“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.

The Resurrection of Jesus and the Birth of God’s New World

Matthew 28:1-8

Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

The point, of course, is that what is happening is the action of God himself. The God who remained apparently silent on Good Friday is having the last word. . . . And what God is doing is not just an extraordinary miracle, a display of supernatural power for its own sake, or a special favor to Jesus. What God is doing is starting something new, beginning the new world promised long ago, sending the disciples to Galilee in the first place but then, as we shall see, on to the ends of the earth and the close of the age with the news of what has happened. A whole new world was opening up in front of them. . . .

[T]he crucial thing is that Jesus’ resurrection is not about proving some point, or offering people a new spiritual experience. It is about God’s purpose that must now be fulfilled. They must see Jesus but that seeing will be a commissioning, a commissioning to a new work, a new life, a new way of life in which everything he told them before will start to come true (198-9).

This event had changed the world for ever. It announced, not as a theory but as a fact, that God’s kingdom had come, that the son of man had been vindicated after his suffering, and that there was dawning not just another day, another week in the history of Israel and the world, but the start of God’s new age that would continue until the nations had been brought into obedience (200).

“They . . . made the tomb secure . . .”

Matthew 27:62-66

Next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

The central claim of the early church was, of course, that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead. The central claim want’ that he was a great teacher, a powerful healer, an inspiring leader, or that he was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice. All of those were true, but they wouldn’t add up to the early Christian faith and life. The crucial fact, they believed, was that Jesus had been bodily raised to life after being well and truly dead and buried. This is what they announced to the startled world, the world of Jews and Gentiles (194).

From the very beginning there has been room for doubt, and many have taken that option. But Matthew is concerned that the doubt be located in the right place. There was no confusion about the details of the burial. If you are going to doubt whether Jesus was raised from the dead it must be because you doubt whether the living God could or would do such a thing for Israel’s Messiah, the one on whose shoulders rested the weight of the world’s salvation (196).

Aaron Orendorff

Psalm 2 begins with a question: “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?”

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, “As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill” (vv. 2-6).

As early as Acts 4, the first Christians saw in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus the fulfillment of Psalm 2.

“They,” Matthew writes, “made the tomb secure . . .”

All the powers of the world were arraigned against the tomb: religious power—“Herod . . . and the people of Israel”—political power—“Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles”—natural power—“a great stone [was rolled] to the entrance of the tomb”—and even supernatural power—“the wages of sin is death.”

Yet for all this security, for all this power, the stone was rolled away, tomb was emptied and death itself defeated.

“If God is for us, who can be against us.”

The Death of God’s Son

Matthew 27:45-46 & 50-54

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” . . . And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Part of the whole point of the cross is that there the weight of the world’s evil really did converge upon Jesus, blotting out the sunlight of God’s love as surely as the light of day was blotted out for three hours. . . . Jesus is “giving his life as a ransom for many” (20.28), and the sin of the “many,” which he is bearing, has for the first and only time in his experience caused a cloud to come between him and the father he loved and obeyed, the one who had been delighted in him. . . .

Of course, Psalm 22 [which Jesus is quoting, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”] goes on, after a long catalogue of suffering, to speak of God’s vindication of the sufferer, and of the establishment of God’s kingdom (Psalm 22.22-31). But that isn’t what Matthew wants us to think here. . . .

Jesus’ death—described by Matthew as “breathing his last” or “giving up his spirit”—is the point towards which the gospel has been moving all along. . . . [Jesus] takes with him, into the darkness of death, the sin of the world: my sin, your sin, the sin of countless millions, the weight that has hung around the world’s neck and dragged it down to destruction. . . .

The disciples, including the women watching from a distance, see only darkness, gloom and death. But Matthew’s reader already knows what they will discover three days later: that this death was not the failure of Jesus to show himself as the son of God, but the way in which his identity, vocation and mission were confirmed and accomplished. As we join our voice with the centurion and others, in declaring that Jesus was indeed God’s son, so we commit ourselves to living by that faith, and to learning every day, by looking at the son, more about the love of the father (190-3).

The Irony of the Cross

Matthew 27:39-43

And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”

So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

Now, in almost the exactly the same tone of voice [as tempter in Matthew 4], we find the mockers challenging him: If you really are God’s son, why don’t you do what you said—destroy the Temple and rebuild it? If you really are God’s son, why don’t you come down from the cross? If you really are God’s son, why doesn’t God deliver you? Surely he can’t want you to be hanging there in agony? Surely he doesn’t want you to . . . die?

Now . . . we see where it was all leading. Opposition and rejection from his own people combined with the hared and anger of the non-Jewish world put Jesus on the cross, and this was in fact the hidden secret of his world public career. Jesus didn’t, as it were, have an early period of success followed by a later period of failure and defeat. . . .

From his baptism onwards he had know what lay ahead: a path that went down into the deep water, like Israel going into the Red Sea. He had trusted, not that God would deliver him by taking him back again to the dry land from which he’d come, but that God would take him through the water and up the other side, leading him of to the promised land that lay ahead. This was the true-Israel path, the Exodus path, the path that led through death itself to a new world, a new life, the other side. He wasn’t simply going to defeat the Romans, or for that matter the chief priests. He was going to defeat death itself (186-8).

Aaron Orendorff

The “irony of the cross” (as D. A. Carson and others have called it) rests like a thick, blanketing fog over the words of Jesus’ mockers.

V. 40: “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!”

Of course, what we, as Matthew’s readers know from the perspective of Easter morning, is that on the cross God’s true temple—the body of His son, the meeting place of God and man—was utterly destroyed and through the resurrection eschatologically “rebuilt.”

