Matthew 27

⁶² The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate ⁶³ and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ ⁶⁴ Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” ⁶⁵ Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” ⁶⁶ So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.

Matthew 28

¹ 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. ² 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. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. ⁴ And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. ⁵ But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. ⁷ 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.” ⁸ So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”

Some years back, the philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart published a list of his favorite fiction books. Among them was The Blind Owl by the Iranian author Sadegh Hedayat. It is a strange an interesting book. In it, the protagonist reflects from his sickbed on his disinterest in religion and in God.

Several days ago she brought me a prayer book that had a layer of dust on it—not only had I no use for a prayer book, but likewise no sort of rabble book, writing, or idea had any use for me. What use had I for their lies and nonsense, was not I, myself, the product of a long line of past generations and were not their inherited experiences found in me, was not the past in my being?—But none of this has ever had any effect on me: neither mosque, nor the call of the muezzin, nor ablutions and spitting, and bending over and standing upright before an almighty god with absolute power that one has to converse with in Arabic. Beforehand, when I was healthy, if I several times obligatorily went to the mosque and tried to harmonize my heart with those of others, inevitably my eyes would wander and stare at the glazed tiles and the forms and patterns of the walls of the mosque, transporting me to the realm of pleasant dreams, and in this way I would find a means of escape for myself—During prayer I would close my eyes and hold my palms in front of my face—in this night that I had created for myself, like the words they unconsciously repeat while sleeping, I would pray, but the utterance of these words was not from deep within my heart, for I would much rather talk to a friend or an acquaintance than with God, with Almighty God! For God was too much for me.

Whilst lying in a warm and damp bed, all of these issues were not worth more than a grain of barley to me, and at these times I did not want to know whether a God truly existed or if it was an object the rulers on earth have conceived to consolidate their divine station and ravage their subjects—to reflect the images on earth onto the sky—I only wanted to know whether or not I would make it through the night until the next morning—Confronted with death, I sensed how weak and childish were religion, faith and belief, almost a kind of diversion for healthy and fortunate persons—Confronted with the horrifying actuality of death and the suffering that I went through, all that they had inculcated in me about reward and punishment of the soul and the Day of Resurrection had become an insipid lie, and when confronted with the fear of death the prayers that they had taught me had no effect.—[1]

This strikes me as tragic and heartbreaking: a sick man scoffing at the idea of resurrection, seeing it as “an insipid lie” that had “no effect” on him when confronted “with the fear of death.”

Hedayat himself was a talented but tragic figure. Consider his passing:

In 1951, overwhelmed by despair, Hedayat left Tehrān and traveled to Paris, where he rented an apartment. A few days before his death, Hedayat tore up all of his unpublished work. On 9 April 1951, he plugged all the doors and windows of his rented apartment with cotton, then turned on the gas valve, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Two days later, his body was found by police, with a note left behind for his friends and companions that read, “I left and broke your heart. That is all.”[2]

He was 48 years old when he took his own life.

I do not claim to know all that was going on in Hedayat’s life, but it does strike me that trust in a good God and in the reality of life after death and in the reality of resurrection could have helped him immensely.

Indeed, the resurrection of Jesus is presented in scripture as the antidote to despair: the despair of the disciples when confronted with the reality of death and the despair of the world at large when confronted with the same. At the end of Matthew 27 and the beginning of Matthew 28, we find the powers seeking to stop the resurrection from taking place…and failing miserably in their attempt. And we may thank God for this!

Man’s futile attempt to stop the power of God.

We begin with a futile attempt to stop the power of God.

⁶² The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate ⁶³ and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ ⁶⁴ Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” ⁶⁵ Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” ⁶⁶ So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.

The Jews anticipate shenanigans by the disciples. They recall talk of resurrection on the third day and fear that the disciples will steal the body and so perpetuate what they see as the dangerous untruths surrounding this Jesus. So, they ask Pilate to secure the tomb. Pilate, with seemingly some degree of irritation and possibly an air of dismissal, tells them to do their best.

