NOTES for Mat 28:1-20

All four evangelists begin their accounts of the Resurrection with testimony about the empty tomb. The empty tomb must both prepare the women who brought spices to understand Christ's victory and express its very essence: the tomb is empty, and death is no more.

Since for the angels the Resurrection of Jesus appears much more natural than His death, they say to the astonished women: 'He is alive, He is life itself. Why are you looking for the source of life in a dark tomb? He could not leave you for long - you will soon meet Him.'

And they do indeed meet Him. He still values their freedom: one can doubt, or one can believe, even seeing Him face to face; one can take part in His fulfillment of the Father's will - the salvation of the world - and hear the final words of Matthew's Gospel, which are in themselves the Good News.

The main feature of the Resurrection was its unexpectedness, and that absolutely for everyone, both for the friends and for the enemies of the Risen One. The women went to the tomb in order to complete the unfinished burial rite; the encounter with the risen Jesus was a complete surprise for them. And the apostles, even after hearing about the Resurrection, did not believe it: as we can see, they decided that the women had simply imagined something in the darkness.

A natural question arises: why? With the enemies of the Risen One everything is clear: for them His Resurrection was the most nightmarish possible end to this story. But when reading the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, at times one begins to think that, paradoxical as it may sound, even to Jesus' disciples His Resurrection appeared strange and even unnecessary. They refuse to believe; it seems to them that all the stories about the Resurrection only trouble people. Of course, they really did not expect anything of the kind. But there may have been something else: Jesus' disciples still could not free themselves from their traditional and very human ideas about the Messiah and messiahship.

After the terrible night of Gethsemane, they understood only one thing: everything was lost; He was not the one they had taken Him to be; there would be no messianic war; the dream had to be abandoned. And at the same time there remained the sacred memory of the Teacher, whom they could no longer forget, with whom, despite failure, too much was connected to renounce the memory of Him. This, too, is a fully formed way of seeing the world, even if a tragic one, which a person can carry through a whole life and with which he can live that life. And suddenly it turns out that not everything is over, that the nightmare and horror of the paschal days already lived through were not enough, that the story has not yet ended; people say He has again been seen alive! What else now? What this time? What other hopes will He give and then destroy? Or is it not Him at all? Maybe the women simply went mad with grief? The last thing needed was for the Teacher's memory to be darkened by mad women crying out.

It is no wonder that after His Resurrection Jesus has to convince His disciples again and again that He is Himself, that He is truly alive, that the most terrible thing is really already behind them, and ahead lies a whole life with Him in His Kingdom. And that only there, in the Kingdom that has "drawn near," will history be completed. And life will begin. Life in all its fullness.

Even during His earthly ministry, Jesus said that He had come to bring not peace but a sword, meaning the division that His witness to the Kingdom would cause. This was so before His resurrection, and after that event the division between those who accept and those who reject became even more noticeable. It would seem that trying to suppress such a significant event, even for unbelievers, is a hopeless undertaking, and yet attempts to do this began from the very start, from the first day when the Risen One appeared to those who no longer hoped to see Him alive.

And later, those who denied Christianity almost never tried to explain what the apostles and other witnesses saw and testified to. Their entire argument was usually reduced to the claim that all the testimony was deliberate or unintentional deception (in the second case people usually speak of the good-faith error of witnesses who took their hallucinations or the fruit of their overheated imagination for reality).

Why then, over centuries and millennia of Christian history, have Christianity's opponents come up with no other, more convincing explanations? It should be clear to everyone that a movement based on deception, or even on good-faith error, cannot exist for millennia! The answer to this question is simpler than one would think, and it is contained in the Gospel itself.

Even in the time of the Savior's earthly ministry, His words were received with hostility by many not because those who rejected them had some logical or other arguments, but because the Kingdom and the One who brought it into the world were unacceptable to them in principle, at any rate as they appeared before them. To accept the Kingdom to which Christ bears witness and its laws means for everyone to stop being what he is, to change radically, and therefore to part with his former self, no matter how much at times the one accepting may like himself. If a person does not want this and is not ready for it, he says "no" to Christ and the Kingdom, a "no" that for him no longer needs explanation.

For those around him, the easiest way to explain his refusal is to declare the whole story a lie, a delusion, a fabrication of adherents; in a word, anything that would rule out further discussion in advance. This was so in the days of the Savior's resurrection, it was so centuries later, and the situation remains the same today. Of course, everyone has the right to make his own choice when it concerns his own salvation. The main thing is not to deceive oneself about the motives of this choice. And not to deceive others either.

When the women heard the news of the Resurrection, they rejoiced—but they were also afraid. The word “fear” has many shades of meaning. Of course, what the myrrh-bearing women feel may be called holy awe. But Jesus, who sees their hearts, says, “Do not be afraid.” This means there was something in their fear that poisoned their joy. It seems to me that it was distrust, a very, very slight shade of distrust, which disappears when Jesus says, “Do not be afraid.” Distrust is not unbelief; it is precisely uncertainty about what this situation means for me and how I should act within it. The myrrh-bearing women knew the most important thing: they had to go to the disciples and tell them. And they go, rejoicing. Yet something that hinders them still remains. For Jesus, apparently, it was very important that their joy should be truly complete, not darkened by fear. The most remarkable thing is how they are healed of fear. Nothing was required of the women. He simply said, “Do not be afraid,” and the fear departed and melted away.

Matthew does not recount the Risen One’s meetings with the apostles in detail, but he gives a concise account of the essence of their communion.

The fact that Christ gathered the apostles on a mountain calls to mind the Sermon on the Mount, the ascent of the Mount of Transfiguration, and the many other mountains where the Lord proclaimed His will. Matthew does not conceal that not everyone who saw the Teacher immediately believed it was He. But Christ rejected none of the disciples. He came near to them, and His coming near is not merely physical: He draws close to the hearts of those who have received Him.

Now He clearly reveals His divine nature to the disciples, for no one except God possesses all authority in heaven and on earth. That is why the hour has come to carry the teaching beyond the Jewish people and proclaim it to the whole world.

The call to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is clear testimony to the Trinity of God. It is strange to hear the judgments of those who claim that Holy Scripture contains no mention of the Trinity.

Finally, Christ testified that He is with us until the end of the age. Notice that He did not say, “I will be with you.” What He said to the apostles He also says to us, here and now.