Matthew 28:1-10

A few years ago, I led a book study during Lent using John Ortberg’s book, Who is This Man?  Ortberg wrote about Jesus as the man who changed everything.  Jesus is the most familiar figure in history and ever since he walked this earth nothing has been the same.  Ortberg wrote, “Jesus’s impact was greater a hundred years after his death than during his life; it was greater still after five hundred years; after a thousand years his legacy laid the foundation for much of Europe; after two thousand years he has more followers in more places than ever.”

Ortberg went on to say: 

From complete obscurity, Jesus came to public attention for the blink of an eye – maybe three years … Yet today, every time we glance at a calendar or date a check, we are reminded that chronologically at least, this incredibly brief life has become somehow the dividing line of history …

No one knows what Jesus looked like.  We have no paintings or sculptures.  We do not even have any physical descriptions.  Yet Jesus and his followers became the most frequent subjects for art in the world.  His image, settled on in Byzantine art by around AD 400, is the most recognized in history.

He has been portrayed in movies by Frank Russell (1898), … Jeffrey Hunter, Max von Sydow, Donald Sutherland, John Hurt, William Dafoe, Christian Bale, and Jim Caviezel as well as countless others.  Songs about him have been sung by too many to count, from the first known song listed by the apostle Paul in the letter to the Philippians to an album … released by Justin Bieber …

It is in Jesus’s name that most people pray, grateful people worship, and angry people swear.  From christenings to weddings to sickrooms to funerals, it is in Jesus’s name that people are hatched, matched, patched, and dispatched …

Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western Culture for almost twenty centuries.  We live in a world where Jesus’s impact is immense even if his name goes unmentioned …

Jesus never married.  But his treatment of women led to the formation of a community that was so congenial to women that they would join it in record numbers … Jesus’s teachings on sexuality would lead to the dissolution of a sexual double standard that was actually encoded in Roman law.

Jesus never wrote a book.  Yet his call to love God … would lead to a community with such a reverence for learning that when the classical world was destroyed in what are sometimes called the Dark Ages, that little community would preserve what was left of its learning.  In time, the movement he started would give rise to libraries and then guilds of learning.  Eventually Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale and virtually the entire Western system of education and scholarship would arise because of his followers …

He never held an office or led an army.  He said that his kingdom was “not from this world.”  He was on the wrong side of the law at the beginning of his life and at its end.  And yet the movement he started would eventually mean the end of emperor worship, be cited in documents like the Magna Carta, begin a tradition of common law and limited government, and undermine the power of the state …

Even in death, Jesus’s influence is hard to escape.  The practice of burial in graveyards or cemeteries was taken from his followers; cemetery itself comes from a Greek word meaning “sleeping place.”  It expressed the hope of resurrection … Whatever it did or did not do to his existence, death did not end Jesus’s influence.  In many ways, it just started it.

The impact of Jesus on Western culture and history described by John Ortberg is profound and immense.  There is hardly an area of life that Jesus did not and does not impact.  You might say that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus shook up the world.  And Ortberg is right; much of that is due to the events surrounding Jesus’s death and resurrection.

The Gospel of Matthew offers an exciting account of the resurrection, one that is filled with energy and urgency.  At dawn on the first day of the week – Sunday morning – Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the place where Jesus had been laid just to look at the tomb.  We don’t know who this Mary was; certainly it does not refer to Jesus’s mother.  She may be Mary the mother of James and Joses.  But in any case, they got to the tomb very early in the morning.  They were compelled to come; they just couldn’t stay away.  They had to be as close to Jesus as possible.  I understand that kind of urgency and compulsion.  In the days and weeks following my mother’s death, I went to the cemetery very often, probably once a week, to just sit and think and leave fresh flowers.  It was a deep and compelling need.  And so I understand why the women went to the tomb that morning.

