Verse 5. Why seek ye the living among the dead?] This was a common form of speech among the Jews, and seems to be applied to those who were foolishly, impertinently, or absurdly employed. As places of burial were unclean, it was not reasonable to suppose that the living should frequent them; or that if any was missing he was likely to be found in such places.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

5. Why, c.Astonishingquestion! not “the risen,” but “the LivingOne” (compare Re 1:18)and the surprise expressed in it implies an incongruity in Hisbeing there at all, as if, though He might submit to it, “itwas impossible He should be holden of it” (Ac2:24).

Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

And as they were afraid,…. That is, the women were afraid of these angels; these bright appearances and majestic forms, as it was usual for good men and women to be, as appears from the cases of Zacharias, the Virgin Mary, and others:

and bowed down their faces to the earth, through great fear and reverence of these heavenly spirits, and as not being able to bear the lustre of their countenances and garments:

they said unto them, that is, the angels:

why seek ye the living among the dead? intimating, that Christ, though he had been dead, was now living, and not to be sought for in a sepulchre; a way of speaking, much like this, is used in a parable of R. Levi’s, concerning Pharaoh’s not finding the name of God among the gods of the nations, upon searching for it. Moses and Aaron said to Pharaoh,

“thou fool, is it usual for the dead to “seek” them among the living? , “or ever the living among the dead?” our God is living, these thou speakest of are dead i.”

Nor is Christ to be found among dead sinners, or lifeless professors, but among living saints, and among the churches of the living God; nor is life to be found among the dead works of the law, or to be obtained by lifeless performances on the dead letter of the law.

i Shemot Rabba, sect. 5. fol. 95. 3.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

As they were affrighted ( ). Genitive absolute with second aorist middle of , to become. Hence,

when they became affrighted . They had utterly forgotten the prediction of Jesus that he would rise on the third day.

Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament

1) “And as they were afraid,” (emphobon de genomenon auton) “Then they became terrified,” Mary Magdalene and the women with her, Mat 28:5; Mar 16:6.

2) “And bowed down their faces to the earth,” (kai klinouson ta prosopa eis ten gen) “And as they bent their faces to the ground,” in reverence and fear,

3) “They said unto them,” (eipan pros autas) “They (the two men) said directly to them,” the two Divinely sent messengers appearing as men, the younger of which, sitting on the right side of the sepulchre entrance, did the speaking, Mar 16:5-6.

4) “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” (ti zeteite ton zonta meta ton nekron) “Why are you all seeking the living one (Jesus) among the dead ones?” Among dead corpses or bodies. For the Father hath given Him to have life in Himself, and God raised Him u p, Joh 5:26; Joh 10:18; Rev 1:18.

Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary

(5) Why seek ye the living among the dead?Better, as in the margin, Him that liveth. The question was enough to change the whole current of their thoughts. The Lord whom they came to honour as dead was in very deed living, was emphatically He that liveth, alive for evermore (Rev. 1:18). The primary meaning of the words is, of course, limited to this; but like the parallel, let the dead bury their dead (see Note on Mat. 8:22), they suggest manifold applications. It is in vain that we seek Him that liveth in dead works, dead formul, dead or dying institutions. The eternal life that is in Christ is not to be found by looking into the graves of the past in the worlds history, or in those of our individual life. In both cases it is better to rise, as on the stepping-stones of our dead selves, to higher things.

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

‘And as they were afraid and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”’

The appearance of the men was such that the women were afraid, and ‘bowed down their faces’ before the men. This may have been because of the brightness of the light, or simply because they were filled with awe. But the men gently asked them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” Given what follows it was a clear indication that the reason why Jesus’ body was not here was because He was alive, and that that was because He had ‘risen’. The words are a gentle rebuke. The suggestion is that the women should not have been looking for Jesus in the tomb on the third day, for Jesus had told them that by then He would have risen from the dead. The thought is that had they been spiritually aware they would have known.

Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett

Luk 24:5-7. And bowed down their faces These words do not intimate their prostrating themselves before the angels, but a respectful and reverential declining of their heads, and looking downward, that they might not appear to gaze, which is well known to have been forbidden to the Jews upon the sight of a celestial vision. See Exo 19:21. Jdg 13:20.Because the women were exceedinglyafraid when the first angel appeared, he spake to them with themost condescending mildness. See Mat 28:5 but now that their terror was a little abated, and they were come down into the sepulchre, he chid them gently, for seeking the living among the dead. By which we are not to understand their coming down to the sepulchre, in obedience to his invitation; but their having brought spices to the sepulchre with an intention to do their Master an office, which belonged only to the dead; for this is a clear proof of their not entertaining the least thought of his resurrection. Accordingly, he found fault with them also for not believing the things which Jesus had spoken to them in Galilee concerning his rising from the dead on the third day: (see ch. Luk 18:31-33.) or rather for not remembering them, so as to have had some hopes of his revivingagain. Remember how he spake, &c. This familiar manner in which the angel speaks of what passed between them and Jesus in Galilee, seems to intimate, that he had then been present, though invisible, and heard what Jesus said. The hint suggests many agreeable reflections, which the pious reader will dwell upon at pleasure. See the note on Mar 16:7. St. Luke, having no intention to tell which of the angels spake, attributes to them both words which in the nature of the thing could be spoken only by one of them, perhaps the one mentioned by St. Matthew and St. Mark. See on Mat 27:44. Further, as it is the custom of the sacred historians to mention one person or thing only, even in cases where more were concerned, the difficulty arising from St. Luke’s speaking of two angels, and the rest but of one, would have been nothing; because we might have supposed that all the women went into the sepulchre together, as St. Luke tells us; and that when they did not find the body, they dispatched Mary Magdalene immediately into the city with an account of the matter; and that when she was gone, the angels appeared unto the rest, while they were yet in the sepulchre. But as St. Luke affirms, that they had searched the sepulchre, and were in perplexity on account of the body’s being away, before the angels appeared; and as St. Matthew intimates that they were out of the sepulchre when they saw the vision that he speaks of, we are obliged to make the supposition, that the women, after missing the body, came out of the sepulchre, and searched for it up and down the garden; then went a second time, and discovered the angels as they entered; for they were still in perplexity when the heavenly messengers spoke to them, which is all that St.Luke affirms; and as there is nothing in his narration forbidding us to make this supposition, so the circumstance taken notice of by St. John, Joh 20:2 that Mary Magdalene told the apostles that they had taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, obliges us to make it: for if, when she entered into the sepulchre with her companions, the angel had appeared to them, and told them, that Jesus was risen, she could not have spoken in this manner to the apostles. St. Luke indeed joins the appearance of the two angels with the account which he gives of the perplexity of the women, occasioned by their not finding the body; because he did not judge it worth while to distinguish the appearance of the one angel while the women were onthe top of the stairs, from the appearance of both the angels after they were come down, as they happened in close succession. St. Matthew and St. Mark have supplied this defect, by informingus, that immediately upon their entering, the women saw an angel, who told them that Jesus was risen, and desired them to come down, and see the place where the Lord lay. Instead of Why seek ye the living among the dead, Luk 24:5. Dr. Heylin reads, Why seek ye, among the dead, Him, who is alive?

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

5 And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

Ver. 5. See Mat 28:5-6 .

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

5. ] , simply the living, Him who liveth, as addressed to the women; but Olshausen’s view of a deeper meaning in the words (Bibl. Com. ii. 47) should be borne in mind; , Orig [117] in Joan. tom. ii. 11, vol. iv. p. 71.

[117] Origen, b. 185, d. 254

Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament

Luk 24:5 . , fear-stricken, from , chiefly in late writers, for . Vide Hermann, ad Viger. , p. 607. , the living one, simply pointing to the fact that Jesus was risen: no longer among the dead. , among the dead. The use of in the sense of among, with the genitive, is common in Greek authors, as in Pindar’s line ( Pytkia , v., 127): . Wolf mentions certain scholars who suggested that . should be rendered “with the things for the dead,” i.e. , the spices and mortuaria . But of this sense no example has been cited.

Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson

Luke

THE FIRST EASTER SUNRISE

THE LIVING DEAD

Luk 24:5 – Luk 24:6 .

We can never understand the utter desolation of the days that lay betwixt Christ’s Death and His Resurrection. Our faith rests on centuries. We know that that grave was not even an interruption to the progress of His work, but was the straight road to His triumph and His glory. We know that it was the completion of the work of which the raising of the widow’s son and of Lazarus were but the beginnings. But these disciples did not know that. To them the inferior miracles by which He had redeemed others from the power of the grave, must have made His own captivity to it all the more stunning; and the thought which such miracles ending so must have left upon them, must have been something like, ‘He saved others; Himself He cannot save.’ And therefore we can never think ourselves fully back to that burst of strange sudden thankfulness with which these weeping Marys found those two calm angel forms sitting with folded wings, like the Cherubim over the Mercy-seat, but overshadowing a better propitiation, and heard the words of my text, ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.’

