Big Idea: Jesus is given a respectful burial, but two days later the tomb is empty, and angels say that Jesus is alive.

Understanding the Text

This is the point at which the whole story turns around. The apparently inexorable process of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution has now run its course, but that is not to be the end. Earlier in the Gospel we heard Jesus’s predictions of resurrection “on the third day” (9:22; 18:33), but these seem to have barely registered with the disciples, who are taken by surprise both in this section, by the discovery of the empty tomb and the angels’ message, and in the next sections, by meetings with the risen Jesus.

There are well-known differences between the ways the four evangelists relate the discovery of the empty tomb (and still more in their sel…