40. Matthew 28: Jesus’ Resurrection and Great Commission
Jesus’
Resurrection (Mt.28:1-10)
On the day after
Sabbath the two Marys, witnesses of Jesus’ burial, trek to his tomb. To “see
the tomb” is how Matthew puts it (v.1). And that’s what they expect to see. Yet
what they do see is completely unexpected! Before they can “see” anything, however, an
earthquake strikes. And a great angel appeared to roll away the large stone
sealing the tomb. “His appearance was like lightning, and his
clothing white as snow” (v.3). So terrifying was the sight of him that the
Roman guards were struck as if they were dead (v.4).
Angels,
earthquakes, and open tombs are often biblical symbols for great acts of God. And
that seems to be what Matthew wants us to get here. A great act of God has occurred
in this place. And not just a miracle, as if Jesus’ resurrection was simply
another proof that God can do things beyond our ken and power. Again, Matthew’s
not doing apologetics here. He’s proclaiming that God has brought to completion
the great story he began in his account of Jesus which was itself the completion
of the great story of God begun in creation and rising to its climactic
crescendo in this event. An earthquake shook Mt. Sinai (Ex.19), angels
punctuate the biblical narrative as God’s messenger and sometimes as God himself,
resurrection is promised to God’s people (Ez.37). And all that converges here
to announce the greatest news of this most marvelous of God’s acts.
Whether
these are symbolic descriptions or real “historical” events, or both, are
questions open to discussion. Several things make me think that even if all
these things actually happened that “happenedness” is not their main point. Firstly,
any gods of that time and place could do such things. Everyone expected they
could and such a demonstration of power might prove the superiority of one
deity over others but not his uniqueness or the character of the event. And the
character of these events seems to be Matthew’s point. Secondly, even though it
is sheer prejudice to deny the God could do such things, no matter how august the
name of the scholar who over the last several centuries has assured us in that
in the modern “scientific” world such things are impossible, whether such an
event as act of God could be demonstrated is questionable. We may with Karl Barth
affirm the resurrection of Jesus as an event in our history and yet, respecting
its character as an act of God, still believe our categories of normal history
are not equipped to discern it. Such things can only be proclaimed as an act of
God and believed or not by those who hear the proclamation. And such proclamation
will lay out their meaning and significance in terms of Gods plan and purpose. And so I shall take it here.
At
any rate, the earthquake, the mighty angel, and the announcement of Jesus’
resurrection, as the fulfillment of God’s creational purpose carry the meaning
of this episode. The crucified one, incomprehensibly and inexplicably the
messiah and Son of God (1:1), had been raised from the dead! Israel in person
has been brought back to life as surely as the dry bones of the nation had been
knit together and covered with flesh and brought back to life from exile in
Babylon.
Without
this event, this resurrection, Matthew’s narrative comes to naught. An interesting
story, perhaps, even arresting, but finally just another failed wannabe Jewish
revolutionary chewed up and spit out by the Roman machine.
“Take away the resurrection of Jesus,
in fact, and you leave Matthew without a gospel. The cross is the climax of his
story, but it only makes the sense it does as the cross of the one who was then
raised from the dead. The great discourses of the gospel - the Sermon on the
Mount, and all the rest - are his way of saying that Jesus is the new Moses,
but much more than that, Israel's Messiah.
He is the one who is giving Israel and
the world the new Law through
which God's new way of being human has been unveiled before the world. But all
this is true only because the one who proclaimed God's blessings on his
followers, the one who announced God's woes on those who went their own ways,
and the one who spoke God's kingdom message in parables,
is now the risen Lord.”[1]
“He
is not here,” the angel tells the women, “for he has been raised, as he said.
Come, see the place where he lay. Then go
quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead’” (vv.6-7).
The empty tomb is a datum susceptible of historical investigation and the
probability too my mind is that it is a genuine historical reflection. It would
be a strange thing for the women to go back and declare him risen when a trip
to his tomb could disprove it. That doesn’t prove Jesus was raised by God but
it does indicate something very odd has happened. Something that must be explained.