But yet, although the words before us, in the full depth and preciousness of their meaning, of course could only be once fulfilled, we may not only gather from them thoughts concerning that one death and resurrection, but we may likewise apply them, in a very permissible modification of meaning, to the present condition of all who have departed in His faith and fear; since for us, too, it is true that, whenever we go to an open grave, sorrowing for those whom we love, or oppressed with the burden of mortality in any shape, if our eyes are anointed, we can see there sitting the quiet angel forms; and if our ears be purged from the noise of earth, we can hear them saying to us, in regard to all that have gone away, ‘Why seek ye the living in these graves? They are not here; they are risen, as He said.’ The thoughts are very old, brethren. God be thanked that they are old! Perhaps to some of you they may come now with new power, because they come with new application to your own present condition. Perhaps to some of you they may sound very weak, and ‘words weaker than your grief will make grief more’;-but such as they are, let us look at them for a moment or two together now.

The first thought, then, that these words of the angel messengers, and the scene in which we find them, suggest, is this-The dead are the living.

Language, which is more accustomed and adapted to express the appearances than the realities of things, leads us astray very much when we use the phrase ‘the dead’ as if it expressed the continuance of the condition into which men pass in the act of dissolution. It misleads us no less, when we use it as if it expressed in itself the whole truth even as to that act of dissolution. ‘The dead’ and ‘the living’ are not names of two classes which exclude each other. Much rather, there are none who are dead . The dead are the living who have died. Whilst they were dying they lived, and after they were dead they lived more fully. All live unto God. ‘God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.’ Oh, how solemnly sometimes that thought comes up before us, that all those past generations which have stormed across this earth of ours, and then have fallen into still forgetfulness, live yet. Somewhere at this very instant, they now verily are ! We say, ‘They were , they have been’. There are no have beens! Life is life for ever. To be is eternal being. Every man that has died is at this instant in the full possession of all his faculties, in the intensest exercise of all his capacities, standing somewhere in God’s great universe, ringed with the sense of God’s presence, and feeling in every fibre of his being that life, which comes after death, is not less real, but more real, not less great, but more great, not less full or intense, but more full and intense, than the mingled life which, lived here on earth, was a centre of life surrounded with a crust and circumference of mortality. The dead are the living. They lived whilst they died; and after they die, they live on for ever.

Such a conviction has as a matter of fact been firmly grasped as an unquestionable truth and a familiar operative belief only within the sphere of the Christian revelation. From the natural point of view the whole region of the dead is ‘a land of darkness, without any order, where the light is as darkness.’ The usual sources of human certainty fail us here. Reason is only able to stammer a peradventure. Experience and consciousness are silent. ‘The simple senses’ can only say that it looks as if Death were an end, the final Omega. Testimony there is none from any pale lips that have come back to unfold the secrets of the prison-house.

The history of Christ’s Death and Resurrection, His dying words ‘ This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,’ the full identity of being with which He rose from the grave, the manhood changed and yet the same, the intercourse of the forty days before His ascension, which showed the continuance of all the old love ‘stronger than death,’ and was in all essential points like His former intercourse with His disciples, though changed in form and introductory to the times when they should see Him no more in the flesh-these teach us, not as a peradventure, nor as a dim hope, nor as a strong foreboding which may be in its nature prophetic, but as a certainty based upon a historical fact, that Death’s empire is partial in its range and transitory in its duration. But, after we are convinced of that, we can look again with new eyes even on the external accompaniments of death, and see that sense is too hasty in its conclusion that death is the final end. There is no reason from what we see passing before our eyes then to believe, that it, with all its pitifulness and all its pain, has any power at all upon the soul. True, the spirit gathers itself into itself, and, poising itself for its flight, becomes oblivious of what is passing round about it. True, the tenant that is about to depart from the house in which he has dwelt so long, closes the windows before he goes. But what is there in the cessation of the power of communication with an outer world-what is there in the fact that you clasp the nerveless hand, and it returns no pressure; that you whisper gentle words that you think might kindle a soul under the dull, cold ribs of death itself, and get no answer-that you look with weeping gaze to catch the response of affection from out of the poor filmy, closing, tearless eyes there, and look in vain-what is there in all that to lead to the conviction that the spirit is participant of that impotence and silence? Is not the soul only self-centring itself, retiring from, the outposts, but not touched in the citadel? Is it not only that as the long sleep of life begins to end, and the waking eye of the soul begins to open itself on realities, the sights and sounds of the dream begin to pass away? Is it not but that the man, in dying, begins to be what he fully is when he is dead, ‘dead unto sin,’ dead unto the world, that he may ‘live unto God’ that he may live with God, that he may live really? And so we can look upon that ending of life, and say, ‘It is a very small thing; it only cuts off the fringes of my life, it does not touch me at all’ It only plays round about the husk, and does not get at the core. It only strips off the circumferential mortality, but the soul rises up untouched by it, and shakes the bands of death from off its immortal arms, and flutters the stain of death from off its budding wings, and rises fuller of life because of death , and mightier in its vitality in the very act of submitting the body to the law, ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’

