someone were to start a rumor today that President John F. Kennedy had physically risen from the dead and had been spotted walking in the Rose Garden of the White House.

At first, you would just scoff at the idea, because there are so many people alive today who remember precisely where they were and what they were doing when they heard that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Maybe you’re one of them. You watched those horrendous events on TV. You witnessed his funeral. And you just know that he’s dead.

But suppose that a determined little group of people—let’s call them Kennedy-ites—keeps claiming to have seen JFK. They keep telling the story that he is alive, and eventually, they start persuading more and more people that it’s true. Pretty soon you start reading about it in the newspapers, and hearing Hollywood celebrities and famous athletes saying that they believe it.

What would you do to prove them wrong? How would you go about exposing this incredible hoax that they are playing on the American public?

Well, I know what I would do. I would go straight to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia to the place where JFK is buried. I would point to the tomb where his body lays. If I had the authority to do so, I would open the tomb and the coffin and prove that his remains were still there. And that would be the end of that. Because in order to have a resurrection, you have to have an empty tomb.

If I had lived back in the first century, I would have gone straight to the graveyard, opened the tomb where Jesus was buried, pointed to his corpse and said “There. That settles that. He did not rise.”

Question: Why didn’t that happen? Why didn’t the enemies of Jesus do precisely that? Answer: Because the tomb was empty. And there are several lines of historical evidence to prove it.

Fact #1

Even the enemies of Jesus had to admit that the tomb was empty.

On the day after his crucifixion, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate and asked him to post a guard on the grave. They were afraid that Jesus’ disciples might come and try to steal the body, and then spread some fantastic rumor about him rising from the dead.

You see, the authorities had already been thinking about the possibility of an empty tomb. So they decided to do everything they could to make sure that Jesus’ body stayed in that tomb.

Jesus’ body was still in there on Saturday and that’s where they wanted it to stay. The guards were there to maintain the status quo.

But listen to what happened Saturday night. I’m reading from Matthew 28:2:

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

Now I’m skipping down to verse 11:

…some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Now there are a lot of inconsistencies about this story. How could the guards have known what had happened when they were asleep? Why would they admit that they had fallen asleep on watch? That was a capital offense for a Roman soldier.

The story of the guards has a lot of holes in it. But right in the middle of it, there is one great big fact. The tomb was empty, and some explanation had to be found for it. So they said “The disciples stole the body. Because one thing is certain: the body of Jesus of Nazareth is no longer there.”

The guards knew it. The authorities knew it. And pretty soon, everybody in Jerusalem knew it. Because even Jesus’ enemies admitted that the tomb that had been occupied on Saturday was empty on Sunday.

Fact #2.

If the disciples had, in fact, stolen the body, why didn’t the authorities simply arrest them and recover the body?

There’s plenty of evidence to show that that’s what the disciples were expecting. John says in John 20:19:

On the evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews

Why were they afraid of the Jews? Because they assumed that there was going to be a knock on the door at any moment, and they would all be arrested and charged with stealing Jesus’ body.

But that knock on the door never came. And the disciples remained free to come and go as they pleased in Jerusalem. No arrest warrant was ever put out. There is no indication that any manhunt was ever conducted. They weren’t even brought in for questioning.

Fifty days later, while the story of the guards was still circulating in Jerusalem, the apostle Peter stood up and made a public address before a crowd of several thousand people. Rather odd for the authorities to allow him to do that, if he were a wanted man!

Several months later, when Peter and John were arrested by the authorities, it was for a different reason. They were arrested for preaching about Jesus and creating a disturbance. There was not a word said about them being wanted for grave robbery. And then they were released.

If the authorities really believed that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body and hidden it somewhere, they certainly didn’t act as though they did. That’s especially perplexing, since the chief priests and Pharisees would have liked nothing better than to have recovered Jesus’ body.

If they could have just found his body think of all the problems that would have solved for them. They could have put Jesus’ corpse on the back of a cart and wheeled it through the streets of Jerusalem. And that would have been the end of the disciples preaching about Jesus being alive. And everything would have returned to normal.

The only conclusion we can come to is that the chief priests knew that Jesus’ disciples hadn’t stolen the body. The story of the guards was just a cover up. The truth was—the body had disappeared. They couldn’t produce the corpse, because there was no corpse to produce.

Fact #3.

