He Is Not Here, and He Is Not Leaving

Two women, and a stone rolled for the wrong reason (28:1–4)

Matthew's last chapter opens on the morning after a Sabbath, outside a sealed tomb in a garden near Jerusalem, three days after the Roman execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Two women are walking out to it. The Gospel that began with a genealogy ends here, and it ends fast: twenty verses, no ascension, no farewell.

Matthew names his witnesses again. He has done it twice already. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary — the same two he named watching the crucifixion from a distance (27:56), and the same two he named sitting opposite the tomb while the stone was rolled across it (27:61). Matthew names them three times in three scenes, and the repetition is deliberate. The chain of custody for the central claim of the Christian faith runs through one set of eyes. These women saw him die. They saw exactly where he was put. Now they find the place empty. Nothing in the chain is hearsay.

They come "after the Sabbath." D. A. Carson, the New Testament scholar whose commentary on this Gospel stands behind much of what follows, notes that the Greek could also be read "late on the Sabbath," putting the visit on Saturday evening. He takes the word as a preposition meaning simply "after," for the ordinary reason: observant women would not walk that far on a Sabbath, so they waited for it to end.^*

Then the ground moves. It is the second earthquake in two chapters, the first at the moment he died (27:51), this one at the tomb. Matthew alone gives us both, so that the death and the rising are framed by the same shudder. An angel comes down, rolls away the stone, and sits on it.

Notice what the stone-rolling is not for. It is not to let Jesus out; the angel's own announcement is that he is already gone. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century preacher of Antioch, asked the question directly: "After the resurrection came the angel. Wherefore then came he, and took away the stone? Because of the women… Therefore that they might believe that He was risen again, they see the sepulchre void of the body." Carson says the same thing in a sentence worth keeping. The stone was rolled back, the seal broken, "and the soldiers made helpless, not to let the risen Messiah escape." The door was opened from the outside, for people who needed to look in. That is the same direction the temple curtain tore when he died, top to bottom, from heaven down (27:51).

And the guards shake and become "like dead men." It is tempting to make that a neat antithesis: soldiers terrified and left so, women terrified and comforted. John Calvin, the Geneva reformer, does distinguish the two kinds of fear. Carson will not let the contrast run that far, and he is right to stop it. Matthew never says the women saw the earthquake or the angel's descent; they arrive at a tomb already open. And their own joy stays mixed with fear all the way to verse 8, which is why the angel has to say "don't be afraid" at all. "It is doubtful whether Matthew intended to contrast the soldiers' terror, based on their failure to understand, with the joy of the women." Nor are the guards pagan witnesses of the resurrection, as is sometimes claimed; they heard nothing the angel said and saw no one rise. What is genuinely striking here is the restraint. The later apocryphal gospels could not resist staging the rising itself. Matthew leaves the moment unwatched.

"Jesus, who has been crucified" (28:5–8)

The angel's first word is "Don't be afraid," and his second is a participle worth slowing down for: he knows they are seeking Jesus who has been crucified. The Greek is a perfect passive, the tense for a finished act whose result still stands. Not "who was crucified once," as though the cross were a phase now safely behind him. He is, permanently and in glory, the crucified one. Chrysostom noticed that the angel is not embarrassed by the word: "he is not ashamed to call Him 'crucified;' for this is the chief of the blessings."^* The wounds do not come off.

Then the evidence, in the order the angel gives it. First a word: "he has risen, just like he said." Not as we hoped, and not even as the prophets foretold, though both are true — as he said. Matthew has recorded that saying three times (16:21; 17:23; 20:18–19), and each time the disciples heard the suffering half and lost the rising half. Second, a place: "Come, see the place where the Lord was lying." Third, an errand: "Go quickly and tell." A word, a look, a commission. In four verses, the whole shape of the Christian life.

One small repair. "He is going ahead of you into Galilee" sounds like a report of a journey already underway, as though Jesus had set off up the road while they stood there. He has not; verse 10 still has him outside Jerusalem. Carson reads the present tense as a vivid way of stating what is certain: "The verb is not a progressive present but a vivid future."^* He will get there before they do. That is a promise, not a travel update.