Touching but a part of the being, and touching that but for a moment, death is no state, it is an act. It is not a condition, it is a transition. Men speak about life as ‘a narrow neck of land, betwixt two unbounded seas’: they had better speak about death as that. It is an isthmus, narrow and almost impalpable, on which, for one brief instant, the soul poises itself; whilst behind it there lies the inland lake of past being, and before it the shoreless ocean of future life, all lighted with the glory of God, and making music as it breaks even upon these dark, rough rocks. Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side. We roll the stone to its mouth and come away, thinking that we have left them there till the Resurrection. But when the outer access to earth is fast closed, the inner portal that opens on heaven is set wide, and God says to His child, ‘Come, enter into thy chambers and shut thy doors about thee . . . until the indignation be overpast!’ Death is a superficial thing, and a transitory thing-a darkness that is caused by the light, and a darkness that ends in the light-a trifle, if you measure it by duration; a trifle if you measure it by depth. The death of the mortal is the emancipation and the life of the immortal. Then, brethren, we may go with the words of my text, and look upon every green hillock below which any that are dear to us are lying, and say to ourselves, ‘Not here -God be thanked, no-not here: living, and not dead; yonder , with the Master!’ Oh, we think far too much of the grave, and far too little of the throne and the glory! We are far too much the creatures of sense; and the accompaniments of dissolution and departure fill up our hearts and our eyes. Think them all away, believe them all away, love them all away. Stand in the light of Christ’s life, and Christ’s death, and Christ’s rising, till you feel, ‘Thou art a shadow, not a substance-no real thing at all.’ Yes, a shadow; and where a shadow falls there must be sunlight above to cast it. Look up, then, above the shadow Death, above the sin and separation from God, of which it is the shadow! Look up to the unsetting light of the Eternal life on the throne of the universe, and see bathed in it the living dead in Christ!

God has taken them to Himself, and we ought not to think if we would think as the Bible speaks of death as being anything else than the transitory thing which breaks down the brazen walls and lets us into liberty. For, indeed, if you will examine the New Testament on this subject, I think you will be surprised to find how very seldom-scarcely ever-the word ‘death’ is employed to express the mere fact of the dissolution of the connection between soul and body. It is strange, but significant, that the Apostles, and Christ Himself, so rarely use the word to express that which we exclusively mean by it. They use all manner of other expressions as if they felt that the fact remains, but that all that made it death has gone away. In a real sense, and all the more real because the external fact continues, Christ ‘hath abolished death.’ Two men may go down to the grave together: of one this may be the epitaph, ‘He that believeth in Christ shall never die’; and of the other-passing through precisely the same physical experience and appearance, the dissolution of soul and body, we may say,-’There, that is death-death as God sent it, to be the punishment of man’s sin.’ The outward fact remains the same, the whole inner character of it is altered. As to them that believe, though they have passed through the experience of painful separation-slow, languishing departure, or suddenly being caught up in some chariot of fire; not only are they living now, but they never died at all! Have you understood ‘death’ in the full, pregnant sense of the expression, which means not only that shadow , the separation of the body from the soul; but that reality , the separation of the soul from life, because of the separation of the soul from God?

Then, secondly, this text, indeed the whole incident, may set before us the other consideration that since they have died, they live a better life than ours.

