It is hard to assimilate all the details of the four gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ resurrection into one account, but that’s how it is with multiple witnesses to an extraordinary event. Instead of trying to make them all fit, we need to hear each on its own terms and hear what truth each writer is telling us.
Here are three aspects that Matthew in particular emphasises – the stone, the guards, and the promise.
The stone
Matthew 28.1-10 – this is Matthew’s account of the women going to the tomb. These were the same women who had seen where Jesus was buried, so there can be no mistake about which tomb we’re going to find is empty.
Matthew simply says that they are going to see the tomb. They are distraught by Jesus’ death and just want to be near his final resting place.
Women going to the tomb and an earthquake that moves the stone are features that appear in more than one gospel. But, reading Matthew carefully, we see that he describes the earthquake happening while they were there – the earthquake, the moving of the stone, and the arrival of the angel of the Lord were all while the women were there.
So what? Well, firstly, it means that Jesus had already risen from the dead and left the tomb before the stone was rolled away. The only comparable story in the gospels is perhaps when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. But on that occasion, they had to move the stone so that Lazarus could get out – Lazarus was raised back to our ordinary kind of life, and in the end he would die again in the usual way.
But Jesus’ resurrection was to a whole new kind of life – one in which death had been defeated once and for all, and there would be no more dying. Jesus didn’t die again – his resurrection life is eternal.
The second thing that follows from the stone moving after the arrival of the women is that we must think why the stone was moved, if it was not to let Jesus out. And the perhaps obvious answer then is that it was to let the women in, and later other disciples, to see that it was true that Jesus was not there. The open tomb was an invitation to see that what the angel said was true – Jesus had risen from the dead, just like he said he would.
And it’s an invitation to us now too – we are invited to look at the empty tomb and see that Jesus could not be held by death, that God raised him to new eternal life. And if that’s the truth, which is what the gospel writers want us to see, then we are also invited to follow Jesus and worship him, as the women did in the garden, immediately they saw Jesus.
So the stone, moved away from the opening of the tomb, was not for Jesus’ benefit – it was for the benefit of the women, and, in consequence, for us. It’s and invitation to see that Jesus is not dead but alive, not shut away in a tomb but up and about in life and on the way to Galilee.
The Guard
On either side of that core account of the women coming to the tomb and finding that Jesus had, in fact, risen from the dead, are two sections of the interwoven story of the soldiers who were set to guard Jesus’ tomb.
The chief priests, who had been so stirred up by what Jesus had been preaching, wanted to make sure that there would be no deception on the part of Jesus’ disciples. They were worried that the disciples would steal Jesus’ body away so that they could claim that Jesus had risen from the dead, as he had said he would. So they persuaded Pilate, the Roman governor, to let them set soldiers to guard the tomb from potential grave robbers.
The thing was, though, that the guards also experienced the earthquake, and saw the stone move and the arrival of the angel, at which point they fainted. Afterwards, Matthew tells, us the guards told the chief priests everything that had happened. Curiously, the chief priests don’t dispute the truth of what the guards were saying, which presumably included the earthquake and the angel, and possibly the already empty tomb.
Here was another opportunity for the chief priests to realise the truth of who Jesus was, but they didn’t take it. Instead, they, who had wanted so much to guard against deception on the part of Jesus’ followers, now became deceivers themselves. They cooked up a story that the disciples had done exactly what they feared they might, and paid the soldiers to spread the story – even agreeing to pay off the Roman governor if they soldiers got in trouble for sleeping on duty.
There will always be those who deny the truth and reality of the Jesus’ resurrection and who will come up with other explanations. Perhaps that not surprising – people do not generally rise from the dead! But here there is good evidence that, on this occasion, Jesus did. Unless we allow that possibility, we will always be looking for other explanations.
The story of the guards shows that the invitation of the stone rolled away is not enough. We need faith to allow that the evidence might be true, that maybe Jesus could have risen from the dead.
The Promise
And on either side of the story of the guards Matthew makes clear the extraordinary, world-changing, earth-shattering difference that the resurrection, which is at the heart of the gospel, makes.
Matthew 27.57-61 describes the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea. He asked Pilate for Jesus’ body so it could be buried. This would have been highly unusual – the bodies taken down after crucifixions would usually have been thrown into a mass grave. But the Romans knew what they were doing, and they would not allow someone who was not yet dead to be removed from a cross.
Joseph (with Nicodemus, John’s gospel tells us) took the body and wrapped it up before placing it in the tomb. This all takes time, and Joseph would have noticed if Jesus was not really dead. And then he put the great stone across the door, which was the usual guarding against grave robbers. In this case it is also the guarding against a man who had merely fainted, reviving and leaving the tomb – as we’ve seen, Jesus had left the tomb before the stone moved.
So Matthew shows us that Jesus really was dead.
And after he’s finished writing about the guards Matthew finishes his whole book by showing how much Jesus really was alive. He met the remaining eleven disciples in Galilee, where they worshipped him. At last they realised that he was the true and living God and worthy of worship.
“All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me,” Jesus says. In his temptations at the start of his ministry, Satan had promised Jesus such authority. Now that has been given to him as of right – he had not had to bow down to Satan to achieve it, but had instead defeated Satan the death he brings. And, with that authority, Jesus says two things:
- Go and make disciples – wherever you are, show and tell people about me – introduce them to me, so that they will also be my disciples.
- “I am with you always” – Jesus’ presence, the Holy Spirit within us, enables us to live the life he calls us to.
Matthew concludes his gospel by drawing it all together with the opening chapters. The angel of the Lord who was sitting on the stone rolled away, appears for the first time since the opening chapters when he is explaining and instructing Joseph and the wise men in the Christmas story. Now the angel explains and instructs the women as to what has happened.
One of the angel’s declarations in Matthew chapter 1 was that Jesus would be called Immanuel, God with us. Here, at the end of chapter 28, Jesus declares “I am always with you”. Jesus, the Son of God is with us – he is alive, living and reigning in the lives of those who follow him in his call to show God to a watching and sceptical world.
That’s the promise Jesus makes, which sweeps away the deceptions spread by the guards and those who come after them, and which makes good on the invitation of the stone rolled away to see the truth of what God has revealed in Jesus.
“Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb. Lovingly he greets us, scatters fear and gloom!”