[Mark 16:1-8] 2026.4.5 The Dawn Life in the Risen Christ
The Dawn Life in the Risen Christ
Mark 16:1-8
In the risen Christ, we see the death of death and the dawn of life
1. Living in the shadow of death
2. Shocked by cracks in the shadow
3. Living under the light of the dawn
Christ is Risen. He’s risen indeed!
It’s so good to see everyone at Church this morning.
A special welcome to my cousin Steve and his wife Joanne who’s come to Sydney to visit us this weekend.
Steve and I were talking about travelling and how it’s been made so much easier by the mobile phone.
I still remember going to Japan many years ago, travelling to the lovely countryside of Hakone, without internet access.
We had to use maps, not the app, but paper maps.
I remember that it was dark and foggy as we were going up the mountain, but somehow my wife Jenny knew exactly where the bus stop is, even though she didn’t understand Japanese and had never been there before.
She got us there without the mobile phone.
We probably could still go there using paper maps, but the mobile phone made it a lot easier.
The map app in the phone will show us exactly where we are and tell us how to get there.
It’s so good that now we rely heavily on it.
And so, we need to make sure it’s charged so that we’ll know where we are.
But more than that, we need to keep it charged just in case we get lost and need to call our emergency contact.
We want to make sure we can use our mobile phone to contact our emergency contact in our time of need.
And so, everyone wants to make sure there phone has charge all of the time.
I have a lot of battery chargers, just in case my phone runs out of battery.
But what if you are in danger, and your phone is out of charge?
What will you do then?
What do you turn to in your time of need? What gives you hope in your darkest hour?
Today, on Easter morning, we’ll get to see a glimpse of what God gives us in our darkest hour.
In today’s passage, we’ll see three things:
1. Living in the shadow of death
2. Shocked by cracks in the shadow
3. Living under the light of the dawn
Before we look into the passage, let’s pray,
I’ll be using a prayer from John Calvin, “Grant, Almighty God, that as you shine on us by your Word, we may not be blind at midday, nor willfully seek darkness, and thus lull our minds asleep; but may we be roused daily by your words, and may we stir up ourselves more and more to fear your name and thus present ourselves and all our pursuits as a sacrifice to you, that you may peaceably rule, and perpetually dwell in us, until you gather us to your celestial habitation, where there is reserved for us eternal rest and glory, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
1. Preparing to meet a dead Jesus
Please open up your Bible with me to Mark 16, beginning from verse 1, “When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they could go and anoint him.”
These three women witnessed the death of Jesus from a distance.
And now, they’re going to the burial place of Jesus to anoint him.
What’s fascinating is that it was the women prepare to anoint Jesus, but the men, the disciples were nowhere to be seen.
The last time saw Peter, one of Jesus’ closest friend and disciple, was at the end of Mark chapter 14, when he denied Jesus not once, but three times.
These disciples were nowhere to be seen, but the women have come to pay their last respects to Jesus.
These women had accepted the harsh reality of life.
They had seen people lived and died, and while tragic, Jesus was just another one, or so they thought.
For them death was a sad and inevitable part of life.
That’s the same for us too, isn’t it?
When we turn on to watch the news, or read the news, we often see deaths that came about because of wars, or of traffic accidents, or of sickness.
All deaths are sad and even shocking, but sadly, over time, we grow numb to the tragedy and the sadness of death.
We grow to accept that this is a norm of life.
Bad things can happen to people.
Sickness can happen to people.
And all people die.
That’s how these women here in the Gospel of Mark understood the death of Jesus.
And so, they got up very early in the morning and got to the tomb at sunrise,
at the start of a new day, on the first day of the week.
After Jesus died, they placed his body in a tomb.
At the entrance of Jesus’ tomb was a large stone.
It was placed there to keep thieves and wild animals from entering in as well as to prevent the bad smell of death from escaping.
When the women got there, they asked one another, “Who will roll the stone from the entrance to the tomb for us?”
The stone was very heavy and the women would not be able to roll the stone away.
They weren’t strong enough; they felt powerless.
Though they were powerless, at least they weren’t dead, like Jesus!
Jesus was dead, powerless to move the stone, powerless to do anything, or so they thought.
This large stone is a such a powerful imagery of our powerlessness in the face of death.
We can’t do anything to get rid of it.
Rather than seeing the large stone from the inside, let’s see it from the inside.
Let’s imagine that we were the ones inside the tomb.
Inside the tomb is certain death and outside the tomb is life.
But in between, there is this large stone that stops our escape from death to life.
Try as we might, we just can’t get rid of death.
We can’t get rid of death by our knowledge or science, for even the smartest scientist dies.
We can’t get rid of death by our money, nor can we get rid of death by our power.
