Luke 24:1–12

Find a quiet place, alone and apart from distractions. Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace. Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing or cant the Jesus Prayer. Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself. Slowly and carefully read the passages of Scripture.

1.         All four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John relate the resurrection of Jesus on “the third day,” the first day being Friday, the second Saturday, and the third Sunday, which is why Christians, after some period, began gathering together for worship on Sundays.

2.         A number of women set out to anoint the body of Jesus, and this done traditionally, only to find that the body of Jesus was not in the tomb. Two men, in Matthew it is one angel, in Mark one man, in John two angels (likely two angels who looked like human men and only one spoke), told them that Jesus had risen, and they reminded them that Jesus had spoken of this earlier, actually on three different occasions.      

3.         The women thereupon returned to where the eleven apostles were staying to report what had happened, but these called disciples of Jesus did not believe the report of the women.

4.         Peter, however, headed for the tomb (in John’s Gospel we find young John went with him), and when Peter looked into the tomb, he only saw the linen cloths that Jesus had been wrapped in lying there; there was no body.

5.         Peter thereupon “went home.”

6.         The linen cloth that had ‘wrapped’ Jesus’ body was done by Josephus of Arimathea, a secret disciple of Jesus and a member of the Council of the Seventy, the Sanhedrin. Is the Shroud of Turin, discovered in the 1300s, and today in a cathedral in the Italian city of Turin, is that the linen cloth Joseph used to wrap Jesus’ body? I think so.