Mark 16:1-8 comments: The central tenet of Christianity; the Resurrection

1 ¶  And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

The Sabbath is past. Once Jesus Christ dies there is no Sabbath to keep any longer. Jesus is our Sabbath, our rest. There is no holy day for a Christian any more.

Col ossians 2:16, 17  Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.

In fact, there are no sacred spaces or sacred days in Biblical Christianity except in the Christian’s spiritual heart where the Holy Spirit dwells and in every day where he or she worships the God of the Bible and submits to His will. All attempts to make buildings, rooms, or a specific order of service, or a certain day of the week sacred and possessed of a spiritual power in and of itself are just humanistic attempts to bypass the responsibility to respond to the Spirit of God inside the believer and replace it with a humanistic formula.

The need for holy days and holy places on earth is past until Christ physically and bodily returns to rule from Jerusalem. The Christian is to now honor God in spirit and in truth, not in adherence to ritual and formality that can be faked by any unbelieving so-called Christian.

We don’t ask for the Holy Spirit to come down on the congregation or for God to, “walk among the pews,” because if He’s not already inside each of us we’re lost and the church service is just a club meeting.

2  And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.

Jesus had to have come out before daybreak.

3  And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? 4  And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. 5  And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted. 6  And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

The central focus of Christianity is an empty tomb. He isn’t there. If you don’t believe that you aren’t a Christian. If you don’t believe that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, the physical presence of God, His bodily image, the express image of His person, you are not a Christian. There is no salvation in humanism. To believe that Christ was just one of those great teachers in history is idiotic. If He was not God then He was either a liar or a lunatic and you are as lost as a goose in a horse race still.

7  But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

Peter is singled out to be used as a leader of the early church but right now, also, he is in a backslidden condition. He is separated from the disciples until Christ appears. We are saved saints but we are not truly Christians unless we are walking a disciplined life, walking with Christ and being like Him. Most of us who are saved are just that, but not Christians.

8  And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.

Although, of the 620 Uncial or most ancient block letter manuscripts that contain Mark 618 contain the following verses they are called into doubt in some Bibles. The two that don’t have these verses are the darlings of the Roman Catholic Church and modern day Protestant expositors, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus.  They are corruptions from the 4^th century, most likely prepared by the Emperor Constantine’s’ bootlicker, Eusebius, for his own purposes of creating a Roman based and controlled church. Jerome’s revision of the Old Latin Bible called the Latin Vulgate and all modern versions gave these two abominations preeminence.

There have been many books written that prove the validity of the last twelve verses of Mark, most predominantly “The Last Twelve Verses of Mark” by Dean John Burgon. If your Bible version calls these verses into any question, throw that “Bible” out. It is trash. Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, Ambrose, and Chrysostrom all quote these verses.  Even Jerome’s Vulgate contains these verses even though he gives the two aforementioned codices preeminence elsewhere.