Sunday’s Readings: Easter Day

Acts 10.34-43 or Jeremiah 31.1-6; Psalm 118.1-2,14-24; Colossians 3.1-4 or Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18 or Matthew 28.1-10

IN MATTHEW’s resurrection Gospel, Mary Magdalene and one other Mary go to the tomb. This is a variation on John’s version, with its one-to-one encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

An angel appears on the empty tomb, and tells them: “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead.’” Their response is a combination of emotions: fear, and joy. Fear is a natural human response to the divine presence from one end of the Bible to the opposite (Isaiah 6.5; Hebrews 10.31). This holds true despite modern unease about whether responding to God with fear is a failure of trust. A couple of English Bible translations (The Revised English Bible and New Jerusalem Bible) attempt to push the give attention to to wonder, by translating “fear” as “awe”. Most persist with the plain meaning.

Here, then, is one easy Easter lesson from Matthew’s Gospel: fear and joy go hand in hand on the resurrection. It is just not that one response is “correct” and the opposite “faulty”. The women leave the tomb quickly “with fear and great joy”. A “jot and tittle” interpreter would observe that the enjoyment is manifestly a more powerful response than the fear. They set out, as instructed, to return to town with a purpose: to steer the disciples to go home to Galilee to attend for Jesus.

I think that the ladies were also intent on going to Galilee to see Jesus. The angels’ command is just not clear on this point: it’s a matter of punctuation (which didn’t exist in Bible days) whether “There you will note him. This is my message for you” is an instruction for the ladies to pass on to the disciples, or one directed at the ladies, too. I’m tempted to punctuate:

[ANGEL TO WOMEN:] “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead’; and indeed he’s going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will note him. This is my message for you.”

Either way, a message from an angel is just not something to disregard. But it seems that the ladies don’t must go to Jerusalem, or Galilee, to fulfill Jesus. Even as they’re obediently returning to the disciples, “Suddenly, Jesus met them.”

This Eastertide encounter with Matthew’s resurrection Gospel brings me fresh insight. Whereas John’s Gospel sets Mary Magdalene’s meeting with Jesus in a garden, Matthew’s shows her — along with the opposite Mary — encountering him while they’re on the road. In that respect, this Gospel seems like one other Emmaus, yet one during which no breaking of bread is required to open the ladies’s eyes to Jesus’s presence. Unlike in John’s account, or Luke’s Emmaus-story, here, in Matthew, he’s immediately recognisable to them each.

Their first response is that of each true disciple, of each brother or sister of Jesus, and of all who recognised him back then for what — and who — he truly is: the identical response of all who come to recognise him down the centuries. We worship him. The women did so with a dramatic gesture: they “took hold of his feet”. Some translations do slightly job of this, since the Greek word (ekratesan) is forceful: “They grabbed hold of his feet.” They probably feared that he would disappear with the identical suddenness as he had just appeared.

Worship of Jesus is the start, middle, and end of Matthew’s Gospel, from 2.11 all of the approach to 28.17. Matthew puts a consistent emphasis on worship of Jesus which is more outstanding than the scattered examples in the opposite Gospels. It is very significant that he mentions worship of Jesus twice within the immediate aftermath of the resurrection. The first of those mentions is on this Easter Gospel. The second emerges within the cycle of readings for Eastertide, at Ascensiontide, Trinity Sunday (there with a spotlight intended to be on 28.19), and, finally, at the top of the yr, Christ the King.

What we learn for today from Matthew, then, to strengthen our Easter faith over again, is that our relationship with Jesus begins with an instinct to worship, which stays with us all the time. The two Marys offer worship instinctively, intuitively, spontaneously. When it’s the turn of the eleven disciples to come across him, they do the exact same. And so must we: “When we see him, we worship him.”