Zachary Peters

Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”

Matthew 28:1–10 (ESV)

He is risen, and that means everything.

We got to read our beautiful resurrection story from Matthew chapter 28. And what I want to do is start from the top here in verse one and just work our way down and talk about a few things here. My initial notes for this was close to 8 pages, but I promise you I almost got that cut in half.

And on that first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, they were going to the tomb.

They were fulfilling some death rites—death rituals. Every culture has them. We have wakes, funerals, open casket, closed casket, visitation, all that stuff. All of those are just death rituals.

And the Marys here are just on their way to finish up this process. They had to rush before to prepare the body of Jesus, because you cannot do certain things on the Sabbath, so they rushed, and now they are going back.

We have to understand the Marys’ position. They have been following Jesus. Jesus had changed their life. Jesus was their teacher, their friend, their guide, and they believed in him. They maybe could not 100% put everything together about what he was saying, but they believe and trusted that he was leading them the right direction. And then he is dead. It is over.

While the disciples are terrified and they are hiding, it was the women in his circle—the Marys and others that are mentioned in the other Gospels—that are watching him suffer. They are watching him on the cross. They are watching him be beaten. Now it is the women who are going to, in the best way they know how, take care of their friend.

In very practical ways, we do the same thing. Think about your own experiences whenever you have lost loved ones. We search for ways to find connection. We search for ways to make us feel better, to grieve, to have hope, to have some sort of final connection with people that we love, and that is what Mary and Mary are doing.

And I am skipping ahead here, but we know the end of the story. This is partially why the resurrection matters so much because it addressed a universal concern and experience. To walk through death, the death of loved ones, and eventually your own death is universal.

And it’s to that universal pain, that universal problem, and that universal fear, that the resurrection speaks directly to, and gives us hope for something beyond, for something more, for something transcendent above our physical experiences—that the spiritual has now invaded the practical to change things.

Which is how Paul can say to those who believe, “We do not grieve like those who have no hope.” We grieve, but it is different, because we have got the resurrection.

The Marys go to see the tomb.

Just a couple of verses before this, there is an earthquake when Jesus breathes his last breath, and that earthquake shakes the area, and it splits the veil in the temple in two.

And now, at the resurrection of Jesus, there’s an earthquake. The earth, which trembled with sorrow at the death of Christ, now leaps for joy at his resurrection. There is significant symmetry here. This is a glimpse of the physical and the spiritual, and how they are intertwined in God’s created order. We forget that sometimes, but it is all connected.

And then the stone was rolled away.

In other Gospel accounts, we see that the women who are going to minister to Jesus are concerned about how they are going to open up the grave. There is a big stone blocking the way.

In this region at this time, one of the ways that graves worked is that there would be a little channel or ditch dug, and there would be a rounded stone rolled into place. It’s not like they were embalming people. It’s not like they had formaldehyde. And so you can imagine, in the heat, after a couple of days of preparing the body and the visitation and the viewing, for lack of a better term, things would start to smell. And so you had to close it off with somewhat of a secure way.

And so the women are concerned, how do we open the grave? Maybe the guards could have helped, but there was no way to know. Well, they did not have to worry about it. The stone was already rolled away.

The thing that was separating them from a crucified friend, crucified Savior, from God, was rolled away. The women did not even have to worry about it.

There are going to be times in your life whenever it will feel like you do not know how to connect with God. He is there. I am here. There might as well be a big stone in between me and him and try as hard as you can, the stone will not budge.

Let me go ahead and tell you right now: the stone is not your job. It is not up to you to enact that connection. The stone is already rolled away for you.

God is already out and about looking for you, waiting for you. Stop looking in the wrong places. He did not stay in the grave.

The Guards are passed out. The angel and the earthquake are terrifying. The stone rolling away, these tough dudes are passed out. The ones assigned to guard the dead themselves appear dead while the dead one has been made alive. There is a little humor in that.

The angel says to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who is crucified. He’s not here, for he is risen, as he said. Come see the place where he lay.”

Do not be afraid, the angel says to Mary and Mary, which sounds like a 90s R&B group. I think it is interesting that there is Fear, even at the resurrection. Even in the midst of this astounding news, there is this fear because we fear the unknown. We fear not being in control. We fear not having the answers. We fear the spectacular things that happen around us that seems like we have no way to stop. Fear.

Maybe you fear, because while you remain a little skeptical about all of this resurrection stuff, the content of who Jesus is, what he preached, what he taught, and the claims of Christianity are dangerously close to connecting with you in a way that’s going to challenge your common sense when it comes to the resurrection, so you’re afraid.

Maybe you are afraid that you look at your life in comparison to who Jesus is, in comparison to the significance of the resurrection, you know that you are not living up to something that has this astounding, immortal value. You are not measuring up.

I am gonna tell you: you never will. But that is what the cross was for. Your fears of not measuring up are a sign that there is something more. And Jesus came just for you, despite the fact that you do not measure up, so that you could experience resurrection, even though you do not deserve to experience the resurrection. But you are afraid because you have a hard time believing you are good enough.

You are afraid and walking in fear, not because you do not believe, not even because your life is not evidently pointing to resurrection, but you are afraid because you know that your life pointing to resurrection might cause you some problems.