William Lane Craig, an expert on the resurrection of Jesus, observes that there may be reasons to think that the guards set at the tomb were Jewish, not Roman. He writes:

It is not clear if this means that Pilate gave them a Roman guard or told them to use their own temple guard…The fact that the guards return to the chief priests is evidence that a Jewish guard is intended…The mention of the governor in v. 14 might indicate a Roman guard, but then it would not be clear how the Jews could do anything to keep them out of trouble. The fact that Roman guards could be executed for sleeping on watch and taking a bribe would further point to a Jewish guard.[3]

Craig’s reference to the guards going to the chief priests points to Matthew 28.

¹¹ While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place.

This would indeed have been unusual had the guard been Roman. Regardless of who these guards were, a guard was set at the tomb to make sure the body could not have been stolen.

Justin Martyr, who was born around the year 100 AD, mentions this in his Dialogue with Trypho, section 108.

And though all the men of your nation knew the incidents in the life of Jonah, and though Christ said amongst you that He would give the sign of Jonah, exhorting you to repent of your wicked deeds at least after He rose again from the dead, and to mourn before God as did the Ninevites, in order that your nation and city might not be taken and destroyed, as they have been destroyed; yet you not only have not repented, after you learned that He rose from the dead, but, as I said before you have sent chosen and ordained men throughout all the world to proclaim that a godless and lawless heresy had sprung from one Jesus, a Galilaean deceiver, whom we crucified, but his disciples stole him by night from the tomb, where he was laid when unfastened from the cross, and now deceive men by asserting that he has risen from the dead and ascended to heaven.[4]

We may see in these foolish attempts to stop the power of God a picture of the world’s opposition to God. And we may see in the resurrection the futility of the world’s efforts! It is indeed foolish and absurd to seek to stop almighty God!

In Psalm 2, the Lord laughs at such nonsense:

² The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, ³ “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” ⁴ He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. ⁵ Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ⁶ “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill.”

Yes, it is laughable: the thought that a few guards could keep the God who created the heavens and the earth from raising His Son from the dead! This was a serious miscalculation on the part of the Jewish leadership. It failed spectacularly.

God’s absolute sovereignty over the powers.

In Matthew 28, we see the sheer, awesome power of God on display.

¹ 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. ² 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. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. ⁴ And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. ⁵ But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. ⁷ 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.”

The earth quakes.

The angel descends.

The guards collapse in fear.

Power.

The awesome power of God.

Indeed, here we see God’s absolute sovereignty over the powers, by which I mean both the earthly powers and the spiritual powers.

The resurrection reveals God’s sovereignty over the earthly powers by demonstrating that the Jewish religious establishment could not silence Him, that the Roman killing machine could not discard Him, and that the plotting of the chief priests and Pharisees could not keep Him in the tomb. On the contrary, each of these earthly attempts fell like a house of cards.

But the greater demonstration of God’s sovereign power came in His victory over the spiritual powers, over the devil Himself, who sought to be rid of Jesus once and for all.

I am a great fan of Calvin Miller’s poetic retelling of the gospels in his book The Singer. Here, Satan, called the Hater, rejoices at having put Jesus, called the Singer, on the great killing machine that would take his life.

The Singer seemed small among the heavy beams of wood. The gray of the day settled close around the spiraled towers and by the afternoon, the fog removed the upper walls from sight. Still it settled downward. At last the great machine itself was shrouded by the mist that came to cool the fever in the dying Singer.

When the fog had made the city one great livid criminal, the Singer looked through glazed eyes and saw his foe, sitting on an old and rotten beam. He leered above the stretched and dying man before him.

“You give me joy and music you will never hear, Singer. Groan for me. Scream the fire that fills your soul. Spew the venom of your grudge upon the city. Never have I known the triumph of my hate till now.”

He rose and walked across the beam and stepped upon a cable. The added strain drew the manacles into the wrists of the dying Singer.

