The First Witness and the First Doubts Text: Mark 16:9-11
Introduction: The Bedrock of Our Faith
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not an appendix to the Christian faith. It is not an interesting epilogue or a spiritual metaphor for new beginnings. The resurrection is the lynchpin of all reality. It is the event that cleaves all of human history in two. As Paul tells us in no uncertain terms, if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are found to be false witnesses about God, and we are still in our sins. If Christ is still in that tomb, then we are of all people most to be pitied (1 Cor. 15:14-19).
Everything hangs on this. Everything. The forgiveness of your sins, the hope of your own resurrection, the meaning of your life, the future of the cosmos, it all comes down to a single, historical question: did a man who was brutally executed by the Roman state on a Friday get up and walk out of his own tomb on Sunday morning? The answer of the Christian church, the answer of history, the answer of the Holy Spirit, is a resounding and thunderous YES.
But we must notice how God, in His peculiar wisdom, chose to announce this world-altering event. He did not arrange for a press conference with Caiaphas and Pilate. He did not appear in glory to the Sanhedrin, or stride into the Roman barracks to the shock and awe of the legionaries. The announcement of the central event in human history was not delivered with the kind of power, pomp, and circumstance that we mortals would have arranged. No, the first witness to the resurrection was not a man of high standing, not a priest, not a disciple from the inner circle. The first witness was a woman, and not just any woman, but one with a particularly messy past. And the first response from the chosen apostles was not immediate, joyful faith. It was stubborn, hard-headed unbelief. This is not how we would have written the story. And that is one of the key reasons we can know that it is true.
This passage is a beautiful and bracingly honest account of the first moments after the resurrection. It shows us the grace of God in choosing His witnesses, and it shows us the hardness of our own hearts, a hardness that only the power of the resurrection can overcome.
The Text
Now after He had risen early on the first day of the week, He first appeared to Mary Magdalene, from whom He had cast out seven demons. She went and reported to those who had been with Him, while they were mourning and crying. And when they heard that He was alive and had been seen by her, they refused to believe it.
(Mark 16:9-11 LSB)
The First Herald of the New Creation (v. 9)
We begin with the simple, declarative statement of the fact, and the Lord's first chosen audience.
"Now after He had risen early on the first day of the week, He first appeared to Mary Magdalene, from whom He had cast out seven demons." (Mark 16:9)
Mark begins with the unshakable historical claim: He had risen. This is stated as a fact, as settled and certain as any other event in history. It happened at a specific time, early on a specific day, the first day of the week. This is why Christians have gathered for worship on Sunday ever since. We are the people of the first day, the people of the new creation. The old Sabbath looked back to the first creation; our Lord's Day looks to the new creation, inaugurated when Jesus Christ walked out of that tomb.
But then we come to the shocking detail. "He first appeared to Mary Magdalene." If you were inventing a story in the first century and you wanted it to be credible, this is the very last thing you would make up. In that culture, the testimony of a woman was not legally admissible in court. It was considered unreliable, emotional, and generally worthless for establishing a matter of fact. And yet, all four Gospels are insistent on this point. The women, and Mary Magdalene in particular, were the first to see the risen Lord. This is a hallmark of authenticity. It is the kind of detail that is too inconvenient, too counter-cultural, too 'embarrassing' to be an invention. It has the solid ring of truth.
But Mark adds another layer. He identifies her as the one "from whom He had cast out seven demons." This is not just a biographical footnote. It is a profound theological statement. The number seven in Scripture often signifies completeness or fullness. To be possessed by seven demons was to be utterly under the dominion of Satan. This was a woman who had been rescued from the blackest pit of demonic oppression. Her life was a wreck, a complete spiritual and psychological disaster zone. And this is the person Jesus chooses to be the apostle to the apostles, the first evangelist of the resurrection.
What does this tell us? It tells us that the gospel is for broken people. It tells us that the grace of God is not for those who have it all together, but for those who are falling apart. The first person to see the risen Christ was a testimony to His power over the kingdom of darkness. He had conquered Satan in her life before He conquered death in the tomb. Her deliverance was a foreshadowing of His victory. He who could cast out seven demons could certainly cast off one tomb. God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He takes a woman with a dark past, a restored demoniac, and gives her the highest honor, the privilege of being the first to say, "He is risen."
A Faithful Report to Faithless Men (v. 10)
Mary, having received this astonishing news, does exactly what she should. She runs to tell the others.
