Acts 10.34-43 or Jeremiah 31.1-6; Psalm 118.1-2,14-24; Colossians 3.1-4 or Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18 or Matthew 28.1-10
IN MATTHEW’s resurrection Gospel, Mary Magdalene and another Mary go to the tomb. This is a variation on John’s version, with its one-to-one encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
An angel appears at the empty tomb, and tells them: “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead.’” Their response is a mixture of emotions: fear, and joy. Fear is a natural human response to the divine presence from one end of the Bible to the other (Isaiah 6.5; Hebrews 10.31). This holds true despite modern unease about whether responding to God with fear is a failure of trust. A few English Bible translations (The Revised English Bible and New Jerusalem Bible) try to push the focus on to wonder, by translating “fear” as “awe”. Most stick with the plain meaning.
Here, then, is one simple Easter lesson from Matthew’s Gospel: fear and joy go hand in hand at the resurrection. It is not that one response is “correct” and the other “faulty”. The women leave the tomb quickly “with fear and great joy”. A “jot and tittle” interpreter would observe that the joy is manifestly a more powerful response than the fear. They set out, as instructed, to return to the city with a purpose: to persuade the disciples to go home to Galilee to wait for Jesus.
I believe that the women were also intent on going to Galilee to see Jesus. The angels’ command is not clear on this point: it is a matter of punctuation (which did not exist in Bible days) whether “There you will see him. This is my message for you” is an instruction for the women to pass on to the disciples, or one directed at the women, too. I am tempted to punctuate:
[ANGEL TO WOMEN:] “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead’; and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. This is my message for you.”
Either way, a message from an angel is not something to ignore. But it turns out that the women do not need to go to Jerusalem, or Galilee, to meet Jesus. Even as they are obediently returning to the disciples, “Suddenly, Jesus met them.”
This Eastertide encounter with Matthew’s resurrection Gospel brings me fresh insight. Whereas John’s Gospel sets Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Jesus in a garden, Matthew’s shows her — together with the other Mary — encountering him while they are on the road. In that respect, this Gospel feels like another Emmaus, yet one in which no breaking of bread is needed to open the women’s eyes to Jesus’s presence. Unlike in John’s account, or Luke’s Emmaus-story, here, in Matthew, he is instantly recognisable to them both.
Their first response is that of every true disciple, of every brother or sister of Jesus, and of all who recognised him back then for what — and who — he truly is: the same response of all who come to recognise him down the centuries. We worship him. The women did so with a dramatic gesture: they “took hold of his feet”. Some translations do rather a good job of this, because the Greek word (ekratesan) is forceful: “They grabbed hold of his feet.” They probably feared that he would disappear with the same suddenness as he had just appeared.
Worship of Jesus is the beginning, middle, and end of Matthew’s Gospel, from 2.11 all the way to 28.17. Matthew puts a consistent emphasis on worship of Jesus which is more prominent than the scattered examples in the other Gospels. It is especially significant that he mentions worship of Jesus twice in the immediate aftermath of the resurrection. The first of these mentions is in this Easter Gospel. The second emerges in the cycle of readings for Eastertide, at Ascensiontide, Trinity Sunday (there with a focus intended to be on 28.19), and, finally, at the end of the year, Christ the King.
What we learn for today from Matthew, then, to strengthen our Easter faith once more, is that our relationship with Jesus begins with an instinct to worship, which remains with us always. The two Marys offer worship instinctively, intuitively, spontaneously. When it is the turn of the eleven disciples to encounter him, they do exactly the same. And so must we: “When we see him, we worship him.”