Those guards we talked about a second ago, they are still around today. Those guards were there to keep Jesus in the grave. If Jesus stays in the grave, then it all stops there. All the powers that be could breathe easy and things would get back to normal. The Romans could breathe a sigh of relief, and the Jewish leaders could go sew back up the curtain in the temple. But Jesus had to stay in that grave for that to happen.

So do we still have guards today? Have there been and is there still people who would benefit from Jesus still being in that grave and thus we not existing as we exist?

I bet a lot of people who had managed to control the populace just because people could not read the bible for themselves wish that Jesus had stayed in the grave. And that his followers would not have used the printing press to mass produce translations of the bible and then taught the people to read them.

I bet more than a few people in the UK and in the US might have wished Jesus had stayed in the grave as Christians refused to relent in stopping the slave trade no matter the personal cost.

I bet a lot of communists in the Soviet Union and Communist China wished that Jesus had stayed in that grave, and the church did not exist and did not continually cause trouble for their atheistic and materialist societies that fall apart when the state is not god and the class conflict becomes nothing in light of God’s love.

I bet the Nazis desperately wished that Jesus had stayed in the grave and that bands of Christians across Europe tried their hardest to hide people even it meant they would die themselves.

There are people today, wanting to deform order for their own selfish desires and even sinful lusts, desperately wish Jesus was still in the grave and his church never born. Instead, Jesus is not in the grave, so the best they can do is pretend he is in the grave and call those who believe fools, bigots, and any number of names cultivated to demean and disarm the resurrection power from the church.

The church so often stands in the way of hedonism or some sort of new age paganism, and those who want those things hate Jesus and us. They are guards of the tomb if you will.

Yet there is still an amount of stress to living up to the news of the resurrection with the guards of social pressure and social rejection in front of us. But the guards are powerless. Do not be afraid!

Mary and Mary showed up looking for a dead friend. They showed up looking for a dead teacher. They showed up looking for a crucified one. That is what the angel says to the Marys.

They saw with their own eyes his lashing. They saw with their own eyes the nails in his hands and his feet hanging on a cross. They saw with their own eyes the crown of thorns and the blood. They saw with their own eyes the spear in his side, and the blood and water flowing out that let the world know that he was dead.

They saw with their own eyes as they brought the body down. And they carried it to the tomb of Joseph Arimathea. They prepared the body with their own hands. They wrapped him, put spices around his body, prepared him for the grave, and put him in there, and now they come back two days later to finish the job that they started, to finish the mourning process, to finish the grief.

You came expecting a crucified one. But He is not here, for he is risen.

Not that he is not there, not that he is gone, not that he walked away. Not that someone came and stole his body. Not that his body was hidden, not that he just sort of vanished into the thin air, but He is risen. He got up. He was not there anymore. And he got up on his own power, under his own volition, because the grave could not hold him down because he was innocent and he was perfect. He is God incarnate.

Society expects us to believe that Jesus stayed in that grave or he never existed in the first place. Society wants us to look at a dead God. Society wants us to think the church is dead. Society wants us to think that the church has no power, that it has lost its sway, that it has lost its passion. But my expectation is not finding a dead church, but finding an alive Christ. And if Christ is alive, the church is alive and the church has a purpose.

And the first thing that a church ought to do with a belief in a resurrected God and the news of a resurrected God is to go tell somebody. The angel says, don’t be afraid. Get out there and go tell the disciples that Jesus is coming to see them. It’s the same calling that we have as a church right now on this beautiful Easter resurrection Sunday.

A few verses later, Jesus himself tells the Marys, in their fear, go tell someone! If something is mentioned twice like that in the bible, pay attention.

And they do go. The Marys—Mary and Mary, number one bestseller, “The Empty Tomb”—they are going to find the disciples.

One more note: There are three words all used like right next to each other here. Fear, Joy, and worship. You don’t have to have all your emotions in check. They have fear and joy.

You don’t know how he’s there. You can’t explain it. You can’t test it. You can’t catalog it, but he’s there. And there’s joy right next to the fear, and then there is worship. They bow down and they kiss his feet.

And while that might not mean so much to you, it means a lot to me. This is not a religion of ghosts. Like Jesus was there. It was him. Fear, joy, and worship on the Easter morning. And again, a call to tell somebody.

I am almost done.

How incredibly sad would it be if you were on a boat heading somewhere nice, and out in the water you look down and there’s all kinds of people struggling, swimming along, floundering, going this way and that way, and you don’t stop the boat. You don’t turn the boat. You don’t even put the little speedboat out. You don’t throw a life vest, life jacket. You don’t throw out a tow line. You just keep on going your way.

And unfortunately, I’m gonna tell you, just even as a pastor, there’s been moments in my life where I’ve sat on the deck of a boat going somewhere nice, and I paid no heed to the people in the water around me who needed to be on the boat with me.

Share the gospel. Share it. No, it’s not easy. There are a lot of things standing in the way—social pressures, anxieties, the thought that, well, you don’t really know what to say. And I’ll go ahead and tell you, even as a pastor, sometimes I don’t know what to say.

But we’ve got to share the gospel.

The Easter message, the resurrection message, is such great news. It’s such great news. I love it. I got to get careful because I get so emotional thinking about all the people who’ve gone before me. And the resurrection makes me excited to see them again.