Matthew 28

Today’s Passage: Matthew 28

Twenty verses. That is all Matthew gives to the morning that split history in two, and the restraint of it is part of the witness. There is no attempt to describe the moment itself, no camera set up inside the tomb, no scene of the Lord sitting up in the dark. What we are given is a stone rolled away and a place where He lay, and the plain announcement of a messenger out of heaven: He is not here; He has risen, just as He said. The chapter moves in four short scenes. Two women named Mary come at first light to look at a grave, and an earthquake and an angel meet them there, and the soldiers posted to guard a dead King fall down like dead men themselves. The women are told to go quickly, and on the road the risen Christ meets them Himself, and they take hold of His feet and worship Him. Then Matthew does something no forger would do. He stops the story and tells us what the guards did, how the men who had the news first sold it for a large sum of money, and how the tale they were paid to repeat was still going around in his own day. And then a mountain in Galilee, where a Gospel that opened with a list of names ends with eleven men, some of them worshiping and some of them wavering, and the Lord of heaven and earth handing them the work of the whole age. Read this chapter slowly. It is the summit of the book, and it is the ground under everything you believe.

As you read, hold this: The crucified King is alive, all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to Him, and He sends His people to make disciples of all nations with the promise that closes the book where it opened: God with us, to the very end of the age.

Matthew 28:1–4 (BSB)

¹ After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. ² Suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, rolled away the stone, and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. ⁴ The guards trembled in fear of him and became like dead men.

Two women walking in the half-dark toward a grave. That is how the greatest morning in the history of the world begins, quietly, with grief that has run out of things to do. They are not going to see a miracle. They are going to see a tomb. Hold that in your mind, because it is the shape of a great deal of Christian life: you keep walking toward the place where hope was buried, not because you expect anything, but because love does not know how to stay away. And while they are on the road the ground shakes. This is the second earthquake in two chapters. The first one came when He died, when the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom and the rocks split open. Now the earth moves again, and heaven comes down, and the stone is rolled back. Do not misread what that stone is for. It was not moved to let Jesus out. He was already gone; later that same day He would come through locked doors as easily as He came through stone. The stone was rolled away to let the witnesses in, so that human eyes could look into an empty place and see for themselves. And then that wonderful detail, the one you could never invent: the angel sat down on it. He rolled back the door of the tomb of the King of glory, and then he sat on it, the way a man sits on a stump when the work is finished. Rome had sealed that stone. Heaven used it for a chair.

Then look at the guards. These were trained soldiers, hard men, the sort the empire sent when it wanted something kept, and they took one look at a face like lightning and clothing white as snow and shook until they fell down like dead men. Feel the irony, because Matthew means you to. Outside the tomb, living men lying on the ground like corpses. Inside the tomb, a corpse that is no longer there, because the Man who was laid on that stone bench is alive forever. All the power the world could muster was posted at that door, and it fainted. The soldiers who had been told to guard the dead ended up being the only dead things in the garden.

Matthew 28:5–10 (BSB)

⁵ But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here; He has risen, just as He said! Come, see the place where He lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell His disciples, ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see Him.’ See, I have told you.” ⁸ So they hurried away from the tomb in fear and great joy, and ran to tell His disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” They came to Him, grasped His feet, and worshiped Him. ¹⁰ “Do not be afraid,” said Jesus. “Go and tell My brothers to go to Galilee. There they will see Me.”

