After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb. And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, approached, rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were shaken with fear of him and became like dead men. Then the angel said to the women in reply, “Do not be afraid! I know that you are seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ Behold I have told you.” Then they went away quickly from the tomb, fearful yet overjoyed, and ran to announce this to his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them on their way and greeted them. They approached, embraced his feet, and did him homage. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.” (Matthew 28.1-10)
On this Easter Sunday, we find ourselves at the pinnacle of the liturgical year and, truth be told, at the pinnacle of the Christian story. In the liturgical year, everything builds towards this moment. In the Christian story, everything builds from this moment. Writing two decades after the resurrection of Jesus from the tomb, Saint Paul made clear the centrality of this event, telling the people of Corinth, “If Christ has not been raised, then empty is our preaching; empty, too, your faith.”
So, the importance of this day cannot be over emphasized. Everything rests upon it and everything is built from it. The liturgical calendar always has the resurrection account from John’s gospel read on Easter Sunday. I’m not sure why, except to say again that John appears here and there across the three-year cycle because he doesn’t have a home of his home on the calendar as do the synoptics and so must find a place here and there. One such place is the Easter Season, as we will see soon enough.
However, for our purposes today, I have chosen to take the resurrection account that Matthew has provided us. It is provided for us at the Easter Vigil during Year A. Because we are in Year A and because we have studied Matthew up to this point, I believe it is important for us to follow through with his text, looking closely at his version of the Easter event because the entirety of his gospel has been leading to this crescendo.
Let it be stated first thing. While Matthew closely follows Mark’s version, which was earlier than his and a template for his own writing, he does not have any hesitancy in changing some of Mark’s text, or as scholars are apt to say, cleaning up some of Mark’s account. While there are several differences, such as the figure at the tomb, called a young man who is inside the tomb in Mark’s version while Matthew states it is an angel who sits on the rock outside the tomb after it is rolled away, such slight differences do not change much in the end.
However, there is one difference that is unique to Matthew and, as I have pointed out elsewhere, whenever there is something unique in one of the gospel’s, we do well not to speed past it because it, in all likelihood, expresses an important or key message for the particular evangelist, often falling in place with his theological take, or stated in another way, his purpose in writing the story.
And that part of the resurrection story that is special to Matthew is found on the lips of the angel who explains to the two women who have come to the tomb, “He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and he is going before you to Galilee, there you will see him.’”
The part I would have us take particular notice of is the angel instructing the disciples to go to Galilee because it is there that they will see the resurrected Jesus. If we look at the other accounts, we will see that both Luke and John have the resurrected Jesus appear to his disciples while they are in Jerusalem, although John will not have Jesus stay in Jerusalem for the forty days that Luke has him.
Mark, for his part, has the women telling the disciples nothing because they are afraid. Later, another ending was added to Mark’s text, probably because of dissatisfaction with how Mark had brought it to an end, but even so, Jesus appears in that longer ending to his disciples while they are in Jerusalem or outside Jerusalem a bit, as in the case of the two who were walking to Emmaus, located about sixteen miles outside Jerusalem.
Only Matthew has Jesus appear to the eleven in Galilee. In other words, when the angel says to the women “He is not here,” the reason is because he is in Galilee. Or, as he says, “He is going before you to Galilee.” Why, we have to wonder, does Matthew make this obvious change to the gospel story of the resurrection?
That is a good question. And that is the question I want us to find an answer to. Scholars generally agree that the principle reason is because of Matthew’s inclination to include the Gentiles in the good news. Galilee, at the northern edge of Palestine, has a good many Gentiles living in it, unlike Jerusalem, considered the centerpiece of southern Judea and of Judaism, which is inhabited primarily by Jews.
To bolster that point, we only have to recall that Matthew offers us the story of the Magi at the start of his gospel. Luke, the only other evangelist with an infancy narrative, tells of shepherds who came to see the newborn child, not men from the east. So, in effect, Matthew has tipped his hand at the start with the story of the magi, and will have Jesus interact on several occasions with Gentiles as he tells of his ministry in Galilee. It should end then with Jesus telling his disciples once they arrive back in Galilee that their mission is to “all the nations,” another way of referring to non-Jews.
