Sermon Based on Matthew 28:1-10
There is a moment in Matthew’s resurrection story that I keep coming back to, and it has nothing to do with the angel. It has nothing to do with the earthquake, the stone, or the guards flat on their backs like dead men.
It’s this: after everything — after the arrest, the beatings, the trial, the cross, the burial, the silence of Saturday — two women get up before dawn and walk to a tomb.
Their names are Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary.” That’s how Matthew introduces them. The other Mary. Which tells you something about how history treats women who show up and do the hard work. But they showed up. They showed up when the eleven men who had followed Jesus for three years were behind locked doors, terrified, trying to figure out what their lives were now. These women walked toward the grave in the dark.
Matthew doesn’t tell us exactly why they came. He says they came “to see” the tomb. The Greek word he uses — theoreomai — means more than a casual glance. It means to watch carefully, to observe with intention. They weren’t just going to pay their respects. They were watching. They were paying attention. They were the kind of people who had listened carefully when Jesus talked about what was going to happen, and they came to see if any of it was true.
I want to spend some time with that before we get to the earthquake.
We are a people who have been through some things. I don’t need to itemize them for you. You came here this morning carrying the weight of whatever the last year has handed you, and some of you are carrying more than a year’s worth. Death has visited some of your homes. Diagnoses have landed. Relationships have broken. The news — the actual news, not the good news — has been relentless. And underneath all of it, there is this quiet but persistent question that most of us are too polite to say out loud in church:
Does any of this still work?
Is there really something on the other side of death? Is the kingdom of God actually breaking into the world, or is that just something we say to make ourselves feel better on Sunday mornings? Is the good news actually alive, or have we just gotten very good at performing a story we stopped believing somewhere along the way?
The two Marys asked that question with their feet. They walked to the tomb to find out.
Matthew’s story of what happened next is the loudest resurrection story in the four Gospels. Mark’s gospel is spare and frightening. Luke is detailed and somewhat domestic. John is intimate and quiet. Matthew… is a seismic event — and I mean that literally.
The earth shakes. An angel descends from heaven, radiant enough to blind you, and rolls back the stone. Not to let Jesus out — Jesus is already gone. The stone is rolled back so that the women can look inside and confirm what has already happened. And then the angel sits on it. He just sits on the stone, like a man who has just moved a piece of furniture out of his way and wants to rest for a moment. Rome put that stone there. Roman soldiers sealed it with the authority of the empire. And the angel of God sits on it like it’s a park bench.
The guards, these trained soldiers, collapse like dead men.
Matthew wants you to feel the weight of what is happening here. This is not a quiet miracle slipping through the cracks of history. This is the world being rearranged. Every system, every authority, every power that put Jesus in that tomb is being exposed for what it is — temporary. Mortal. Already on the wrong side of history.
One of the commentaries I’ve been working through this week puts it this way: tyrants and empires devote endless energy toward maintaining the power to silence their critics. They know that nothing silences like death. But what happens when a ragtag group of resurrection-believers offers testimony in response to state-sanctioned execution? Matthew’s answer is: the earth shakes. The guards fall. The angel sits on the stone and waits.
There is a theological word for this: euangelion. It means Gospel. Good news. But here’s something you may not know about that word — it wasn’t invented by Christians. It was a Roman word. In the Roman Empire, euangelion meant an announcement from the Emperor. An imperial proclamation. A declaration of Roman power and Roman peace. When Caesar had a victory, when he extended the empire, when he wanted the population to know that he was in charge and the world was safe because of him, that announcement was called euangelion — good news.
The first followers of Jesus took that word deliberately. They picked it up and aimed it back at Rome like a mirror. They said: here is the real good news. Here is the real announcement. The real power at work in the world is not Caesar’s. It is not the empire’s. It is God’s. And God’s power does not use crosses to silence people — God’s power raises the crucified from the dead.
That is what Easter is. It is a claim about who is actually in charge. It’s a declaration that death, which every empire and every tyrant and every system of oppression has always used as its final argument, does not get the last word. The last word belongs to God. And God’s word is this: He is risen.
Now, I want to be honest with you about something.
That claim, that God’s power triumphs over death, can be hijacked. It has been hijacked. The church has a long and painful history of draping resurrection language over its own ambitions, using the authority of the risen Christ to bless its own agendas, its own empires, its own cruelties. If you have ever heard the gospel weaponized, if you have ever seen the resurrection used as a cudgel, you are right to be suspicious of triumphalist language.