Many rich and powerful people have tried and failed.
How do we respond to our powerlessness to the remove death?
One response is to keep trying.
Some people believe that if only they had more time, more money, more knowledge, then they’ll be able to make death disappear.
But it can’t be done; we cannot get rid of death.
We are powerless when it comes to death.
Another response is that we give up.
There are people give up trying, because they understood that the stone of death is too heavy.
And so, they live life of hopelessness.
They ask, “Why keep living, why should we strive to live, if we’re just postponing death?
What’s the point of suffering in life when it all ends in death?
There’s a verse in Ecclesiastes 6:12 that describes this well:
Ecc 6:12, “For who knows what is good for anyone in life, in the few days of his futile life that he spends like a shadow? Who can tell anyone what will happen after him under the sun?”
The shadow of death hangs over everyone who is living.
We don’t know when we will die, but we do know this for certain: Every day is one day closer to your death.
It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old, the same truth applies to everyone: You are one day closer to your death.
It might be T-1,000,000, or T-1, you might have decades to go or just a few days to go.
The same truth applies, we’re one day closer to our deaths today than we were yesterday.
Late last year, between November and early December, I had to either attend or look after four funerals.
Even as someone who attended more funerals than most people because of my position as the Church minister, this is still more than usual.
There’s sadness at funerals but generally speaking, people accept his as part of reality.
Some family members knew that the time of their loved one’s death is approaching; others were shocked at the sudden death of their loved ones.
Whether they were ready or not, they had to accept the death of their loved ones.
Whether we’re ready or not, we all live in the shadow of death.
Most us of respond by pushing against it, raging against it, or while others respond by giving up.
But there’s a third way, a new way, a better way.
The third way says, “We can’t move the stone of death, but there is someone who has moved the stone for us.”
2. Shocked to hear about a risen Jesus
Look with me at verse 4-5, “Looking up, they noticed that the stone—which was very large—had been rolled away.
5 When they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side; they were alarmed.”
As the women came to the tomb, they were shocked to see a messenger of the God, sitting on the right side of an empty tomb!
They were shocked because the messenger of God is basically saying that there are now cracks in the shadow of death.
It’s a little like this:
One hundred years ago, in the year 1926, if you had pneumonia, there’s a 18% chance of you dying in the next few weeks.
If you’re pregnant in the same year, there’s a 10% chance that you will die while giving birth because of bacterial infection.
Death by bacterial inspection was part of every day life.
But that’s not the case now.
People do recover from pneumonia
So what changed?
On September 3, 1928, Dr Alexander Fleming came back from a holiday to sort through petri dishes containing colonies of Staphylococcus, the bacteria that cause boils and sore throats and abscesses.
But he noticed something strange in one dish.
He saw mould in the dish that got in there by accident.
What was strange about the dish was that the part around the mould was clear of the bacteria.
From there, he extracted what eventually came to be know as penicillin, the first antibiotics manufactured to treat bacterial infections.
He was studying a bacteria which caused millions of deaths, but was shocked to see that death by bacteria could be stopped by mould.
He saw a crack in the shadow of death caused by the bacteria.
And all this happened by accident!
When the women arrived at Jesus’ tomb, they saw that the stone at the entrance of the tomb had been rolled away.
What they saw was really a crack in the shadow of death.
This is just a crack in the deaths caused by bacteria.
This was a crack in the death of all causes.
This was a permanent crack in the shadow of death itself.
On the right side of the tomb sat a young man.
This young man dressed in white robe was an angel of God.
When they saw him, they were alarmed; they were frightened.
They were expecting to see a dead body but they were speaking with an angel instead!
The word angel literally means a messenger.
The angel in the passage is God’s messenger, with a message from God for the women: Don’t be alarmed.
He then tells them a summary of what happened to Jesus in verse 6, “Don’t be alarmed,” he told them. “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they put him.”
Jesus was crucified and buried but he’s not here. He’s risen!
They came to the tomb to look for a dead man but he is risen!
They were preoccupied with death; they were here to see Jesus one last time.
But Jesus was not here, he’s risen!
James Edwards in his commentary sums it up well, “the living are consumed with death, but the Crucified One is consumed with life.”
One of my favourite books is called, “The Death of death in the death of Christ” by John Owen.
What an incredible title! The death of death in the death of Christ.
In the death of Christ, Christ killed death, Christ smashed death, Christ crushed death.
This is the message we see throughout the Bible:
“God raised him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by death.” Acts 2:24.
Death could not hold him down.
The stone cannot block Jesus.
When Jesus raised up from the grave, he threw the large stone of death away.
And again, in 1 Corinthians 15:24, “When this corruptible body is clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will take place:
Death has been swallowed up in victory.