I am not going to enter here, at any length, or very particularly, into what seem to me to be the irrefragable scriptural grounds for holding the complete, uninterrupted, and even intensified consciousness of the soul of man, in the interval between death and the Resurrection. ‘Absent from the body, present with the Lord.’ ‘This day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.’ These words, if there were none other, are surely enough; seeing that of all that dark region we know only what it pleases God to tell us in the Bible, and seeing that it does not please Him to give us more than hints and glimpses of any part of it. But putting aside all attempts to elaborate a full doctrine of the intermediate state from the few Scripture expressions that bear on it, I merely allege, in general terms, that the present life of departed saints is fuller and nobler than that which they possessed on earth. They are even now, whatever be the details of their condition, ‘the spirits of just men made perfect.’ As yet the body is not glorified-but the spirits of the perfected righteous are now parts of that lofty society whose head is Christ, whose members are the angels of God, the saints on earth and the equally conscious redeemed who ‘sleep in Jesus.’

In what particulars is their life now higher than it was? First, they have close fellowship with Christ; then, they are separated from this present body of weakness, of dishonour, of corruption; then, they are withdrawn from all the trouble, and toil, and care of this present life; and then, and not least surely, they have death behind them, not having that awful figure standing on their horizon waiting for them to come up with it. These are some of the elements of the life of the sainted dead. What a wondrous advance on the life of earth they reveal if we think of them! They are closer to Christ; they are delivered from the body, as a source of weakness; as a hinderer of knowledge; as a dragger-down of all the aspiring tendencies of the soul; as a source of sin; as a source of pain. They are delivered from all the necessity of labour which is agony, of labour which is disproportionate to strength, of labour which often ends in disappointment, of labour which is wasted so often in mere keeping life in, of labour which at the best is a curse, though it be a merciful curse too. They are delivered from that ‘fear of death’ which, though it be stripped of its sting, is never extinguished in any soul of man that lives; and they can smile at the way in which that narrow and inevitable passage bulked so large before them all their days, and after all, when they came to it, was so slight and small! If these are parts of the life of them that ‘sleep in Jesus,’ if they are fuller of knowledge, fuller of wisdom, fuller of love and capacity of love, and object of love; fuller of holiness, fuller of energy, and yet full of rest from head to foot; if all the hot tumult of earthly experience is stilled and quieted, all the fever beating of this blood of ours for ever at an end; all the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ done with for ever, and if the calm face which we looked last upon, and out of which the lines of sorrow, and pain, and sickness melted away, giving it a nobler nobleness than we had ever seen upon it in life, is only an image of the restful and more blessed being into which they have passed,-if the dead are thus, then ‘Blessed are the dead!’ No wonder that one aspect of that blessedness-the ‘ sleeping in Jesus’-has been the one that the weary have laid hold of at all times; but do not let us forget what lies even in that figure of sleep, or distort it as if it meant to express a less vivid life than that here below. I think we sometimes misunderstand what the Bible means when it speaks about death as a sleep, by taking it to express the idea that that intermediate state is one of a kind of depressed consciousness, and of a less full vitality than the present. Not so. Sleep is rest, that is one reason for the scriptural application of the word to death. Sleep is the cessation of all connection with the external world, that is another reason. As we play with the names of those that are familiar to us, so a loving faith can venture to play, as it were, with the awful name of Him who is King of Terrors, and to minimise it down to that shadow and reflection of itself which we find in the nightly act of going to rest. That may be another reason. But sleep is not unconsciousness; sleep does not touch the spirit. Sleep sets us free from relations to the outer world but the soul works as hard, though in a different way, when we slumber as when we wake. People who know what it is to dream, ought never to fancy that when the Bible talks about death as sleep, it means to say to us that death is unconsciousness. By no means. Strip the man of the disturbance that comes from a fevered body, and he will have a calmer soul. Strip him of the hindrances that come from a body which is like an opaque tower around his spirit, with only a narrow slit here and a narrow door there-five poor senses, with which he can come into connection with an outer universe; and, then surely, the spirit will have wider avenues out to God, and larger powers of reception, because it has lost the earthly tabernacle which, just in proportion as it brought the spirit into connection with the earth to which the tabernacle belongs, severed its connection with the heavens that are above. They who have died in Christ live a fuller and a nobler life, by the very dropping away of the body; a fuller and a nobler life, by the very cessation of care, change, strife and struggle; and, above all, a fuller and nobler life, because they ‘sleep in Jesus ,’ and are gathered into His bosom, and wake with Him yonder beneath the altar, clothed in white robes, and with palms in their hands, ‘waiting the adoption-to wit, the redemption of the body.’ For though death be a progress-a progress to the spiritual existence; though death be a birth to a higher and nobler state; though it be the gate of life, fuller and better than any which we possess; though the present state of the departed in Christ is a state of calm blessedness, a state of perfect communion, a state of rest and satisfaction;-yet it is not the final and perfect state, either.

