Sermon Illustrations

It’s hard to believe that body snatching is still going on. Of course during the 17th and early 18th centuries, body snatching was rife. A growing number of anatomists, keen to improve their medical knowledge, needed corpses on which to conduct dissections, bodies were difficult to come by, as it was only legal to perform a dissection on the corpse of a recently executed criminal. So ‘body snatchers’, made money by digging up fresh corpses and selling them to medical schools and hospitals.

When Mary Magdalene first arrived at the tomb of Jesus she thought His body had been snatched. She ran to Peter declaring, “They have taken away the LORD out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.”

Later, when the Jewish leaders, heard that Jesus body was missing, they bribed the Roman soldiers to say, “His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.” And that is a rumour that persists to this day.

But the irony in all this is that Jesus was not the victim of body snatching, but He Himself is the body snatcher.

You say, “What do you mean?”

There was an interesting name applied to the body snatchers of the 17th & 18th centuries. They were sometimes called “the resurrection men.” Jesus is the original Resurrection Man.