The first word out of heaven on Easter morning is do not be afraid, and it is spoken to the women and not to the soldiers. That is worth noticing. The same glory that flattened the guards steadies the grieving. And then the messenger names them with a tenderness that ought to undo us: I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He does not correct the title. He does not say, you are looking for the wrong man, that was last week. The One who is risen is the One who was crucified, and He will carry those wounds into eternity; the resurrection does not cancel the cross, it vindicates it. And then the sentence the whole Bible has been leaning toward: He is not here; He has risen. He has risen (ἠγέρθη) ēgerthē, pronounced ay-GER-thay. Strong's G1453, to raise, awaken, rouse from sleep. The verb here is egeirō, and it is not a lofty theological term at all. It is the plain, homely word for waking somebody up, for rousing a sleeper, for reaching down and getting a person onto their feet. Matthew uses it when Jesus takes a dead girl by the hand and she gets up, and when a paralyzed man is told to get up and pick up his mat and go home. It is the word for a hand under your arm in the morning. And the form it takes here is passive: He was raised. The Father raised Him, and the Spirit of holiness declared Him Son of God by that raising, and elsewhere the Lord says just as truly that He lays down His life and takes it up again, so that the whole Trinity is at work on that stone bench in the dark. But hold on to the humbleness of the word. What happened to Jesus in that tomb is what happens to a sleeper when someone comes in and wakes him, and it is the very same word the Scriptures use for what will happen to every believer who has ever been laid in the ground. He was roused first. We are roused after. When you stand at a graveside and it seems like the end of the world, remember that God calls it waking somebody up. , just as He said. Praise God for those last four words. Not, as we had hoped. Not, as we could not have imagined. Just as He said. Three times on the road He had told them plainly that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer and be killed and on the third day be raised, and three times it went past them, and now the angel simply points back at His own word and says, there it is, exactly as promised. Everything He ever said stands or falls on this morning, and this morning it stands.

Then comes an invitation that no other religion on earth could offer: Come, see the place where He lay. Come and look at an emptiness. Come and see where the body was and is not. And having looked, go quickly and tell, and the tense of it is urgent, run, do not stand here. So the first preachers of the resurrection in the history of the church are two women with their skirts gathered up, running down a road, carrying a message they were given and told to deliver. And what a mixture they are carrying: in fear and great joy, both at once, which is exactly what any honest heart feels when God does something enormous. He is going ahead of you into Galilee, the angel says, back north to the fishing villages and the hills, back to the ordinary places where they had walked with Him, which is precisely where He had told them He would go on the night they all ran away. He kept that appointment too. Years later Paul would gather what those women were carrying into a single sentence.

"But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep." 1 Corinthians 15:20 (BSB)

And then, on the road, He meets them. There is no fanfare in it. The Greek word He speaks is the ordinary street greeting of that world, the thing you said to a neighbor at the well, and the BSB gives it as Greetings! The Lord of life comes back from the dead and says good morning. They came to Him and grasped His feet, and there is the proof that this is no ghost and no vision and no grief-stricken imagination: there were feet to hold, feet with holes in them, warm and real and solid enough to take hold of. And they worshiped Him, and He let them. Keep that in view. A holy man would have pulled them up. An angel in this very Gospel would have refused it. He receives their worship on the road at dawn because worship is what He is owed. And then the word that should melt anyone who has ever failed Him: Go and tell My brothers. Every last one of those men had deserted Him and fled. Peter had sworn in a courtyard that he never knew Him. And the first thing the risen Christ says about them is My brothers. He did not come out of the tomb with a list of grievances. He came out looking for His family.

Matthew 28:11–15 (BSB)

¹¹ While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. ¹² And after the chief priests had met with the elders and formed a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money ¹³ and instructed them: “You are to say, ‘His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep.’ ¹⁴ If this report reaches the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” ¹⁵ So the guards took the money and did as they were instructed. And this account has been circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Two groups of people left that garden with the same news, and Matthew sets them side by side so we cannot miss it. The women were given a message and told to run and give it away for nothing. The soldiers were handed a large sum of money and told to keep a message quiet. One report is carried by joy, the other is purchased with silver. It is the second time in three chapters that money has changed hands over this Man, and both times it bought a lie. Read the cover story they were paid to tell and notice that it is self-defeating on its face: His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we were asleep. Sleeping witnesses testifying to what happened while they slept. Men admitting to a capital offense of dereliction in order to explain the very thing they had been posted to prevent. It is the worst alibi in recorded history, and it survived for generations because people wanted it to, which tells you something true and sad about the human heart. We do not reject the resurrection because the evidence is thin. We reject it because of what it would require of us if it were so.

