“He is not here, but is risen. Remember how he spoke to you when he was yet in Galilee, saying that the Son of man must be delivered up into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.”
The men then made clear exactly what they meant, ‘“He is not here, but is risen'. And lest there be any doubt they linked it with Jesus' promise, given while they had all been with Him in Galilee, that having suffered, and having died, He would rise again on the third day. The words are not an exact quotation but combine the ideas in Luke 9:22 (‘must') with Luke 9:44 (‘be delivered').
The main difference between this quotation here by the men, and what Jesus had said (see Luke 9:22; Luke 9:44), lies in the change from ‘killed' to ‘crucified', an indication of the accuracy of Luke's recording. Initially the form of death had not been spelled out. Now it was crystal clear. We can understand that the women, burdened with grief, were astounded. While Jesus had spoken of such a thing they had never really considered the genuine possibility of it as a real current event. And now it seemed that the promise which had seemed so strange at the time had been genuinely fulfilled. They no doubt found the thought both amazing and exciting.
There is no reason for assuming that Luke's mention of Galilee on the lips of the angels indicates that he has altered Mark's words in Mark 16:7. The angel would not have been limited to two sentences, and what Mark says is of a very different import to what we find here in Luke. Thus we may reasonably accept that he said both. But Luke would not want to mention the words spoken in Mark's Gospel, for he does not want to involve the appearances in Galilee. He wants to concentrate attention on Jerusalem, which to the Gentiles to whom he was writing was seen as the centre of Israel's religion. It is from Jerusalem that the Gospel will go out (Acts 1:8).