Hold On !
Matthew 28: 1-15
A three year old, new to his Sunday school class, had just finished singing, “Jesus Loves Me.” As the class was being dismissed, he came up to his Sunday school teacher and asked, is Jesus HERE? The teacher paused for a moment. She wasn’t sure if she should say, yes Jesus is here and leave it at that, or explain to him that yes, we can feel that Jesus is here. Before she had time to reply, he asked again, “Is Jesus HERE, because I can’t see his feet!”
I guess when you are three, feet are what you look for when you are trying to find a grown-up. But maybe…not just three year olds. In our story for today, two women at the tomb encounter Jesus as they are running away to tell the disciples that the tomb was empty. When they ran into him, they did something very interesting. They held on to his feet. Listen, with me, to Matthew’s story of the resurrection of Jesus in Matthew 28: 1-15.
Matthew’s story of the resurrection is the most dramatic story we find in the gospels. Two women came to the tomb Easter morning to mourn his death. They had probably heard that the Roman soldiers had sealed the tomb with a huge stone and posted guards outside, so they weren’t planning on trying to anoint the body. They were there to quietly mourn.
Into this silent scene all heaven breaks loose. There is an earthquake. An angel appears, rolls back the stone, and sits upon it. The soldiers become frozen in fright. The angel then announced that Jesus wasn’t there, and invited to women to peer into the tomb so they could see for themselves. Then the angel told them to tell the disciples that Jesus had gone ahead of them into Galilee.
As they turned from the grave and ran…they literally ran into Jesus. Recognizing him right away, they grabbed his feet. The Greek verb for grab means “to seize.” Matthew uses that word one other time when earlier in the story, the soldiers seized Jesus to bring him to trial.
Grabbing on to the leg or feet of a beloved parent is something children do quite often. If that parent is acting like they might leave or do something the child doesn’t want, the child will grab on. “Daddy, don’t LEAVE” is often followed by an arm wrapped around Daddy’s leg. When I imagine our resurrection story today, I can almost see those two women grabbing on to Jesus for dear life. Where are you going NOW? You have already drug us all the way to Jerusalem, and then you got yourself killed and put in a tomb, let’s stay HERE for a while.
On every Easter Sunday of our lives, we see Jesus escaping again. Escaping our grasp, escaping the tombs of the world, escaping to all the Galilees of our lives. The minute we start to bask in the wonder, love and praise of the glorious resurrection, we find the whole reality of Jesus’ life escaping from our grasp. “Is Jesus here, because I can’t see his feet!” Today, as we allow the resurrection to sink in, I invite you to ask yourself a question. “If we believed in the resurrection, how would our lives and world be different?” As you roll that question over in your mind, I will share with you some of my reflections. Perhaps together we can learn to let the reality of the resurrection speak to us.
If we believed in the resurrection, how would life be different? For starters, it would mean that God is sovereign. The resurrection is the trademark of the power of God. It is evidence that the sovereignty of God is true sovereignty. God is no small monarch reigning over a graveyard. If he were, death would be the real king, and God would be a local deity ruling under the power of death, not over it.
Generally, we don’t realize just how much death reigns in our minds and hearts. It is hard for us to even imagine a body that doesn’t deteriorate, a world that does not threaten death to many of its people, a planet that doesn’t have species dying, a world where people are all part of one family.
Death is the trump card all the powers that be use to keep people in check. Death is the reason we grasp and grab. The reason we clutch. We clutch our assets, fearfully build oversized estates to demonstrate our superiority, and maintain a fierce grip on our positions as though the loss of them would mean the loss of our very self. If there were no death, what would we have to lose? Jesus is talking about a world where death itself is left behind. When God raised Jesus from the dead, a whole new kind of life began. Resurrection life. And resurrection life is a threat to everything that clings to our death-dealing world.
If we believed in the resurrection, how would life be different? The “powers that be” would no longer be “the powers that be.” In Jesus’ day, the powers that be were the Roman government and the chief priests. Together, those powers had the poor under their thumb. Those two groups were so threatened by the rumor that resurrection might happen, they sealed the tomb with a huge stone and posted armed guards to secure it. They couldn’t take the chance that even a rumor of resurrection might get out of that tomb, much less the risen Lord.
Why? Because they knew that the resurrection would empower the poor in ways they could only imagine. Nothing would stop the little people from working for God’s purposes. They would be eager to work for God’s promises of justice, peace and love that Jesus had taught them. They would be more daring to risk living fully and loving wastefully. More willing to share what they have with those who have nothing. More courageous in speaking out against the abuses of Caesar’s empire and more ready to risk all for God’s empire.
None of this would do. The threat of resurrection was a real threat then, and it continues to be. The poet Julia Esquivel understood that threat in her work in Guatemala. Her country endured nearly 30 years of political violence under the rule of a series of dictators. She watched as thousands and thousands of indigenous groups were savagely murdered. Hundreds of villages were literally wiped off the face of the earth.
Against that bloody backdrop, she says of those who lost their lives: “They have threatened us with resurrection because they are more alive than ever before, because they transform our agonies and fertilize our struggle, because they pick us up when we fall, because they loom like giants. That is the whirlwind which does not let us sleep, the reason why sleeping, we keep watch, and awake, we dream.”
You see, resurrection doesn’t mean life as we know it will go on and on. Resurrection doesn’t mean we get to go to heaven when we die. Resurrection means oh so much more than that! Resurrection means death will not have the final word. Resurrection means that life is not a cheap gift expiring quickly or our only shot at an eternity’s worth of meaning.
Resurrection means you don’t need to spend your whole lifetime protesting death, asserting your strength against its grip, or striving to squeeze an eternity’s worth of meaning, pleasure, security and satisfaction from your diminishing life span. For, as you know, in that scenario, death still wins. Death still speaks its icy no.
Resurrection means God has spoken a thunderous “YES” to the life and ministry of Jesus. And to your life. When the moment of mortality tries to pronounce a grim no over your grave, death will be overwhelmed and over matched by God’s incomprehensible “YES.”
So today, cling to his feet and experience the reality of resurrection life. And tomorrow, when you return to whatever Galilee you face each day, remember Jesus is alive and he is returning there with you with the astonishing miracle of his “YES!”