A word of great care here, because these verses have been terribly misused. Matthew is a Jewish man, writing a Jewish book, about a Jewish Messiah, for readers who knew the Hebrew Scriptures by heart. When he says the account has been circulated to this very day, he is doing what a reporter does: noting a rumor still in the air at the time of writing, and answering it. He names the men who invented it, a handful of frightened officials in one city on one weekend, and he names no one else. This chapter is not a verdict on a people, and any use of it to feed contempt for the Jewish people is a wicked misuse of a book whose every page honors the promises made to Israel. Take the warning where it belongs instead, which is much closer to home. What this scene exposes is what religious position will do to a heart that has decided in advance how the story must end. These were men who could hear a soldier describe an earthquake and an angel and an empty tomb and immediately call a committee and open the treasury. The evidence never had a chance, because the conclusion was already fixed. That temptation belongs to every religious heart, including the one reading this and the one writing it. There is no defense against it except a real love for the truth.

Matthew 28:16–20 (BSB)

¹⁶ Meanwhile, the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain Jesus had designated. ¹⁷ When they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted. ¹⁸ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. ¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

The eleven. Matthew could have written the disciples and spared us the arithmetic, and he does not. There is a gap in that number and he leaves it showing, a wound in the middle of the greatest scene in the book. They climb a hill in Galilee, and mountains have been the high places of this Gospel all along: a mountain where the tempter offered Him all the kingdoms of the world, a mountain where He sat down and taught them what the kingdom is really like, a mountain where His face shone like the sun. Now one more, and this time it is not the crowds who are gathered but eleven ordinary men who had all run away. And Matthew writes the sentence that proves he is telling the truth: When they saw Him, they worshiped Him, but some doubted (διστάζω) distazō, pronounced dis-TAD-zoh. Strong's G1365, to waver, to be of two minds, to doubt. The word is distazō, and it is built on the number two. It is not the word for settled unbelief or for rejection; it is the word for a mind standing in two places at once, pulled in two directions, wavering the way a man wavers at a fork in the road. It appears only twice in the entire New Testament, and both times in this Gospel. The other time is out on the water in the dark, when Peter looks at the wind and starts to sink, and Jesus reaches out His hand and takes hold of him and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” That is the whole flavor of the word: not a fist raised against God, but a heart that believes and staggers in the same breath. And here it is, standing right beside the word worshiped, in the same sentence, describing the same men on the same hilltop. They worshiped, and some of them wavered. If you have ever knelt with your whole heart and felt your mind flicker at the same moment, this verse was left in the Bible for you. The Lord did not send the waverers down the mountain. He came to them, all of them, and gave them the work. . A man who was standing there wrote that. He had every reason to tidy it away and he did not.

He does not scold them for it either. He simply comes closer. And another of His friends, given a week and a scar to touch, would find the same patience waiting for him.

"Then Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and look at My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Stop doubting and believe.” Thomas replied, “My Lord and my God!”" John 20:27–28 (BSB)

Now the last words of the Gospel, and they open with a claim so large that if it is false it is madness and if it is true then nothing else in your life is quite the same: All authority (ἐξουσία) exousia, pronounced ex-oo-SEE-ah. Strong's G1849, authority, rightful power, the right to act. Exousia is a bigger word than our English authority usually carries. It means the right to act and the power to make the action stick, both together. A man may have the power to do a thing without the right, and that is tyranny; he may have the right without the power, and that is frustration. Exousia is the two of them welded. Matthew has been quietly building this word through the entire Gospel. The crowds came away from the Sermon on the Mount astonished, because He taught as one who had authority and not as their scribes. He told a paralyzed man to get up so they would know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He handed authority over unclean spirits to twelve men and sent them out with it. And in the temple courts in His last week the chief priests marched up and demanded to know by what authority He did these things, and He never gave them the answer, because the answer was standing in front of them. Now, on the far side of the grave, He states it plainly and without limit, and the whole of it has been given to Me, received from the Father, held by the Son. Every command that follows in the next two verses rests on that one sentence, and so does every hour of your obedience. in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Not influence. Not popularity. Not a share. All of it, in both realms, the seen and the unseen, the empire and the angels, the grave and the throne. Six weeks earlier this same voice had been silenced by a Roman execution squad, and now it announces universal dominion from a hill in a backwater province with eleven unemployed Galileans for an audience. Either that is the most preposterous sentence ever spoken or it is the truest, and the empty tomb is the reason to believe it is the truest.

