The empty tomb and trust
Canon Professor Michael Hull writes:
Each of the four Gospels gives an account of Easter Day and each presents us with witnesses to an empty tomb (Matt. 28.6; Mk 16.6; Lk 24.3; Jn 20.2, 13). Each of the Gospels, to be sure, and many other books of the New Testament, will recount witnesses to the Risen Lord and his Ascension. Most disciples come to believe not along the lines of a doubting Thomas (Jn 20.24–29), but because they believe Jesus’ take on himself, as Luke writes, ‘And they remembered his words…’ (24.8), specifically Jesus’ own prophecy about being flogged and murdered—and then rising on the third day (Lk. 18.33 (Cf. Matt. 20.19; Mk 10.34; Lk. 24.7; 1 Cor.15.4 inter alia).
We too profit from Jesus’ words. The Holy Scriptures not only give us God’s words and deeds in their historical contexts, but they also witness God’s plan of salvation to be fulfilled at Jesus’ second coming with the end of time as we know it. The first disciples come to see the empty tomb as an inversion, not a reversal, because Jesus has neither cheated death nor escaped death temporarily as did Lazarus (Jn 11.1–43); instead, Jesus has conquered death: ‘I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades’ (Rev. 1.18). The empty tomb signposts Jesus’ triumph over sin and death. The consequences for his disciples are, if you will pardon the pun, a matter of life and death. ‘If there is no resurrection of the dead,’ says St Paul, ‘then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain’ (1 Cor. 15.13-14).
Easter’s empty tomb should turn us again and again, back to Jesus’ words, that is, to the entirety of God’s supernatural revelation in the Holy Scriptures. Baptism, death to sin, is not and end, but a beginning: it is the beginning of our true lives, of our lives in Christ, that has consequences in earth and heaven. As Jesus’ death was not an end, but a beginning, so too our lives in him are not deaths but beginnings, for one day our tombs shall also be empty even though we will fill them for a wee while. However, between our Baptisms and our empty tombs we must follow Jesus. We do so best by, again, remembering his words: ‘Take up your cross and follow me’ (Matt. 16.24; Mk 8.34; Lk. 9.23) whereby in our different walks of life and circumstances we embrace travail and adversity to witness to Jesus by proclaiming the Gospel in thought, word and deed.
If Easter Day is a day to remember his words, it is a day to begin serious study and conformity to the Holy Scriptures. We find ourselves, in 2025, in violent and tumultuous times. For example, the situations in Gaza and Ukraine beggar belief in terms of their violence and disregard for human life; or again, the contention and duplicity in Holyrood and Westminster make us despair of human nature. Like the Psalmist (20.7) and Isaiah (30.2–5), we trust in the name of the Lord. We cannot rely on unaided human strength or wisdom to get us out of the holes we dug ourselves. Justice and righteousness on the earth will be ours to the extent we trust in God (Jer. 9:23–24).
The early church, and, indeed, the church throughout the ages is predicated on trusting in the words of Jesus to interpret everything. There is no other way to make sense of ourselves. Likewise, there is no way to make sense of the vicissitudes of our earthly lives outwith Jesus’s words. There were no witnesses to his resurrection, to the event itself of his passing from death to life because the fallen humanity is intolerant of it, incredulous. We are not fit, not able this side of heaven to grasp it on the first bounce. Our forebears in the Faith, though, are our heroes and heroines. Though at first perplexed, knowing not what to think, they seized on St Peter’s words as spoken when droves of disciples abandoned Jesus earlier in his ministry: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (Jn 6.68).
To trust in God via Jesus’ empty tomb is to know that sin and death are not the ultimate words in any sense. There is irony in the Gospels’ accounts of Easter Day in the inversion, namely, the last place to look for Jesus is in the graveyard, as one among the dead, when in fact, ‘… he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy’ (Col. 1.18).
The Reverend Canon Professor Michael Hull has been an Assistant Priest at St Vincent’s since 2015. He is also the Principal and Pantonian Professor of Divinity of the Scottish Episcopal Institute.