And that explanation can take a number of different forms. The empty tomb proves
none of them but requires some explanation.
The
explanation given by the angel to the women, “he is going ahead of you to
Galilee; there you will see him” (v.8), is missional. As Wright says, “Jesus' resurrection
is not about proving some point, or offering people a new spiritual experience.
It is about God's purpose that must now be fulfilled. They must see Jesus, but
that seeing will be a commissioning, a commissioning to a new work, a new life,
a new way of life in which everything he told them before will start to come
true.”[2]
Filled
with “fear and great joy” (v.8) the women quickly depart. Unlike the three
disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration who want to memorialize the
experience and remain there, they understand the missional thrust of this
experience. Neither fear nor joy can keep them in place but both galvanize them
into action. And in their going the risen One meets them. And in that missional
context they are moved to worship (without the admixture of doubt in men experience
in the mount of commissioning in v.17!), laying hold of his feet in adoration
(v.9)!
Weak,
considered unreliable witnesses, not movers and shakers in their world, it is
to such, these women, that Jesus entrusts the continuation of his mission.
Their evangelical and apostolic work constitutes the human foundation of Jesus’
church. The world of the strong, reliable, and competent men has ended in
death. The movers and shakers can only crucify the world’s hope.
The women
who come to mourn the hope they believed lived in him are astonished that the
cross has become a “giving tree” (Shel Silverstein) and that hope indeed
springs too new life through it. In their weakness and Jesus’s the truth shines
forth. The cross is the criterion of truth in this world awash in the worship
of power, strength, efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, and the like. Only
those who abandon such imagined competencies, or never have had or were
imagined to have them, and simply go when and where and to whom Jesus directs
them meet him and worship him in these trusting responses. A new world has indeed
dawned. It shines forth here in the very first founding moments of the missi0n
of the people of the risen One.
Worship of
Jesus is missional for two Marys as well. Jesus directs them to go and deliver
their evangelical and apostolic word to his male disciples who are still in
hiding. To them, through these women, Jesus addresses a forgiving and restoring
word. He calls them “brothers”! That’s right! Betrayers and deserters he calls
brothers. And he extends to them the same missional call the women received: Go
to Galilee and they will see him there too (v.10).
Jesus
began his ministry in Galilee and there he continues it through his people as
the risen One. He recruited his first disciples from there and from there they
will launch their ministry. Not from Jerusalem, the center of power, the
stronghold of death, but from weak and insignificant Galilee. The world will
not be subjugated by the might of an imperial assault but subverted by a
suffering, serving, cross-bearing people whose greatest honor is to die for loving
others too much!
The Guards Scurry to Cover their Rears (Mt.28:11-15)
The
guards, having recovered from the shock of the angel’s appearance and the earthquake,
and discovered Jesus’ tomb empty, return to Jerusalem to tell the chief priests
what had happened. Something has to be done to explain what has happened (as I
said above these happenings require some sort of response).
The
priests consult with the elders and they decide to payoff the guards to tell
this story: “His disciples came by
night and stole him away while we were asleep” (v.13). Better to pay the guards
to fabricate a story and then protect them from its consequences than to allow
word of Jesus’ empty tomb to get among the people. Who knows what crazy ideas
they might make of that! Not the first time or the last this gambit has been
used.
This they did. And Matthew reports this story was still
circulating at the he wrote his gospel (at least several decades or more after
Jesus’ resurrection)!
Just as the authorities tried to thwart Jesus’ birth (Mt.2)
at the beginning of Matthew’s story, and failed, so they try again to thwart
his resurrection at the end. And fail now too!
The (So-Called) Great Commission
(Mt.28:16-20)
There are a couple of reasons to question the name
traditionally given to this passage: the great commission. It has usually been
taken as a missionary mandate for the church to send people into the world to
spread the gospel. But
-each gospel has its own “commission,” or sending out of Jesus’
disciples (Mk.16:7; Lk.24:49; Jn.21:4ff. [implied in the catch of 153 fish,
then thought to be the number of nations in the world). Why should Matthew’s
version be given pride of place and called “great”?
