The Greatest Story ever told . . .

 

READ Mark 13–16

Mark writes concisely. He leaves the other gospel writers and our imagination to add details. I’m told that at least one movie portrayed the events of these chapters in vivid scenes. I’m glad I didn’t see them. It is better to let the Holy Spirit feed me what He wants me to visualize. Today, it is the suffering, not only the physical which I can scarcely imagine, but the anguish that Jesus experienced during all of it.

Jesus warned His disciples, but they didn’t get it. His enemies wanted to kill Him yet He was innocent of any wrong-doing. A woman “did what she could” and anointed Him for His death; she ‘got it’ but they criticized her for it.

He was betrayed by one of His followers. He told them they would deny Him and they denied that they would do it, but they did. Even in His darkest hour of prayer, they fell asleep, and one of them led His enemies to that sacred place of His yielded prayer and had Him arrested.

The trial was a travesty of justice. Pilate knew better, but his position was more important than doing the right thing. The soldiers mocked Jesus, made fun of the One who created them and gave them each breath to live. He was nailed to a cross. He did control His dying — “He breathed his last” — this One who gives life and breath to everyone. A centurion saw it and declared, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” Life itself died.

They put Him in a tomb, a cave-like dark place with a large stone rolled in front of its opening — to keep people out or to keep Jesus in? The stone was not enough, nor the tomb, nor the spear in His side. This God-man had the power to give up life and also had the power to breathe again.

My heart doctor agrees that there are mysteries that cannot be explained, like the fact that a transplanted, inert heart placed in a human body and rightly hooked up will start beating all by itself. Such is the power of life, of the Lord God who is live, of Jesus who is God and who came to life from being dead and alone in a dark tomb.

I sat and cried reading this again, and marveled. This is the One that I worship, that I owe my life to, not just the life that came at conception, and showed itself at that first cry when I was born, but the life that I now have as a reborn child of God, a life that will never die. Like Jesus, the body will go into a tomb, but it will not stay dead. Eternal life cannot be destroyed. Jesus proved it.

The women came, oblivious. They intended to anoint His body, but He was not there. The angel said, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” (Mark 16:6–7)

What joy, what wonder. He had to appear to them or they would have left with unbelief and only their mourning. He met two on a road, “and beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” (Luke 24:27) After that, He appeared several times, to Cephas, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred brothers at one time. (see 1 Corinthians 15:5–6) Their surprise reveals that this was not a deluded wishful thinking. Their lives were changed. History was changed.

Mark ends with a section that some Bibles note did not appear in some of the earliest manuscripts. Even so, it describes what other Scriptures verify. Jesus told the eleven what He tells all who have faith in Him: we must go into the world and proclaim the gospel to all creation. “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” Believers will be accompanied with evidence, and the last two verses affirm this is true:

So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by accompanying signs. (Mark 16:19–20)

This is the bottom line: tell others what Jesus did and does. He will confirm it to those who hear. It may not be received by some yet history declares that this God-man changed the world, and my life, by dying when we should have been the recipients of God’s wrath and making His eternal life available to all who believe.