Matthew 28:1-10

I heard a true story about a priest at an Easter morning mass. He went to the pulpit and said, “You’ve heard the story. Think about it.” And then he sat down.

It’s tempting. How do you explain a story that defies explanation? The question on many minds Easter morning is, “Did the resurrection really happen?” I get it. Even though we shout, “Christ is risen!” in our calls to worship and sing, “Jesus Christ is Risen today…”, if I had asked my congregation to be as honest as possible in answering the question, “Do you believe in the resurrection?” I’d have heard about 250 different answers on a spectrum ranging from, “Yes, absolutely,” to “No way.”

Of all the Gospels, Matthew’s version might win the prize for “least believable.” Only Matthew describes an earthquake, a bookend to the earthquake at the time of Jesus’ death (Matthew 27:50-54). The earthquake announces the angel, whose appearance is “like lightening” – I picture him sort of sizzling and popping with power, radiating danger; I’d cast Chris Hemsworth in the role, so just picture Thor in dazzling white clothing. In the other gospels, the tomb was already open when the women arrive, but this buff angel rolls back the stone as the women look on. Jesus is gone; apparently, the stone was no obstacle. The angel sits on the stone, crossing his angelic arms, and glances over at the security guards – only Matthew mentions these guards (Matthew 27:62-66) – who are in some sort of terror-induced coma. You see the irony: the living look dead and the dead are alive? The angel doesn’t speak to the guards. His assurances are only for the women: “You don’t need to be afraid.”

The angel says Jesus has been raised, just as he said he would. Jesus predicted his resurrection three times in Matthew’s gospel (Matthew 16:21, 17:9, 20:17-19). The angel then says, “Go tell the disciples. Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee.” The women take off and run headlong into Jesus. In awe and surprise, they grab onto him and Jesus echoes the angel: “You have nothing to fear. Go tell my brothers I’ll meet them in Galilee.” Matthew doesn’t explain how all this works, or even what it all means. Like the priest, he tells the story and sits down.

The Gospels don’t spell out what resurrection means. They do show us a lot about the person who was raised – about Jesus. As a child, he was a refugee (Matthew 2:13-15). As an adult, he had no place to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). He broke the rules about holiness. He spoke out against the government (Matthew 22:15-22). He insisted that mercy triumphs over judgment (Matthew 5:7, 9:13). He chose to love and live among religious and political outcasts and called them beloved children of God – and that made him an outcast, as well (Matthew 9:10-13). He called proper, upstanding people hypocrites (Matthew 23:1-36) and said that love was more important than money, power, status, everything (Matthew 22:36-40) – so important that we need to love even our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48) – our enemies, for God’s sake. That’s why he was killed. As someone put it, Good Friday is not a celebration of religion; it’s a warning to religion.

That’s who Jesus was and that’s who was raised. That’s who God chose to raise. It wasn’t just shocking; it was positively scandalous. So what does that tell us about God? What does it tell us about us?

The New Testament has an unusual way of describing Jesus after the resurrection. He’s “the firstborn of the dead” (Colossians 1:18; Revelation 1:5), or the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15); the firstborn “of many brothers [and sisters]’ (Romans 8:29); the pioneer of faith (Hebrews 12:2), leading the way into a new day, a new era, a new way of life, a new creation. So it makes sense that the risen Jesus calls the disciples his brothers.

Easter doesn’t celebrate that one man rose from the dead. Easter celebrates new resurrection life for all of us. For all of us, now. Jesus was just the first, but all humanity can rise from what is deadly – deadly to us, and deadly to our whole world. Not sometime in the future, but now. The Gospel writers call Jesus “the son of man,” an enigmatic title that one of my seminary professors translated as the “the new human being.” We tend to skip over this “son of man” talk because it’s confusing, but maybe the gospel writers used it all the time because it matters. Maybe what they’re trying to tell us is that Jesus is the first of a new generation of humanity; Humanity 2.0, we might say. Resurrection invites us to join him in Humanity 2.0, in “resurrection life.” Resurrection life says, “You don’t have to wait for some distant future to start practicing compassion, nonviolence, reconciliation, reverence, joy, hope, and peace. You can leave the old humanity behind and start practicing Humanity 2.0 now.” We can join the resurrection, now. We can rise. Now.

“Did it happen?” is the wrong question. The right question is, “Is it happening?” The promise of the resurrection is not simply what God has done, but what God is still doing. Brian McLaren writes, “As the sun rises Easter morning, everything changes. The emphasis shifts from what lies behind to what lies ahead of us, from what we have done to what God is doing, from what we have been to what we shall become.”

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
Herman C. Waetjen, The Origin and Destiny of Humanness (San Rafael, CA: Crystal Press, 1976).
Brian D. McLaren, “Joining the Resurrection,” April 8, 2012, http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Joining-the-Resurrection-Brian-McLaren-04-09-2012