Easter Monday, April 5, 2021

Matthew 28:8–15

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went away quickly from the tomb, fearful yet overjoyed, and ran to announce the news to his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them on their way and greeted them. They approached, embraced his feet, and did him homage. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.”  While they were going, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had happened. The chief priests assembled with the elders and took counsel; then they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him while we were asleep.’ And if this gets to the ears of the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” The soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has circulated among the Jews to the present day.

St. Matthew presents a contrast in these verses of his Gospel.  There are two groups of people who have two very different reactions to the same fact — that of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead — and who are given two different sets of orders.  On the one hand, the women were “fearful yet overjoyed”; on the other, there were the soldiers, who were panicked over the appearance of the Angel and also that the tomb they had been told to guard was empty.  In ancient times, the escape of a prisoner meant the execution of the guard.  But the guards did not know what else to do but to plead their case.  The women are told to go to the Apostles, whom the Lord for the first time calls his “brothers”, and tell them to return to Galilee, where he will meet them.  These women are to bring the glad tidings of the Resurrection to them.  They thus fulfill the office of the Angel who was sent to them.  The guards, full of dread, are ordered by the Jewish leaders to lie about what they had seen and to lie about the Apostles.  The lie, in fact, would be harder to believe than what actually happened, since people would be asked to imagine the guards sleeping through an operation that would have involved several men, a number of torches, the use of levers, and a certain amount of time.  And if the guards could say the Apostles stole the Body, they must have been awake at any rate.  And if they had seen the Apostles steal the Body, why did they not stop them, or chase after them?  Surely they could have caught up with men loaded down with the Body of a dead man?  But this was the story that they told.

This sums up the positions of those who believe in the Lord Jesus and those who refuse to believe.  Those who believe are overjoyed in the promise of the Lord that they may be with him forever; those who refuse to believe are unhappy people who seek to spread their unhappiness and to prevent the believers from expressing and sharing their joy.  The believers are free in the knowledge of the truth; the unbelievers are chained to their pathetic lies and their darkness.  Let those of us who believe speak with our joy and our love to those many people who do not know Jesus, so that they may enter into his truth too.