They leave "with fear and great joy," which is not a contradiction but an unusually honest piece of reporting. Calvin describes them as "held in suspense between joy and perplexity," then widens it: "there are sometimes opposite feelings in the hearts of the godly, which move them alternately in opposite directions, until at length the peace of the Spirit brings them into a settled condition."^* Anyone who has believed something enormous before their nerves caught up will recognize the morning exactly.

The first word, and the first errand (28:9–10)

He meets them on the road, and the first word out of the risen Christ's mouth in this Gospel is the ordinary Greek greeting, chairete — the "good morning" you would say to a neighbor at the well. It is the same word Judas used in the garden (26:49). Our translations reach for "Rejoice!" and the word can carry that, but the plainness is the point. He has just walked out of a sealed grave, and he says hello.

They take hold of his feet. Not a vision, not a rumor, not a comforting impression. Feet, held. And they worship: proskyneō, the word Matthew used of the magi at the cradle (2:11) and the disciples in the boat (14:33). Carson is careful, since the verb can mean no more than "knelt before" — but its return in verse 17 pushes the sense toward worship.^* The Gospel that opened with foreigners face-down before a toddler ends in the same posture.

Then the errand: "Go tell my brothers." Who are they? Read as a word to the Eleven, the line is very moving. The men in question had all run. Peter had sworn on oath that he never knew him. And the first message the risen King sends is addressed to deserters as family. Calvin heard it that way and did not soften it: it is "the astonishing kindness of Christ, in deigning to bestow the name of brethren on deserters who had basely forsaken him," chosen "for the purpose of soothing the grief by which he knew that they were grievously tormented."^*

The older reading takes it as the Eleven. Carson argues for something wider, and we follow him. Apart from places where brothers means blood relations, Matthew uses the word for spiritual kinship (12:49–50; 25:40), and nothing here restricts it to the Twelve. The natural sense is everyone attached to Jesus' cause who was in Jerusalem that weekend, most of them Galileans who had walked down with him. That costs Calvin nothing; he had already seen the door standing open. "But as the Apostles were not the only persons who were acknowledged by him as brethren, let us know that this message was conveyed by the recommend of Christ, in order that it might afterwards come to us." The circle called family that morning is larger than the circle of those who had failed, not smaller — and it is still being enlarged.

And the errand goes through the women. Calvin is blunt about why that ought to unsettle us. The arrangement was meant "to chastise the indifference of the apostles, who were like persons half-dead with fear, while the women ran with alacrity to the sepulcher." Then he turns it on the reader: "never shall we be duly prepared to learn this article of our faith in any other manner than by laying aside all pride, and submitting to receive the testimony of the women." Every Christian who has confessed the resurrection has done so downstream of what two women said on a road that morning. Tim Keller, the Manhattan pastor, preaching on John's resurrection account rather than on this chapter, gave the historian's version of the same point: "If you are making up stories about their resurrection, if you were writing them just because you wanted to write them, you would never in that day have made women be the first eye witnesses."

The other report (28:11–15)

Now Matthew does something no other Gospel does, and it is one of the quietly devastating pieces of construction in the book. Two parties leave that tomb carrying news. The women "departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to bring his disciples word" (v. 8). "Now while they were going, behold, some of the guards came into the city, and told the chief priests all the things that had happened" (v. 11). Same morning, same event, two testimonies moving in opposite directions. One is carried by joy. The other is bought — with the same commodity as before, "a large amount of silver," the second time in two chapters that silver has changed hands in that building. The first purchase was Judas, bought for thirty pieces of silver (26:15). The second is perjury. The men who would not put Judas' returned coins in the treasury because they were blood money (27:6) had no difficulty spending temple silver on a lie.

Carson names the contrast, and it turns out to be the architecture of the whole ending. The chief priests use bribe money to commission men to spread lies, while "the resurrected Jesus uses the promise of his presence to commission his followers to spread the gospel."^* Two commissions, two currencies, eight verses apart.