Long before the manger, Daniel had seen this in a night vision and written it down.

"In my vision in the night I continued to watch, and I saw One like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence. And He was given dominion, glory, and kingship, that the people of every nation and language should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed." Daniel 7:13–14 (BSB)

Therefore. Everything hangs on that little hinge. Because all authority is His, go. And here it is worth slowing down over the grammar, because the shape of the sentence is the shape of the mission. In the Greek there is exactly one command in these two verses, one imperative, and it is not go. It is make disciples (μαθητεύω) mathēteuō, pronounced math-ay-TYOO-o. Strong's G3100, to make a disciple, to apprentice someone to a master. Mathēteuō is the verb built off mathētēs, the noun for a disciple, and a mathētēs in that world was not a student in the way we use the word. He was an apprentice. He did not sign up for a course and go home at the end of it; he attached himself to a master, went where the master went, ate what he ate, watched how he handled money and strangers and insults, and slowly became like him. Learning happened by living alongside. So this verb means something far heavier and far warmer than make converts. It means bring people into that kind of lifelong apprenticeship to Jesus. It is a rare word, used only four times in the whole New Testament, and Matthew accounts for three of them: once of the scribe discipled in the kingdom of heaven who brings new treasures and old out of his storeroom, once, beautifully, of rich Joseph of Arimathea who was himself a disciple of Jesus and gave Him his grave, and now here at the end, where the thing that was done to them becomes the thing they are sent to do. That is how it has come down two thousand years to you. Somebody was apprenticed, and apprenticed somebody else, and the chain has never once been broken. . Going, baptizing, and teaching are all participles hanging off that single verb, the three things you are doing while you obey the one thing. Which means the commission is not fundamentally a travel order and not fundamentally a recruiting drive. It is an order to produce learners of Jesus Christ, apprentices, people who follow Him and are being formed by Him. You can cross an ocean and never make a disciple. You can gather a crowd, take a name, mark a decision, and never make a disciple. The one thing He asked for is a person who follows Him, and everything else in the sentence exists to serve that.

Then the sweep of it, and the name. All nations, and remember that earlier in this same Gospel He had sent the Twelve out with instructions not to go onto the road of the Gentiles but to go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. That restriction has been lifted. The Gospel that began with Abraham, to whom God promised that all the families of the earth would be blessed, ends with the doors thrown open to every people on the map. And they are to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, which is one of the most astonishing sentences in the Bible and slips past us because we have heard it at every christening we ever attended. Name, singular. Not names. One name, three Persons, spoken in a single breath by a Jewish man to Jewish men who confessed every morning of their lives that the LORD our God, the LORD is one. He puts Himself inside the divine name without a flicker of explanation, and He puts the Spirit there with Him. Then, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you, and mark the verb: not teaching them to know it, teaching them to obey it. Not a syllabus, a life. And all that He commanded, not the comfortable parts, which sends the church straight back through the Sermon on the Mount and the parables and the hard sayings about money and enemies and forgiveness, back through this whole book, forever.

And then the last line, and there is no goodbye in it. And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Look at how the commission is built. At the front stands all authority, and at the back stands I am with you, and the command to go and make disciples is set down in the middle, bracketed by His power and His presence. That is the only reason anyone has ever obeyed it. You are not sent out with a technique or a strategy or your own thin courage. You are sent by the One who owns heaven and earth, and you are accompanied by Him every step, always, and the Greek is warmer even than that: all the days. The good days and the flat ones, the days you are brave and the days you waver on the mountain with the rest of them, to the very end of the age. Matthew does not record the ascension. He does not close the curtain or tell us that Jesus went away. He ends the book with the Lord speaking, and standing there, and promising to stay.