And, therefore, in the last place, the better life, which the dead in Christ are living now, leads on to a still fuller life when they get back their glorified bodies.

The perfection of man is body, soul, and spirit. That is man, as God made him. The spirit perfected, the soul perfected, without the bodily life, is but part of the whole. For the future world, in all its glory, we have the firm basis laid that it, too, is to be in a real sense a material world, where men once more are to possess bodies as they did before, only bodies through which the spirit shall work conscious of no disproportion, bodies which shall be fit servants and adequate organs of the immortal souls within, bodies which shall never break down, bodies which shall never hem in nor refuse to obey the spirits that dwell in them, but which shall add to their power, and deepen their blessedness, and draw them closer to the God whom they serve and the Christ after the likeness of whose glorious body they are fashioned and conformed. ‘Body, soul, and spirit,’ the old combination which was on earth, is to be the perfect humanity of heaven. The spirits that are perfected, that are living in blessedness, that are dwelling in God, that are sleeping in Christ, at this moment are waiting, stretching out I say, not longing, but expectant hands of faith and hope; for that they would not be unclothed, but clothed upon with their house which is from heaven, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.

We have nothing to say, now and here, about what that bodily condition may be-about the differences and the identities between it and our present earthly house of this tabernacle. Only this we know-reverse all the weakness of flesh, and you get some faint notion of the glorious body. It is sown in corruption, dishonour, and weakness. It is raised in incorruption, glory, and power. Nay, more, it is sown a natural body, fit organ for the animal life or nature, which stands connected with this material universe; ‘it is raised a spiritual body,’ fit servant for the spirit that dwells in it, that works through it, that is perfected in its redemption.

Why, then, seek the living among the dead? ‘God giveth His beloved sleep’; and in that peaceful sleep, realities, not dreams, come round their quiet rest, and fill their conscious spirits and their happy hearts with blessedness and fellowship. And when thus lulled to sleep in the arms of Christ they have rested till it please Him to accomplish the number of His elect, then, in His own time, He will make the eternal morning to dawn, and the hand that kept them in their slumber shall touch them into waking, and shall clothe them when they arise according to the body of His own glory; and they looking into His face, and flashing back its love, its light, its beauty, shall each break forth into singing as the rising light of that unsetting day touches their transfigured and immortal heads, in the triumphant thanksgiving ‘I am satisfied, for I awake in Thy likeness.’

‘Therefore, comfort one another with these words,’ and remember that we are of the day, not of the night; let us not, then, sleep as do others; but let us reckon that Christ hath died for us, that whether we wake on earth or sleep in the grave, or wake in heaven, we may live together with Him!

Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren

as they were, &c. = becoming filled with fear. to. Greek eis. App-104.

unto. Greek. pros. App-104.

the living = the living One.

among. Greek. meta. App-104. Not the same word as in Luk 24:47.

the dead. See App-139.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

5.] , simply the living,-Him who liveth, as addressed to the women; but Olshausens view of a deeper meaning in the words (Bibl. Com. ii. 47) should be borne in mind;- , Orig[117] in Joan. tom. ii. 11, vol. iv. p. 71.

[117] Origen, b. 185, d. 254

Fuente: The Greek Testament

Luk 24:5. ) Him, who not merely has returned to life, but is altogether the living One. [The truth of the resurrection is most surely established.-V. g.]- , with [among] the dead) in the state and position (condition) of the dead.

Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament

they: Luk 1:12, Luk 1:13, Luk 1:29, Dan 8:17, Dan 8:18, Dan 10:7-12, Dan 10:16, Dan 10:19, Mat 28:3-5, Mar 16:5, Mar 16:6, Act 10:3, Act 10:4

the living: or, him that liveth, Heb 7:8, Rev 1:18, Rev 2:8

Reciprocal: Mat 14:26 – they were Mat 17:7 – Arise Mat 28:5 – ye seek Joh 20:15 – whom Act 1:11 – why 1Co 15:4 – he rose

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

THE APPEAL OF EASTER

Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen.

Luk 24:5-6

There is a tone of gentle remonstrance in these words of protest against an unseasonable sadness on the day of earths greatest joy. O ye of little faith, the angels would seem to say, less faith than love, more dutiful than understanding, why come ye to anoint His body on the third day?