V. 42: “He saved others; he cannot save himself.”

Again, from the perspective behind the curtain, it was only by not saving himself that Jesus could ultimately save others.

V. 43: “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now . . .”

Jesus’ trust in God (as Gesemene reveals) is precisely why his Father did not deliver him.

Finally, vv. 40 and 42 identify Jesus as “the Son of God” and the “King of Israel,” which the cross, the crowds assume, nullifies and disproves.

Yet the mystery of cross is that it is because Jesus is God’s Son and Israel’s true King that he cannot (or perhaps better, will not) come down. (Later, in v. 54, a Roman centurion—the last person who should have understood—will be the first to recognize and confess: “Truly this was the Son of God.”)

How the Kingdom Came . . . and Comes . . . and Will Come

Matthew 27:27-31 & 35-38

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and twisting together a crown of thorns, they put it on his head and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him, they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him and led him away to crucify him. . . .

And when they had crucified him, they divided his garments among them by casting lots. Then they sat down and kept watch over him there. And over his head they put the charge against him, which read, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.” Then two robbers were crucified with him, one on the right and one on the left.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

What for Pilate and the soldiers was Jesus’ “crime”—his claim to be Israel’s true king—was for Matthew the sober truth. And the crucifixion was the means by which his kingdom would be established. . . .

Why? Because the kingdom Jesus had spoken of, from the Sermon on the Mount onwards, was never a kingdom to be established and maintained by military force. If it was to be God’s kingdom, it would come about by God’s means; and the means that the true God chooses to use are the means of self-giving love. . . .

The point of it all is this: Jesus is leading the way he had spoken of from the beginning, the way of being God’s true Israel, the light of the world. He himself is set on a hill, unable now to remain hidden (5.14). This is how he is shinning the light of God’s love into the dark corners of the world: by taking the evil of the world, the hatred and cruelty and unthinking mockery of the world, the gratuitous violence, bullying and torture that still defaces the world, and letting it do its worst to him. Never let it be said that the Christian faith is an airy-fairy thing, all about having wonderful inner, spiritual experiences, and not about the real world. This story takes us to the very heart of what Christianity is all about; and here we meet, close up and raw, the anger and bitterness of the world, doing its worst against one who embodies and represents the love of the creator God himself (182-3).

Aaron Orendorff

What does it mean to serve a king enthroned on a cross? What does it mean to live as the citizen of a kingdom that comes not by taking power but by surrendering it, not by enacting violence but by suffering it?

The point certainly isn’t masochism—pain for the sake of pleasure. Knowing why we suffer doesn’t make suffering any less awful.

No, the point is found by recognizing that God’s pattern—the way His kingdom comes—is through the cross. God’s kingdom does not erase evil; it subverts and redeems it. As Dorothy Sayers wrote, “[On the cross] God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion: He rose from the dead.”

For Jesus’ followers then this means that the kingdom must advance not in victory and triumph—or at least not by what the world would call victory and triumph—but by reenacting and reembodying (much like celebrating communion) the death and resurrection of God’s Son. The kingdom came and comes and will come through paradoxical cycle of death and resurrection.

Jesus and Barabbas

Matthew 27:15-18 & 20-26

Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. And they had then a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. So when they had gathered, Pilate said to them, “Whom do you want me to release for you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” For he knew that it was out of envy that they had delivered him up. . . . Now the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus. The governor again said to them, “Which of the two do you want me to release for you?” And they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?” They all said, “Let him be crucified!” And he said, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified!” So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves.” And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” Then he released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

As the story of Jesus’ crucifixion winds towards its great climax, pulling more and more characters and motives into its wake, there now emerges into the light one who summed up, in the most unlikely way, one of its central themes. When Jesus dies, Barabbas goes free. . . .

By the end of the passage it is crystal clear. Barabbas represents all of us. When Jesus dies, the brigand goes free, we all go free. That, after all, is what a Passover story ought to be about. . . .

The point for Matthew is that all are guilty: the chief priests and elder who have handed Jesus over; Pilate the weak bully; and the crowds themselves. And part of the reason for stressing universal guilt is that, with the death of Jesus redemption is offered to all. What happened, close up and in sharp focus, to Barabbas is now open to all. When Jesus ides as King of the Jews, he draws on to himself the guilt and death of Israel, and thence also of the world (178-9).

The Fruit of [Inauthentic] Repentance

Matthew 27:3-5

Then when Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he changed his mind and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” They said, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” And throwing down the pieces of silver into the temple, he departed, and he went and hanged himself.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 2)

[T]here are levels, and degrees, of remorse. We saw when we looked at Peter, at the end of the previous chapter, that there is a big difference between remorse, such as that of Judas, and genuine repentance, such as that of Peter. . . . Remorse and repentance both begin with looking at something you’ve done and realizing it was wrong. But the first goes down the hill of anger, recrimination, self-hatred and ultimately self-destruction, the way that leads to death. The second goes down the route Peter took, of tears, shame, and a way back to life (174).

Aaron Orendorff

John the Baptist—Jesus’ wild-eyed, locust eating, camel-fur wearing cousin—chastised his curious audience: “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matt. 3:18).

Jesus, with a similar bend, warned his disciples that the difference between authentic sheep and “ravenous wolves” will be seen by their “fruit” (Matt. 7:16, 20).

The dual stories of Peter and Judas bear this truth out. The key difference between these two failed disciples—one an deserter, the other a traitor—is in the fruit their “changes of heart” bore. Peter, broken and weeping, clings to the hope that this cannot be the end. He clings to his friends, and eventually clings to Jesus. Judas, on the other hand, surrenders himself to failure. Judas gives himself over to despair and goes the heart-breaking way of death.