“the dramatic launching”

Matthew 28:11-15

While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, “Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

In this passage Matthew returns to the chess-game once more, to ward off more thoroughly a move that was regularly made in his day to enable people to avoid coming to terms with the resurrection as an actual event. . . . the disciples, they say, came at night and stole his body (201).

[Similarly] don’t be fooled by the idea that modern science has disproved the resurrection of Jesus. . . . Everybody in the ancient world, just like everybody in the modern world, knew perfectly well that dead people don’t get resurrected. . . . The Christian belief is not that some people sometimes get raised from the dead, and Jesus happens to be one of them. It is precisely that people don’t ever get raised form the dead, and that something new has happened in and through Jesus which has blown a hole through previous observations. The Christian thus agrees with scientists ancient and modern: yes, dead people don’t rise. But the Christian goes on to say that something new and different has now occurred in the case of Jesus. This isn’t because there was on odd glitch in the cosmos, or something peculiar about Jesus’ biochemistry, but because the God who made the world, and who called Israel to be the bearer of his rescue-operation for the world, was at work in and through Jesus to remake the world. The resurrection was the dramatic launching of this project (202).

Aaron Orendorff

In gospel-terms, the resurrection of Jesus is the sole, encompassing foundation for all legitimate hope. Followers of Jesus do not hope in providence (though it is a great comfort to know that God is working everything together for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his purpose). They do not hope pragmatically in fruit or in results. They do not hope in the work of their hands, their abilities, or even God’s visible blessing.

All hope is laid here: that Jesus Christ is risen, that the grave is overwhelmed, that God, through His Son, has conquered sin, the devil and death. Hope revolves around the resurrection like the earth revolves around the sun. As such, the resurrection not only trumps but categorically excludes all other hopes, inviting us, in the wake of the new world that it brings, to die and thereby see that it is true.