I don’t know what they expected to happen, but I doubt that they could have fore-seen a violent earthquake taking place.  Pastor Richard Dietrich of the First Presbyterian Church in Staunton, VA, writes, “There is a great earthquake.  Even small quakes are alarming.  The dishes in the cabinet rattle, and the silver in the kitchen drawer clicks; the house feels as if it may move off its foundation.  In a great quake, the dishes may well fly out of the cabinets, and the silver may jump out of the drawer; the foundation of the house may splinter and the house may fall …”

I have experienced two earthquakes, and both were unsettling.  The first time I was in Charleston, SC, in 1978 attending a summer honor’s school for six weeks.  I had walked to a music store close to the campus of the College of Charleston, where the program took place.  All of a sudden, the drums started to vibrate.  Then I noticed sheet music rattling in the racks.  And then I became aware of a motion under my feet.  The second time I was visiting my brother in California.  I woke up one night hearing glass figurines vibrating on the glass shelves of a cabinet in my bedroom.  And then I felt the motion underneath.  Earthquakes are startling and frightening, even small ones.

During the earthquake, an angel of the Lord came down from heaven.  He rolled away the stone that was covering the entrance to the tomb and then sat on it.  His appearance was like lightning and his clothes were as white as snow.  That would have scared me!  In fact, the Roman soldiers who had been posted at the tomb to guard against someone stealing the body of Jesus were so afraid of the angel that they shook and became like dead men.  The word translated “shook” is actually closer to the word “quake,” and comes from the same root as the word “earthquake.”  It is astonishing to think that hardened Roman soldiers would come so unglued at the presence of an angel!  But they became like dead men in his presence.

Then the angel spoke to the women.  The first thing he said was “Don’t be afraid.”  Every angel says that to the people to whom he appears.  Because, of course, everyone is afraid when they see an angel!  Then the angel tells them, “I know that you are looking for Jesus.  He isn’t here; he has risen, just as he said.  You can even come and see the place where he lay.  Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead and will meet them in Galilee.”  

Dietrick points that the angel “reassures [the women], though we are not certain how reassured they are.  Is it reassuring to find out that not only has the earth been shaking; it has been so shaken that the dead have been stirred back to life?”  In a way, they shouldn’t be so surprised that Jesus had risen from the dead.  Because on Friday, at the moment Jesus died, the earth shook and the rocks split and the tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.  Matthew recorded this in Chapter 27, verses 50-54.  Those who came out of the tombs, after Jesus’s resurrection, went into Jerusalem and appeared to many people.

Well, the women didn’t waste any time.  They hurried away from the tomb on the way to give the message to the disciples.  They were afraid, yet they were also filled with joy.  Dietrich writes, “They run with both fear and great joy … they are afraid for joy.  It’s the kind of feeling we have when we fall in love, when we witness the birth of a child, when we lean over the rim of the Grand Canyon, joyous and fearful at the same time.  The women are running, afraid for joy, to tell the disciples when they run into Jesus.”

Jesus suddenly appeared to the women and spoke one word to them:  “Greetings.”  I can only imagine what it felt like for the women to see the resurrected Jesus for the first time.  They went to him, held his feet and worshiped him.  And then Jesus repeated the message from the angel:  “Don’t be afraid.  Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, where they will see me.” 

The story of Jesus’s resurrection is powerful, full of energy and excitement.  And it is made clear to us that Jesus wasn’t raised in any kind of natural way.  The resurrection was something only God could accomplish.  Cameron Murchison, Dean of the Faculty at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA, writes that the resurrection of Jesus “is not about human capacities or possibilities.  It is wholly about God’s capacity and determination … If death as a final conclusion to even the most finely lived human life is to be transcended, it is not because such goodness just naturally lives on.  It is, rather, because God acts at that boundary of life we call death and does something altogether new.  Angels and earthquakes are the inevitable elements of the resurrection narrative, because that is the only way Matthew can make clear that we are confronted with God’s possibilities and not our own.”

The story of Jesus has a way of shaking up the world.  And we who follow Jesus are supposed to be shaking up the world ourselves, by doing the things that Jesus did.  By loving our neighbors as ourselves and even loving our enemies.  By taking care of the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the vulnerable.  By working on behalf of those who are denied justice.  By speaking truth to power, even when that involves personal risk.  By reaching out to those who are on the margins, those who are overlooked and excluded.  By living out the Beatitudes, which turned the world upside down.  Jesus’s resurrection shook up the world.  Do you believe it?  Then let’s get shaking!