It is worth asking who these guards are. Calvin pictures "armed soldiers," assuming Pilate's legionaries — which is what makes the bribe hard to credit, since a Roman confessing he had slept on watch was signing his own death warrant. Carson suggests temple police under the priests' own authority, which explains both why they report to the priests rather than the governor and why money could buy them.^* We take that reading.

The story collapses on inspection either way, and neither Chrysostom nor Calvin can resist saying so. "How did they steal Him? O most foolish of all men! For because of the clearness and conspicuousness of the truth, they are not even able to make up a falsehood." Calvin lays it out in a line: "They add that this was done while they were asleep. How then do they come to know that it was stolen?" Sleeping men make poor eyewitnesses.

But Chrysostom sees the further thing, and it is what to carry out of the paragraph: the lie concedes the case. "For indeed even this establishes the resurrection, the fact I mean of their saying, that the disciples stole Him. For this is the language of men confessing, that the body was not there."^* The tomb's own guards became the first hostile witnesses to an empty grave, and the earliest counter-explanation on record grants the very fact it exists to explain away. Every precaution taken at the end of chapter 27 has turned into evidence. The priests had gone to Pilate, asked for a guard, sealed the stone and posted the watch (27:62–66), and every one of those measures now works for the story they were meant to prevent.

Then Matthew's closing note, the least defensive sentence a forger could write: "This saying was spread abroad among the Jews, and continues until today." He does not tell us the rumor was put down. He tells us it is still circulating as he writes.

The mountain, and the ones who wavered (28:16–17)

"The eleven." Matthew could have written "the disciples." He counts them instead, and the count is a wound.

They go to a mountain in Galilee, and Matthew's mountains have been carrying freight all book — the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7), the night of prayer (14:23), the transfiguration (17:1) — and one other. In chapter 4 the devil took him "to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory," and offered the lot for a single act of worship. On this mountain, the last one, Jesus says that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. He receives more than was offered, and he receives it the long way: by refusing the shortcut, going to the cross, and taking the kingdoms from his Father's hand rather than the tempter's.

"When they saw him, they bowed down to him, but some doubted." The verb is distazō, and it occurs in the New Testament only twice, both in Matthew: here, and at 14:31, where Peter is going under and Jesus has him by the wrist. Carson is precise about what it carries. It "does not denote intellectual disbelief but hesitation." Not a man who has weighed the evidence and concluded against it; a man in two places at once, holding on to the hand that has hold of him and still sinking. That Matthew prints it at all is itself a kind of evidence, and Chrysostom said so: "if some doubted, herein again admire their truthfulness, how they conceal not even their shortcomings up to the last day."

Who hesitated? The plain reading of the sentence is that some of the Eleven did, and many readers take it that way. Carson thinks otherwise. By every other Gospel the Eleven had already seen the risen Jesus at least once, so he reads the hesitant ones as others in a larger company — the same wider group he finds behind my brothers in verse 10. If that is right, the scene is bigger than eleven men on a hilltop, and may even be the appearance "to more than five hundred" that Paul reports (1 Corinthians 15:6). We lean to Carson, though not hard; the sentence will carry either reading, and neither changes what happens next. As to why anyone hesitated, Carson follows N. T. Wright, the English New Testament historian, and suggests something simple and strange. The risen Jesus both was and was not the same as he had been. The people who knew him best could not get to the bottom of it.

Here two readers we trust part company, and the disagreement is worth leaving open. Calvin says the hesitation did not last: "His approach unquestionably removed all hesitation." Carson answers that the text does not say so — verse 18 is tied to verse 19, not offered as a cure for verse 17 — and that we are simply not told what became of the waverers. We leave it where Matthew left it, because what that leaves standing is the point. He does not sort them. He does not send the confident ahead and hold the unsteady back for remedial work. He closes the distance himself and commissions the whole group, worshipers and waverers, in one sentence. The church has never been sent out on the strength of its own certainty. It is sent on the authority of its King.