I. Love surviving death.And yet, remonstrate as they might, we feel that the angels recognised that these women were seeking our Blessed Lord along a track which eventually would bring them right. Even many sins are forgiven to the much-loving. Their love had survived death; it would rally itself once more on hope, and mount up into a perfected faith. For these holy women had grasped that which is of the essence of true religion. For religion is not a mere pondering over slowly yielding evidence to reach a measure of certainty which shall at least remain until stronger evidence oversets it. Religion is not a mere cord of obligation which binds us to a great and invisible Lord. Religion is a devotion to a Person.

II. Beyond the grave.Why seek ye the living among the dead? All life has reference to that which is the other side of the grave. So the ancestors of their race had gone forth declaring plainly that they sought a better country, that is a heavenly.

III. A life to be lived.We seem to be more and more drifting into the idea that Christianity is a system to be intellectually accepted more than a life to be lived. But if you want to find the risen Christ you must know Him before you know the power of His resurrection. But we indignantly repudiate the idea that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is only the necessary immortality of a great Man, that He is alive as other great ones are alive, in influence, in memory, in spiritual Presence. This is not what we mean by the resurrection, this is not what St. Paul preached at Athens amidst the ill-concealed ridicule of his hearers. This is not what he preached before Festus, who thought him mad for his pains. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave may be accepted or denied, but no self-respecting Christian will stay for one moment to accept a travesty of that glorious doctrine, which is at once an insult to the understanding and a menace to the faith of those who have lived and grown in the strength and nurture of the Catholic faith. The living Christ, that is Whom we seek. And to have found the living Christ is to find Him in death and beyond death. I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of hell and of death.

IV. The living Christ.If you would know Jesus and the power of His resurrection, you must find the living Christ. It is only too true that the ordinary forms of religion, the common setting of our life, may be but the tomb where Christ is not. If Lent has taught us anything it has taught us this, that a good deal of the doubts that vex us, and the disappointments which pull us back, do not come from a weakness in our religion, but from a weakness in ourselves. How can we hope to find joy and peace in believing, if we have never really made proof of our religion? Nothing is so insipid as a religion which is a mere form, and nothing so dangerous as religious professions which are not based on sincerity and truth.

Rev. Canon Newbolt.

Illustration

What evidence would satisfy you as to the truth of our Lords resurrection? If it could be proved to a certainty that without fraud, actual or literary, the grave of Jesus Christ was found empty on the first Easter Day, if you could satisfy yourself without any doubt whatever as to the credibility of the witnesses who saw and asserted this fact, to which St. Paul himself testified with such emphasis in his sermon at Antioch, would you be satisfied? Would not the restless, suspicious mind go off elsewhere on other difficulties and demand other evidence? As a matter of fact, the empty grave was not the cause of the disciples faith. The fact of the empty grave created no belief in the resurrection in the case either of St. Mary Magdalene, or of the other women, or of St. Peter. The Easter faith did not really spring from the empty grave, but from the self-manifestation of the risen Lord.

Luk 24:11

THE APOSTLES AT HOME

And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.

Luk 24:11

Idle tales! It is a contemptuous word, such as a very superior person would use. It seems to say, Hysterical women are apt to see angels. And what they say cannot be true, because it is contrary to the most elementary experience, that a dead body should rise again, and that a body buried under such conditions should escape from the tomb. A risen Lord, an empty tomb! They were both impossible. It was pure nonsense. And yet the women were right, and the absurd and the impossible had to be corrected by fact.

I. What did it meanthe Apostles at home on Easter morning, repudiating the realisation of what they had hoped for and the embodiment of the unseen which they had been led to expect? Nonsenseidle tales; these are ugly words on Easter morning. It meant that, for the moment, they had failed in devotion to our Lords Person. Note well who they were whose simple faith had been rewarded by a wondrous revelation, which a colder reason would seek to repudiate.

II. What did it mean, once morethe Apostles at home on Easter morning?It meant that for the moment their faith had broken down. It was a supreme moment when the tottering child had to take his first step alone, and did not see the tender hand ready stretched out to catch his fall. It was the beginning of their lifes workto walk by faith and not by sight, and they were not ready to begin; and, as we have already seen, the next step was harder, because a longer distance now intervened. It is a mistake to miss rungs out of the ladder of life anywhere; it always means a harder effort afterwards, sometimes a wrench. See what it meant to St. Thomas to lose the whole of Easter Day.