The Resurrection story got started in Jerusalem, not someplace else

This is a detail that we don’t often think about. If you wanted to start a story that was essentially untrue, it would be better to hatch that story somewhere far away from a place where it would be easy to disprove it.

For example, if I were to invent a myth that all Scandinavians were 6’3 and had blonde hair, where would be the best place for me to start such a myth? Well, probably someplace where the people hadn’t come across too many Scandinavians! Someplace like New Guinea or Tibet.

You certainly couldn’t get anyone to believe such a myth on the streets of Stockholm, Sweden. People would know better, because the evidence to disprove that myth was readily available in the form of the thousands of short, dark-haired Scandinavians who live there.

Question: Why didn’t the story of the resurrection get started in Galilee? Jesus and his disciples were from Galilee. Many people thought very highly of Jesus in Galilee—he was like a favorite son.

Jesus had done many amazing miracles in Galilee, so he must have had quite a reputation there. So surely it would not be surprising if a story about him rising from the dead came from the favorable climate of Galilee?

But the fact is, it didn’t start there. It started in Jerusalem in the headquarters of his opponents. It started in the very place where he was crucified and buried. Right under the noses of the chief priests and Pharisees who had every reason in the world to stamp that story out.

If the resurrection of Jesus were a myth, how could it start within walking distance of the place where it was supposed to have happened—where people could go and check out the material evidence for themselves?

If the story of the resurrection were a myth, surely Jerusalem would be the one place in all the world where you would best be able to demolish that myth.

But the historical fact is that the story of the resurrection not only got started, but grew explosively in Jerusalem, and not someplace else. Because the tomb was empty. Nothing else can explain the fact that Christianity was born in Jerusalem.

Fact #4.

The early Christians began to worship on Sunday, not Saturday

Remember, the earliest followers of Jesus were Jewish. They were people of the Sabbath. It was part of their religious and cultural heritage. Worship on the Sabbath was part of their Jewishness.

The followers of Jesus did not suddenly stop being Jews after Easter. Long afterwards, we still read about them going to the Temple to pray, of keeping vows in accordance with the OT Law, of practicing circumcision, and so forth.

But there was one great change in the way they did things. They changed their day of worship from the seventh to the first. Sunday became their new Sabbath, not Saturday. That was an enormous change for people who were Jews to make.

Why did they do it? What could possibly have been so important about the first day of the week that they would even think of changing something that they and their fathers and their grandfathers had been observing for thousands of years—something that was an intrinsic part of their racial and cultural identity?

It was because of what happened on that one Sunday almost two thousand years ago. They went to a tomb, expecting to find it occupied, and it was empty. On Easter Sunday, Jesus met them—in a glorified, physical body, victorious over death, not as some ghostlike spirit, still the prisoner of death—and that changed everything.

So what do you do with an empty tomb? The historical evidence for the empty tomb is incredibly strong. Many skeptics have set about to disprove it, only to become convinced of its truth in the process.

But evidence alone cannot change your life. There’s an old saying that goes “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” Because your will is the key. You cannot be convinced of something if you have already made up your mind not to believe it.

You see, there is a very personal dimension to this matter of the empty tomb.

If Jesus did rise from the dead, it means that he must have been who he said he was: God in human form. And if Jesus is God in human form, then there must be a reason why he came here to earth.

And if you understand the reason he gave for his coming—to redeem us from our sin—then that has some pretty striking personal implications.

It means that you’re lost in sin without him, and the only way to get “found” is to put your trust in him to save you. It means that you must turn your destiny over to him; to let him take control of your life.

And that is always where your will steps in and says to your intellect: “Hold on, now. Let’s not be hasty here! Sure, it seems like a pretty convincing case that Jesus rose from the dead. But if he did, then the only reasonable thing to do is to become a follower of him. And you know what that means—no more doing things MY way.”

“So maybe we’d better just ignore the empty tomb. Oh sure, I suppose that we can come to church on Easter Sunday morning and sing the resurrection songs. Not much harm in doing that.

“But for the rest of the year, let’s keep the empty tomb safely tucked away in the pages of the Bible. Jesus, you’re a nice guy and everything, and it sure seems like you did rise from the dead, but I’ll run my own life, thank you very much.’”

Is that where you’re at today? Or are you ready to be a follower of the only one in history whose tomb is empty?