55 Where, death, is your victory?
Where, death, is your sting?
Death’s been swallowed up.
On Good Friday, Jerry reminded us that light can’t escape from a black hole.
We who live in the shadow of death can’t escape from the black of death even if we try.
When Jesus died on the cross, it was as if Jesus, the Light of the world, allowed himself to be swallowed up by death.
However, in his death and resurrection, Jesus swallowed up death.
And so Jesus says in John 11:25-26, ““I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me, even if he dies, will live. 26 Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Jesus doesn’t just claim to know how to defeat death; Jesus claimed to be the Resurrection and the Life that swallowed up death.
That is, Jesus is bigger than even death itself.
He is the Resurrection and the Life.
Jesus was placed in the tomb as a dead man but he came out as the risen man, the man who will never die again.
It was dark when Jesus’ body entered the tomb but when Jesus came out it was the beginning of a new day.
A new dawn, the dawn of life that is truly life, has finally begun.
When I was looking after or attending the four funerals at the end of last year, there was an obvious difference between the funerals of those who had put their trust in Jesus in their lifetimes and those who didn’t.
Those who had put their trust in Jesus during their lifetime had friends and families who were sure that they were with Jesus and who were certain that they would see their each other again.
There would be sadness at the funerals, but there’s a certain hope.
But those who had not put their trust in Jesus during their lifetime had friends and families who loved them, but they would often only go as far as saying that their memories would live on.
There’s sadness but also a lostness to what happens beyond the death of their loved ones.
This is a lostness that comes with living in the shadow of death.
But Jesus has risen to show that he had smashed death.
The Christian message shows that there are now cracks in the shadow of death.
Death is defeated in the death of Christ - that’s the heart of the Christian message.
3. Living under the light of the dawn
For those of us who have put our trust in Jesus, we no longer live in the shadow of death, but we live under the light of dawn of life.
We live under the light of the risen life of Christ.
It’s a little like the words to the first verse of this song:
“From the day, we arrive on the planet, blinking step into the sun.”
Does anyone know the song?
Yes, it’s “The Circle of Life” from the movie the Lion King
For Christians, it’s not coming into the circle of life, but coming to the dawn of a new life, a life that’s not a circle that takes us back to where we began.
It’s a life where death is not the end.
It’s a life where life begins and continues in Jesus Christ.
It’s the promise of an eternal life – an endless life.
For those who believe that Jesus had died and rose from the dead, those who had put their trust in Jesus, it’s a life that begins now.
What does living under the dawn of life look like?
Here are four clues that we see in today’s passge:
1. There will be a change in the way you see the world.
The angel said that You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth.
Nazareth was not a famous town.
It’s a little town where you don’t expect anything good to come from.
In other words it’s a town for losers, not winners.
The world saw Jesus as someone insignificant, but we don’t see things form the world’s point of view any more.
The angel didn’t say you are looking for Jesus, the Glorious Son of God, the Saviour of the world.
He certainly could’ve, but instead, he said that this Jesus, the Son of God, came from the humble town of Nazareth.
And so, don’t look down on the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, for that’s how the world see them.
God uses the humble to shame the strong.
After all, the world had got it really wrong; they crucified Jesus.
As people living in the dawn of life, see things from God’s perspective.
2. Jesus is not dead and so Christians don’t go to memorial to remember Jesus.
World leaders have memorials so that people can remember what they’ve done.
But not so Jesus; he’s risen and He’s alive.
He’s physically resurrected from the dead.
Those of us who live under him don’t live as if we’re living under the teaching of a dead teacher.
We live as someone who’s under a living teacher, a living Lord, who is here, right now, in our congregation here present.
For Jesus has said, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them”
Where two or three Christians are gathered, Jesus is there.
At the tomb, the women were told that Jesus was not here, he’s risen.
At the Church, we proclaim that Jesus is here, with his people, for he’s risen.
And so, don’t look down on our size, don’t take this time we gathter together for granted, for the living, risen Lord Jesus is here.
3) The angels told the women to “Go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you to Galilee; you will see him there just as he told you.’ (Mark 16:7)
These disciples should’ve been there at the tomb but they were afraid.
However, instead of rejecting them because of their cowardice, Jesus invited them to meet with him.
Jesus invited them to restore their relationship with him.
To live under the dawn of the life of Risen Christ means living out and practising forgiveness and reconciliation.
It means forgiving the wrongs that’s been done to you and wanting to reconcile, because Jesus has died, rose from the dead to forgive you your sins. If Jesus has forgiven us, how can we not forgive others?
This is one of the clearest sign of the true Christian, this is one of the clearest sign of the true Church: there is forgiveness and reconciliation.
The world hates and go to war with one another.
