MPV Commentary

Mary's Visit to the Sepulchre, and Return to It with Peter

1-2. The first day of the week Mary Magdalene came early to the tomb while it was still dark. (See on Mr 16:1-4; and Mt 28:1, 2).

She ran to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre." This dear disciple's dead Lord was still his "Lord" in death.

3-10. Therefore, Peter went forth with that other disciple, and they came first to the tomb. These particulars have a singular air of artless truth about them. Mary, in her grief, runs to the two apostles who were soon to be closely associated in proclaiming the Saviour's resurrection, and they, followed by Mary, hasten to see with their own eyes. The younger disciple outruns the older; love may have supplied swifter wings. He stoops, he gazes in, but enters not the open sepulchre, held back probably by a reverential fear. The bolder Peter, coming up, goes in at once and is rewarded with bright evidence of what had happened.

6-7. He sees the linen clothes lying there. And the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself. This shows with what grand tranquillity "the Living One" had walked forth from "the dead" (Lu 24:5). The two attendant angels (Joh 20:12) likely did this service for the Rising One.

8. Then went in that other disciple who came first to the sepulchre, and he saw and believed. He probably means that he believed in his Lord's resurrection more immediately and certainly than Peter.

9. For as yet they knew not the scripture that he must rise again from the dead. In other words, they believed in His resurrection at first, not because they were prepared by Scripture to expect it; but facts carried resistless conviction of it to their minds, and furnished a key to the Scripture predictions of it.

11-15. But Mary stood outside the tomb weeping. Brief was the stay of those two men. But Mary, arriving perhaps by another direction after they left, lingers at the spot, weeping for her missing Lord. As she gazes through her tears on the open tomb, she also ventures to stoop down and look into it, when lo! "two angels in white" (as from the world of light) appear to her in a sitting posture.

12. One angel was at the head, and the other at the feet where Jesus' body had lain. They were proclaiming silently the entire charge they had received regarding the body of Christ.

13. Woman, why dost thou weep? You would think the vision too much for a lone woman. But absorbed in the one Object of her affection and pursuit, she speaks out her grief without fear.

14-15. Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. She repeats her very words to Peter and John. On this, she turns herself and sees Jesus standing beside her, but takes Him for the gardener. Clad therefore in some such style He must have been.

16-17. Jesus says unto her, Mary. It is not now the distant, though respectful, "Woman." It is the oft-repeated name, uttered with all the wonted manner, and bringing a rush of unutterable and overpowering associations with it.

She turned herself, and said to him, Rabboni! But that single word of transported recognition was not enough for woman's full heart. Not knowing the change which had passed upon Him, she hastens to express by her action what words failed to clothe; but she is checked.

17. Jesus says unto her, Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father. Old familiarities must now give place to new and more awful yet sweeter approaches; but for these the time has not come yet.

18. But go to my brethren and say to them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God. Jesus had called God habitually His Father, and on one occasion, in His darkest moment, His God. But both are here united, expressing that full-orbed relationship which embraces at once Himself and His redeemed.

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that He had spoken these things unto her. To a woman was this honor given to be the first to see the risen Redeemer, and that woman was not His mother.