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Luke 24:6-8
‘He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: “The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.” Then they remembered his words.’
The women in Jesus group of disciples are given a prominent role in Luke’s Gospel, and this is particularly true in the accounts of the finding of the empty tomb on Easter morning. The women were present at the crucifixion, and here ‘the women’ take the spices which have been prepared in advance in order to anoint the body of Jesus, in doing so they find the tomb empty and bump into two angels. It is the women who first have faith in the Risen Christ.
An empty tomb is not proof that Christ has risen. Faith is not something which can be proven, and therefore, much to the chagrin of secularists, is not something which can be defended. This raises all kinds of issues and debates, but it is worth noting that faith does not require one to disengage ones intellect; in fact, as we shall see, the opposite is true. Faith is something which is experienced, and so we feel the wounds in Christ’s hands and feet (Luke 24:39), and which makes sense of the world we live in.
In our reading this morning the angels are surprised to see the women approaching the tomb to find the dead body of Jesus (there must be some irony here - they can’t be that surprised otherwise why were they waiting for the women to go to the tomb?). They tell the women that the living is not to be found amongst the dead, and go on to explain how Jesus had described to them in Galilee the events that would unfold leading up to and beyond Jesus’ death.
The presumption that the women would know this information shows that they were in the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. This is also demonstrated in Luke’s Gospel by their natural reaction to share the news with their fellow, male disciples. They do not feel obliged to go and share, they chose to.
What makes the women so eager to go and share? They have discovered the tomb of Jesus empty, they have been preached to by heavenly messengers, and they have recalled what Jesus said to them before his crucifixion. Their faith consists of what they see and know, miraculous events, and what seems right to their intellect. The conversations they had with Jesus make sense now.
