Sermon text: Matthew 28:1-20
Matthew’s account of the resurrection unfolds in three parts, each building on the last: the truth revealed, the truth concealed, and the truth taken afield.
The truth revealed (verses 1-10) opens with Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arriving at the tomb, followed by a dramatic scene—an earthquake, an angel descending to roll back the stone, the guards collapsing in fear, and the angel’s declaration: “He is not here, for He is risen.” This passage functions as an early apologetic for the resurrection, structured around a standard familiar to a Jewish audience: Deuteronomy 19:15 required the testimony of two or three witnesses to establish any matter as true. Matthew’s account delivers exactly that pattern. The angel serves as the first witness, delivering truthful testimony as God’s messenger. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary serve as a second and third witness—and their credibility is reinforced by Matthew 27:55-61, which places them at the crucifixion, at the burial, and now at the empty tomb, giving them direct, continuous observation of the entire sequence. A fourth witness even appears in verse 9: Jesus himself, alive and greeting the women directly.
The presence of women as the first witnesses carries particular weight given the culture of the time. Jewish legal practice in the following centuries would come to disqualify women as witnesses, and while that wasn’t yet codified law at the time of the resurrection, women were still not regarded with the same social standing as men. If Matthew’s account were fabricated to persuade people, the natural move would have been to invent more socially credible witnesses—religious officials or respected men—rather than women. Their inclusion here argues strongly for the account’s authenticity: there would have been no reason to include them unless it were simply what happened.
The truth concealed (verses 11-15) shows how quickly opposition moved to suppress the resurrection. Guards who witnessed the events reported to the chief priests, who bribed them with a substantial sum to spread a fabricated story: that Jesus’s disciples stole his body while the guards slept. This explanation carried enormous risk for the guards themselves—sleeping on duty was effectively a death sentence—which suggests these were likely temple guards under Jewish authority rather than Roman soldiers, explaining why they reported first to the priests rather than to Pilate. Matthew notes this false account “is commonly reported among the Jews until this day,” meaning the fabrication had already spread widely by the time he wrote, decades after the resurrection itself. This reflects a pattern that recurs throughout history: whenever truth threatens someone’s power, position, or worldview, a competing narrative gets manufactured and repeated until it hardens into accepted fact for those unwilling to examine it further.
The truth taken afield (verses 16-20) closes with the Great Commission. The eleven remaining disciples meet Jesus in Galilee; some worship him, while others still wrestle with doubt—a detail that aligns with John’s account of Thomas. Jesus’s commission is direct: all authority has been given to him, and the disciples are sent to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to observe everything he commanded, with the promise of his continued presence “even to the end of the age.”
The lie of the empty tomb could only be defeated one way: by spreading the truth further and louder than the fabrication. That pattern still holds. A concealed or contested truth doesn’t lose ground through argument alone—it loses ground as more witnesses, across more lives, testify to its reality. Personal testimony carries a unique kind of durability in that regard: someone can challenge the historical reliability of a text, but no one can credibly dispute what someone has personally experienced. That distinction matters, too, in how truth gets described—not as “your truth” or “my truth,” language that has crept into modern usage, but as truth itself, singular and unchanging, even as individual experience and application of that truth vary from person to person. Whatever gets layered on top of Easter culturally—the eggs, the bunnies, the trappings—the substance underneath remains the same claim Matthew’s Gospel makes: Jesus is risen, and that truth is meant to be carried further, not concealed.