All authority, all nations, all things, all the days (28:18–20)

"All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth." Given — a passive, and behind the passive stands the Father. Calvin marks the distinction that keeps this from confusion. Christ is not laying claim to "the eternal power with which he was endued before the creation of the world," but to that "which he has now received," in our flesh, in the person of the Mediator — and "this authority was not fully known until he rose from the dead."^*

Carson sharpens it from the other side. He also corrects a way of putting it that most of us have used. It is not that the resurrection handed Jesus a greater authority than he had before. His words already outlasted heaven and earth (24:35), and he already forgave sins (9:6). What changed is reach: "the spheres in which he now exercises absolute authority are enlarged." Nothing was added to his deity. Everything was vindicated in his humanity, and the territory was handed over. And the words are Daniel's: one like a son of man brought to the Ancient of Days, and "dominion was given him, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him." Something has begun here, not only been proved. Keller again: "In the resurrection, a hole was punched in the pitiless walls of the world and into a world of decay has come immortality."

"Therefore" — because of that authority, not because of anyone's competence — "go and make disciples of all nations." There is one command in the sentence. Mathēteusate, "make disciples," is the main verb; going, baptizing, and teaching are participles hanging on it, and the first of them carries imperative force, which is why it is rightly translated "Go." But the errand itself is not travel and it is not recruitment. It is apprenticeship: learners bound to a Master and taught to observe what he commanded, which is a longer and slower business than counting decisions.

Here Carson takes away a sentence many of us have preached. Baptizing and teaching are not how you make disciples, as though the verse handed us a method: "baptizing and teaching are not the means of making disciples, but they characterize it." What makes a disciple is the gospel proclaimed and believed. Baptism and instruction are what discipleship then looks like. It is a small correction with a large effect, because it keeps the commission from turning into a program. Calvin's warning to anyone who teaches runs the same direction: they are sent "with this reservation, that they shall not bring forward their own inventions," so as "to gain disciples for him, and not for themselves."

"All nations." Panta ta ethnē — and here Matthew closes his circle. Those same two words stand in the Greek Old Testament at Genesis 18:18 and 22:18, where God swears to Abraham that in his offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed.^* Matthew's first sentence called Jesus "the son of David, the son of Abraham." His last paragraph pays out the Abraham half of that line. The door was never a late amendment; it was in the first verse.

"Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." One name, three persons, and no argument offered. Calvin draws out why the three are named: the efficacy of the sign runs through all of them, beginning "with the unmerited mercy of the Father, who reconciles us to himself by the only begotten Son," then the Son's sacrifice, then the Spirit who "washes and regenerates us." So "God cannot be truly known, unless our faith distinctly conceive of Three Persons in one essence."^*

And then the last clause, which is where the whole book has been going. "Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." Not I will be. I am — present tense, spoken by a man about to be out of sight. The word behind "always" is not the usual one. It is pasas tas hēmeras, "all the days," and both Matthew Henry, the English Puritan commentator, and Carson stop on it. Henry counts the days out: "I will be with you on sabbath days and week days, fair days and foul days, winter days and summer days." Carson puts it in a line: "Not just the horizon is in view, but each day as we live it."

Turn back to the first page. "They shall call his name Immanuel; which is, being interpreted, God with us." Twenty-eight chapters later the name has become a promise in the first person. Between them stands 18:20 — "where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the middle of them" — and behind all three stands the oldest commissioning formula in Scripture, spoken to Moses at the bush and to Joshua at the river: I will be with you. The King enrolls himself in that line, and closes it.

Notice, finally, two things Matthew does not do. He does not end with a command. The last sentence is a promise, and the order is the order of the whole book: the authority first, the presence last, the errand carried between them rather than owed. And he does not end with a departure. There is no ascension in this Gospel, no farewell scene, no watching him go. The book that opened by naming him God-with-us does not end with him leaving. It ends with him staying — and with an errand that is only conceivable because he did. Carson says the consequence plainly: "The final chapter is being written in the mission and teaching of Jesus' disciples."^*