-Jesus is not sending his followers out to make converts (a lá
a Billy Graham crusade) but to make disciples, that is, help those already
converted to grow and mature.
-finally, this is not really a “sending” passage at all.
Though we usually translate the beginning of v.18 as a command, “go,” the Greek
is more properly taken as “as you go,” which points to action already being
taken. Baptizing, and teaching are the actions Jesus exhorts his people to do “as
they go.”
The church is inherently a sent, a going-people, because that is its nature.
The “going” is not the big deal here. The baptizing and teaching are. And while
that activity certainly includes introducing people to Jesus its scope is much
broader – it is the eschatological ingathering of the nations under the
lordship of Jesus. He is the one after all to whom “all authority in heaven and
on earth has been given”! And that’s lordship, rulership language. The devil
offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth for doing messiahship the his
way in his 3rd temptation; here all authority in heaven and on
earth are given to Jesus (by God) for remaining faithful to his Father’s
way of being messiah.
The commission here, then, is not to go and preach and save
individual people (“souls” as we used to say) out a mass headed to perdition.
No, here the church goes into the world to Jesus’ victory over all non-godly
and ungodly powers that had illicitly claimed sovereignty over the world and in
him God’s reassertion of his rightful rule over his world and the nations in
it. Here is a vision of the peoples of the world turning back to God and not a
mass headed to perdition (see Isa.2:1-4; Mic.2:1-4). This doesn’t necessarily mean
every single individual but it surely means people groups as a whole. And by it
declaring and demonstrating this divine rule as Matthew has been at pains to
teach it in the gospel these nations can see, touch, hear, and benefit from that
rule in their lives here and now.
Matthew identified Jesus at the beginning of the gospel with
the promise of Immanuel, God with his people (Isa.7:14) in mercy and in
judgment and tied that to the birth of Jesus. Here at the end of Jesus’ story
he himself declares that will is Immanuel, the God who will be with his people
even too the close of the age (28:20).
On the final mountain scene in Matthew, then, we see the
whole long story of God with his people begun in creation now culminated and
climaxed in the story of Jesus. That story is not over, to be sure. But
everything decisive has been done. While in Jesus’ setting the “close of the
age” probably looks ahead to the great war with Rome in 70 a.d which was the “close
of the age” for ethnic Israel, we find that time frame “stretched” in Paul to
the close of the pagan rule of the nations of the world with the fall of Rome in
the 5th century a.d. and the onset of the (ill-fated) long period of
so-called “Christian” rule over the West. A few hints (Rom.8:18-25; Rev.21-22) point
to an even longer and universal horizon of hope. Jesus’ promise to be “with you”
encompasses all these time frames, of course.
However, and I’ll end our exposition with this, short of that
last final and universal horizon of hope we live “in between” Jesus’ decisive
victory over sin, death, and the devil and his return to finally and fully
establish God’s kingdom at that very end (Rev.21-22). Much like the Allied
forces in the European theater in World War 2 who lived between the decisive
victories at Normandy (D-Day) after which the outcome of the war in that
theater was no longer in doubt and the declaration of peace, the signing of
treaties, and the cessation of hostilities (V-Day) nearly a year later, we
remain in a period of on-going hostilities and conflict as the now-defeated
powers keep on battling to the bitter end trying to inflict as much damage as
possible before the war is finally ended. Like a mortally wounded beast who is
most dangerous and unpredictable in its death throes, the devil thrashes around
trying to do as much damage as he can before he is thrown in the “lake of fire”
at Christ’s return. Our lives here and now remain conflicted then, as we
struggle with powers within and without to further and implement the victory of
Christ in a not-yet-fully-redeemed world. We do that work in the assurance that
the victory has been won and the end secured as we go about living and loving,
suffering and serving as did Jesus as so memorably portrayed by the skillful
pen of Matthew.
Comments
Post a Comment