The world hates and refuse to forgive.
That’s the sign of death.
But a clear sign of life, the clear sign of hope, is forgiving the enemy, just as Christ has forgiven us.
If you want to see a Church living in the dawn of the light of life, look for signs of forgiveness and reconciliation in its members.
4) Finally, the women were command to proclaim the good news.
That’s why a Church who lives in the light of the the dawn of life can’t keep our mouths shut about Jesus.
We mustn’t keep our mouths shut about Jesus.
We’ve been commanded to speak. To not speak, to not proclaim the gospel is disobedience.
To stay silent about the dawn is to give in to the darkness.
However, something strange happens in the final verse:
“They went out and ran from the tomb, because trembling and astonishment overwhelmed them. And they said nothing to anyone, since they were afraid.”
There was a sudden and abrupt stop to the gospel of Mark.
It’s like playing an imperfect cadence at the end of a song.
It doesn’t feel finished, does it?
Why are the women still afraid?
Why did they keep silent?
If you truly understood the significance of what happened with what the angel had said about Jesus, you would be afraid.
We’re so accustomed to darkness that light scares us.
To really believe that Jesus has rose from the dead is to challenge everything that that we had thought was the norm in our lives.
It’s a challenge to all of our values.
It’s a challenge to all our beliefs.
It’s a challenge to what we think would be what we need in our darkest hour.
We might have grown up believing that what we need in our darkest hour, the one thing that we can rely on, is our wealth, our friends, our family, our health, ourselves.
But now that Jesus has risen, He’s saying in effect that the one thing you need in your darkest hour is none of these things.
None of these things will save you from your darkest hour.
Jesus says, “I am the Way, I am the Truth, I am the Life. I am the Resurrection and the Life.”
These are big and outrageous claims.
And yet, because he has risen from the dead, we know that it’s true.
Believing Jesus is not a casual decision – it’s a serious decision that will challenge the core of your very being.
If you have understood it correctly, it should be alarming to you, it might even make you afraid.
But the whole reason why we’re hearing this message today, is because someone else, who was also once afraid, had decided that trusting Jesus is far better than anything else in their world.
Someone else had believed that setting their hope in Jesus is the right thing to do and so they obeyed Jesus and shared the message with you, shared this message with me, at great personal cost. ‘
How did they do it? How could they put their trust in Jesus?
How do they see the glimpses of life that made them believe in Jesus?
Well, it’s because someone has moved the stone in their heart away, so that they are no longer living in the shadow of death, but they live in the dawn of the life in Christ.
And that Someone is none other than Jesus Christ himself.
It’s Jesus himself who moves the stone of death in our hearts so that we can see his light.
That’s what he’s done in my life, that’s what he’s done in the life of all of us who profess to trust in Jesus.
That’s what we want to see Jesus do in your life as well.
We would love Jesus to move the stone of death in all of hearts so that we may see and experience and live in the dawn of the life of Christ.
That’s the message of Easter.
I read this from the post of a Christian organisation who announced the sudden death of their leader last year, “He's gone from the place of the dying to the place of the living.”
Friends, we are living in the place of the dying, where death is the air that we breathe, but in Christ, we can looking forward to the place of the living, to live the life that is truly life, as we look forward to an eternal life.
That’s the hope that we have in the Risen Christ. Do you have the same hope?
What gives you hope in your darkest hour?
For those who are in Christ, we can say that in the risen Christ, we see the death of death and the dawn of life
Here’s a picture of the dawn (this) morning.
Do you live in the shadow of death, or under the dawning light of life?
If you had been living in the shadow of death, but now want to live under the dawning light of life in Jesus, you can do so by coming before him in prayer.
In a little while, I’m going to pray a prayer that helps you begin that journey from darkness to dawn.
I’m going to say,
“Dear God, thank you for raising Jesus Christ from the dead. Because Jesus has risen, we don’t have to live under the shadow of death anymore. Please forgive me for chasing after the darkness of sin instead of the light of your truth. Take me from the shadow of death into the light of Jesus Christ. I can’t move the rock of death by myself. Please remove the rock of my unbelief, so that I may follow Jesus. Save me, for I pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
If that’s what you want to say to God, you can say this prayer with me.
I’m going to repeat it again slowly, line by line.
Say it slowly in your heart if that’s what you want to pray to God.
Let’s pray, “Dear God, thank you for raising Jesus Christ from the dead. Because Jesus has risen, we don’t have to live under the shadow of death anymore. Please forgive me for chasing after the darkness of sin instead of the light of your truth. Take me from the shadow of death into the light of Jesus Christ. I can’t move the rock of death by myself. Please remove the rock of my unbelief, so that I may follow Jesus. Save me, for I pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.”