III. There would be many mornings like the dark dawn of that first Easter, when all they would have to act upon would be a treasured precept or a half-forgotten command. A morning would be coming to St. James when he would have to ask himself, Is it worth while to lay down my life in the vindication of a lost cause? when He would have to summon all his faith to mount the throne of martyrdom set on the right hand of his crucified King. A day would be coming to St. Peter when in the still night, with soldiers sleeping each side of him, he would have to act on what he had been told, to prepare for a road which he had never traversed before, and to gird himself for a journey against which flesh and blood rebelled. One by one they would have to learn to live in the minority, to be on the unpopular side, to be suspected and scorned by the religious world, and oppressed by the political rulers of its prosperity. One by one they most of them must go before their time, and endure as seeing Him Who is invisible.

Rev. Canon Newbolt.

Illustration

Let Magdalene come out to-day and say what she has seen. Let the other Mary come forth and say why she went thus early to the grave. Let Joanna tell us why she found a joy in ministering to Christ of her substance so great that she, too, comes to wait on Him in life or death, and finds the reward which He has ever promised to a generous faith. This is a side of Easter which appeals to every one. While Jews say He cannot, and Pilate says He shall not, and Apostles fear He may not rise, here is our place beside the tomb. We do not in the least need evidence or confirmation or defence. The Jews do not stop us; Pilate cannot coerce us, nor friends damp our ardour. Our godparents did not say for us, and we did not say for ourselves, when we accepted the Creed, all this I steadfastly believe subject to whatever historical revisions may await it in the future. We, too, have a school of trained research. We know Him in Whom we have believed. He has never failed us yet; His word has always come true. We have been with Him on the mountain side, and He has taught us. We have been with Him when the ship of the Church seemed whelmed beneath the waves, and He has stilled for us the tumult. We have knelt before Him in the upper room, and He has given Himself to us, with His own Hand, in mystic Eucharist. We have stood beneath His Cross and seen Him pass into the dark valley of the shadow of death, and here we are with Him on Easter morning. You say the Body has been stolen; you say we have dreamed it; you say our words are idle talesnonsense; you deny us the testimony of our eyes, as a blind man might refuse to believe there was a sun.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary

5. Living among the dead. This was the angel’s way of saying the One who was dead was then living, to assure the women they need not be afraid any longer.

Fuente: Combined Bible Commentary

And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

[Why seek ye the living among the dead?] “A parable. A certain priest (who had a foolish servant) went somewhere without the city. The servant seeking about for his master, goes into the place of burial, and there calls out to people standing there. ‘Did you see my master here?’ They say unto him, ‘Is not thy master a priest?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ Then said they unto him, ‘Thou fool, who ever saw a priest among tombs?’ So say Moses and Aaron to Pharaoh; ‘Thou fool, is it the custom to seek the dead among the living? (or perhaps the living among the dead?) Our God is the living God; but the gods of whom thou speakest are dead,’ ” etc.

Fuente: Lightfoot Commentary Gospels

Luk 24:5. Bowed down their faces to the earth. Peculiar to Luke.

Why seek ye the living among the dead? Why seek ye one who is living and no longer dead in the place where the dead are looked for. The term living, or him that liveth, may have here a higher significance. Christ is the Living One, as Himself the Life, and this the angel knew; whether he meant to say so or not. Mark does not give these words, but their substance.

Fuente: A Popular Commentary on the New Testament

The angels’ words stressed the fact that Jesus was alive. It was inappropriate to look for a living person in a tomb (cf. Act 2:24). They then flatly declared that Jesus had risen from the dead and reminded the women of Jesus’ prophecy that He would rise after three days (Luk 9:22; Luk 9:43-45; Luk 18:31-33). Luke wrote that the meaning of Jesus’ prediction was incomprehensible to the disciples when He gave it (Luk 18:34; cf. Luk 24:16). However now God’s messenger clarified it. Note the recurrence of the divine necessity behind Jesus’ death and resurrection in Luk 24:7 indicated by the word "must" (Gr. dei, cf. Luk 2:49; Luk 4:43; Luk 13:33; Luk 17:25; Luk 19:5; Luk 19:22; Luk 22:37; Luk 24:25-27; Luk 24:44-46; Act 2:23-24).

Fuente: Expository Notes of Dr. Constable (Old and New Testaments)