“Check-mate, Singer!” He howled into the mist and the shrieking of his laughter was absorbed into the opaque air…

“Look how he dies. Cry, Creator, Cry! This is my day to stand upon the breast of God and claim my victory over love. You lost the gamble. In but an hour your lover will be pulp upon the gallows. Did you tell him when his fingers formed the world, that he would die on Terra, groaning with his hands crushed and whimpering in my great machine?”…[5]

And then:

In the morning, the wreckage of the great machine lay in splintered beams beneath the wall. It had fallen in the night. The great iron pinions that held it to the ancient stones had given way…

Shortly after daybreak the wreckage lay behind a civil barricade and a crew of laborers was sent to clear the chaos from the streets. A group of men lifted the heavy beams. Ox-drawn sledges took them well beyond the city gates…

A workman finally spied the giant tension cable that drew the heavy chains. He feared to see the mutilation he would find beneath the tangled cables and the ropes.

But when he had pulled the final chains away, the manacles were empty…

At length he found the foreman sent to direct the clean-up operation at the wall. “Tell the Grand Musician,” he said, “there is no body in the wreckage and the manacles are empty.”[6]

There is something so beautiful about this: the devil’s cruel delight giving way to despair before the awful realization that even he could not stop God’s great plan! The resurrection was the beginning of the end for Satan. It signaled that not only could no earthly power stop the Lord, neither could any spiritual power!

The words of the angel are staggeringly understated:

⁶ He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.

This lacks the kind of fantastic embellishment one might expect from a fiction, from a legend, These words are said in the way that all true things are said: simply and directly and with confidence.

Jesus was dead.

Now, Jesus is alive.

Feel free to take a look!

Here—simply, dramatically, powerfully, irrefutably—God asserts His sovereignty over the cosmos and over death itself.

The disciples’ joyful recognition that everything is different now.

And then we see the amazing joy of the disciples, a joy arising from the realization that now, because of this fact of the resurrection, everything is different!

⁸ So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ And behold, Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”

There is an intensity in the language that reveals the magnitude of what has happened:

• quickly
• great joy
• ran
• took hold of his feet
• worshipped

The crucified Jesus appeared alive to His disciples and this meant that everything—their assumptions, their view of reality, their fears, their understanding of life and death, their understanding of God, their understanding of Jesus, their understanding of one another—everything would now be different!

This combination of emotions is telling: “fear and great joy.” Fear because of the shocking, unnerving, world-shaking power of God. Great joy because of the possibility that something simply unbelievable had actually happened: Jesus, who they saw die, yet lived!

It is an amazing thing to stand in proximity to the greatness of God! They were right to tremble! But what joy! What amazing good news! How astonishing!

I am reminded of the church sign on an easter Sunday morning that said this:

This changes everything.

This change is everything.

Yes! That is so!

In 1874, Robert Lowry determined to capture the victory and the life-altering reality of the resurrection of Jesus. Here is how he did it:

Low in the grave He lay
Jesus my Savior!
Waiting the coming day
Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes
He arose a Victor from the dark domain
And He lives forever with His saints to reign
He arose! (He arose)
He arose! (He arose)
Hallelujah! Christ arose!

Vainly they watch His bed
Jesus, my Savior!
Vainly they seal the dead
Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes
He arose a Victor from the dark domain
And He lives forever with His saints to reign
He arose! (He arose)
He arose! (He arose)
Hallelujah! Christ arose!

Death cannot keep his prey
Jesus, my Savior!
He tore the bars away
Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes
He arose a Victor from the dark domain
And He lives forever with His saints to reign
He arose! (He arose)
He arose! (He arose)
Hallelujah! Christ arose!

Amen, and amen!

 

[1] Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl (Authorized by The Sadegh Hedayat Foundation – First Translation into English Based on the Bombay Edition) (Kindle Locations 1167-1183). Wisehouse. Kindle Edition.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadegh_Hedayat

[3] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/historical-jesus/the-guard-at-the-tomb

[4] https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html

[5] Miller, Calvin. The Singer (The IVP Signature Collection) (pp. 92-93). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

[6] Ibid., pp. 101-102.