But the response to a hijacked gospel is not a smaller gospel. The response is to look at who was actually there when the story began. Look at who showed up at the tomb.
It was not generals. It was not emperors. It was not the powerful men who ran the religious establishment. It was two women whose names history has half-forgotten, walking toward a grave in the dark because they loved someone who was dead, and they wanted to see.
The good news, from the very beginning, has been for people like that. It has been carried by people like that. It spreads not through imperial decree but through ordinary people who saw something that changed them and ran to tell someone else.
Matthew says the women left the tomb with fear and great joy. I love that phrase. Fear and great joy, together, in the same body, at the same time. Not one after the other. Both at once. Because that is what it feels like to be standing at the edge of something real. That is what it feels like when the story you have been telling yourself, the story where death always wins, where the tomb always holds, where the powers of the world always have the last word, starts to crack.
You are afraid because everything is changing. You are joyful because it is changing for the better. And you run.
I think the church is at one of those moments right now.
The old maps don’t work the way they used to. The cultural arrangements that once made it easy to be a church — where Sunday was sacred, where Christianity was the default, where the building was the center of gravity — those arrangements are gone or going. And there is a version of the church that responds to that reality by getting smaller and tighter and more afraid, pulling inward, drawing lines, trying to seal the tomb of what used to be.
But Easter says the tomb doesn’t stay sealed.
Because the good news is not a program. It is not an institution. It is not a building or a tradition or a theological position. The good news is Jesus, alive and uncontainable, loose in the world, moving ahead of his disciples to Galilee before they even know which way to go.
This matters. Jesus doesn’t wait for the disciples at the tomb. He doesn’t wait in Jerusalem, the center of religious power. He goes to Galilee… to the edge, the margins, the place where fishermen worked and ordinary people lived, the place Matthew elsewhere calls “Galilee of the Gentiles,” the doorway to everywhere else. He goes there first and tells the women: go tell my brothers I’ll meet them there.
Which means the risen Christ is always already ahead of us. Always already in the neighborhoods we haven’t gone to yet, the conversations we haven’t started, the people we haven’t noticed. Our job is not to produce the good news or protect it or manage it. Our job is to follow it. To go where it is already going. To be, as the women were, witnesses… people who pay careful attention and then run to tell someone else what they’ve seen.
Let me tell you about a man named Tom Wenzl.
Tom was a police officer. Over the course of his career, he arrested a couple named Kevin and Danielle Riley — separately, years apart — each time for drug offenses. Kevin and Danielle went to prison. Tom went on with his career.
And then Kevin and Danielle got clean. And they found their faith. And eventually they became licensed lay pastors of a small Presbyterian church in Washington state. And somehow, in the way that God seems to have a dark sense of humor and an unending commitment to making things whole, Tom Wenzl ended up at their church. Tom and Kevin became friends. Then Tom and Danielle. And on a Sunday morning not long ago, Kevin and Danielle stood in the water and baptized the man who had arrested them both.
Danielle said afterward: “Nobody is beyond resurrection.”
That is what the good news alive in the world looks like. That is the earthquake. Not the dramatic kind, but the slow, tectonic kind that rearranges the ground beneath your feet until you are standing somewhere you never could have imagined and you realize that God has been working on this for years.
Donald Juel, a New Testament scholar, once wrote something that has stayed with me this week. He was reflecting on the resurrection story and he said simply: none of the Gospels can really end the story of Jesus. The whole point is that it continues, and that its significance continues.
It continues in you. It continues in this community. It continues in every act of mercy and repair and witness and showing-up-before-dawn that happens in the name of this risen Jesus. The chain of announcement that began when two frightened, joyful women ran from a garden and told eleven confused men that the teacher was alive… that chain has not been broken. It runs through two thousand years of ordinary people who saw something true and told someone else.
You are in that chain. You are one of the links.
So here is the charge Matthew gives us, and it is the same charge Jesus gave the women on the road, and it is the same charge the angel gave them before that: do not be afraid. Go. Tell. He is going ahead of you.
The good news is not buried. It has never stayed buried. It is alive and loose and moving in the world, and it will not be stopped by Rome, or empire, or locked doors, or our own fear, or any of the other thousand things that try to roll a stone in front of it.
Go find where it is already going. And run to meet it.
The Good News Is truly alive in our world!
Jesus is risen.
Amen.
Written by: Rev. Dave Wasson
Dove Sermons 
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