"She went and reported to those who had been with Him, while they were mourning and crying." (Mark 16:10 LSB)
Notice the contrast. Mary has seen the risen Lord. She is filled with what must have been an explosive, world-altering joy. But she runs into a room filled with the exact opposite. The disciples are not waiting in eager expectation. They are not poring over the Scriptures, remembering Jesus' promises that He would rise on the third day. No, they are huddled together in a state of utter collapse. They are "mourning and crying."
Their hope is dead. As far as they are concerned, the whole enterprise was a catastrophic failure. The man they believed was the Messiah had been arrested, tortured, and publicly executed as a common criminal. Their leader was gone, their dreams were shattered, and they were terrified that they would be next. They are locked in a room, not out of faith, but out of fear and grief. They are weeping over a dead Jesus. Their worldview had been wrecked, and they were sitting in the rubble.
This is a picture of the world without the resurrection. It is a world of mourning and crying. It is a world where death has the last word. It is a world where every good thing, every noble cause, every great leader, ultimately ends up in a grave. This room of weeping disciples is a microcosm of humanity apart from Christ. They had been with Him, they had seen His miracles, they had heard His teaching, but without the resurrection, none of it made any sense. It was all just a tragic story with a terrible ending.
Into this black hole of despair, Mary comes with her report. She comes as a messenger of the new world, a herald of the victory of life over death. She is bringing the gospel, the good news, to the very men who would be tasked with taking that same news to the ends of the earth.
The Stubbornness of Unbelief (v. 11)
Here we have the first evangelical presentation of the resurrected Christ, and the response is not what we would hope for.
"And when they heard that He was alive and had been seen by her, they refused to believe it." (Mark 16:11 LSB)
They refused to believe it. The Greek is even stronger; it implies a settled, determined disbelief. This was not a matter of wanting more evidence or asking clarifying questions. This was a flat rejection. Why? We can see several reasons.
First, there was the cultural prejudice we already mentioned. This was Mary, a woman. Their grief-addled minds likely dismissed her story as hysteria, an emotional fantasy born of sorrow. "Idle tales," Luke calls their reaction (Luke 24:11). They were looking at the messenger, not the message.
Second, the sheer magnitude of the claim was overwhelming. Dead people stay dead. This is a fundamental rule of the universe as they knew it. Their despair was, in a way, more rational to them than Mary's hope. It is easier to believe in the grim reality of the grave than in the glorious impossibility of an empty tomb. Their unbelief was a form of self-protection. To hope again, only to be disappointed, would be unbearable.
But third, and most importantly, their unbelief was a spiritual problem. Jesus had told them this would happen. Repeatedly. He had said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again" (Mark 8:31). They had the prophetic word, and they had the personal word of Jesus Himself, and yet, they refused to believe. Their hearts were hard. Their minds were closed. Grief had blinded them to the promises of God.
And again, we must see this as a sign of the truthfulness of the account. If the disciples were inventing this story, they would have painted themselves as heroes of the faith, waiting expectantly by the tomb on Sunday morning. Instead, they record their own cowardice, their own despair, and their own stubborn, pig-headed unbelief. They make themselves look terrible. Why? Because it's what actually happened. The resurrection is not something they cooked up in a moment of religious fervor. It is something that crashed into their world and overcame their determined skepticism. They did not believe because they were gullible; they believed because they were eventually confronted with evidence they could no longer deny: the risen Christ Himself.
Conclusion: From Weeping to Witnessing
This short passage is a microcosm of the gospel's journey through the world. The pattern is established right here, on the first day of the new creation. The news of the resurrection is first brought by an unlikely messenger, a redeemed sinner who has personally experienced the delivering power of Christ.
This message is delivered to a world that is mourning and crying, a world locked in a room of fear and despair, convinced that death has the final say. And the initial, natural response of the fallen human heart, even the heart of a disciple, is to refuse to believe it. It sounds too good to be true. It violates all the rules of our fallen world.
But the story doesn't end with their unbelief. We know that Jesus would appear to them as well. He would show them His hands and His side. He would rebuke their unbelief and hardness of heart, and then He would commission these same doubting men to go into all the world and preach this unbelievable news. And they did. These same men who were crying in a locked room went out and turned the world upside down. What made the difference? The reality of the resurrection.
The faith that saves is not a leap in the dark. It is a faith grounded in a historical fact. But it is also a faith that is a gift. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that must work in our hearts to overcome our natural, stubborn unbelief. Like Mary, we are all rescued from the dominion of darkness. Like the disciples, we are all prone to doubt and despair. But the risen Christ comes to us, through His Word and Spirit, and He turns our mourning into dancing. He replaces our unbelief with a robust and joyful faith. And then He sends us out, unlikely messengers all of us, to tell a weeping world the best news it could ever hear: He is alive.