By the time that Matthew is writing his gospel, some fifty years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, it has become quite clear that the majority of the Jews would not accept Jesus as the promised Messiah. Yes, some had, but many more had not. So, for Matthew, it was time to move on, putting the community’s focus on reaching out to non-Jews who seemed more open to Jesus’ story.
As I see it, that is all fine and good and rings true to the text. However, while it may be the most obvious intention of Matthew’s placing the appearance in Galilee and not in Jerusalem, it does not necessarily preclude another reason or two. I like to think that the return to Galilee is a reiteration of Jesus’ mission, a reminder that his disciples are now called to continue his message and his ways. In other words, Jesus is asking them to return to their roots and the roots of his mission, something that simply cannot be found in Jerusalem. Not for Matthew, at any rate.
And what was that mission? Again, it was a mission that had Jesus include everyone who was excluded. Not only the Gentiles–although, as I said, he attends to their needs as shown in his healing the Centurion’s servant and in restoring the health of the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman, but all others in need of saving. That included a man with leprosy, Peter’s mother-in-law who lay ill, a paralytic who wanted to walk again, two blind men begging for sight, and a man with a withered hand.
Put simply, whoever was pushed away or pushed out of sight–as lepers and beggars and sick people as a rule were–Jesus was intent on bringing back into the fold, refusing to go along with the practice of distancing oneself from others who were diseased. It was the same with poor people and people who were hungry. Rather than ignore their need, Jesus attended to their need, providing food and comfort for them.
In other words, the people that the world at large wants to erase from sight or even eradicate, Jesus shined a light on, calling them close, listening to their cries, and holding them in his arms as they wept because life had treated them so unfairly. Truth be told, this was the most radical part of his message, the belief, lived out not only in his words but in his works, that the least, the last, and the lost should not be scorned, but should be saved.
Obviously, it was a way of life that the world did not welcome, a world where those with power, position, and prestige ruled with hard-heartedness, heavy-handedness and mean-spiritedness. It should have come as no surprise, then, that they also would want to dismiss Jesus, deciding he also had to go because he questioned the way things were done.
A return to Galilee on the part of the disciples served as a return to the basics, those things central to the message of Jesus and without which it could not continue. The resurrection of Jesus from the tomb was the Father’s validation of the rightness of Jesus’ message to the world. Now, the return to Galilee was further validation that the Father wanted the same message to continue, going to the ends of the earth as the risen Jesus told his disciples when he appeared to them atop a mountain in Galilee.
So, what does this say to us? That should not be all that difficult to determine. The risen Jesus wants to see us in Galilee also, in other words, in those places where the poor suffer at the hands of the rich, where the foreigner is cast out by those without tolerance for others with different skin, a different language, or a different way of living, a place where the voices of the little people of the world are silenced by those with the power to deny others their right to protest a world of injustice.
One final point. After the risen Jesus had directed the eleven to go to “all nations,” his last words to them were, “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” Those final words before the resurrected Jesus left this world are important, a reminder that his spirit stays with us down through the ages. However, it is a promise that follows a command. That command, of course, is to go to the nations, meaning to go to the oppressed, to the outcast, to the ostracized, all those living on the outside, never welcomed to the inside where food is plentiful, where wine is rich, and where life is good.
For what it’s worth, that is how I choose to understand Matthew’s departure from the other evangelists in having Jesus appear to the disciples in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. As I have said before, Matthew does not view Jerusalem favorably, finding it to be the home of the enemies of Jesus, those with the power to crucify him on a cross. Galilee, on the other hand, often referred to as “the Galilee of the Gentiles,” was Jesus’ homebase, the place where he reached out to one and all, regardless of who they were, where they came from, or what others thought of them.
If we can take that much from this Easter message, then I believe we have taken something very important with us for our future days as we also try to imitate the great love, the deep concern, and the open arms that Jesus showed to the people he met on the roadways and on the sides of the road in Galilee. If we want to see the risen Jesus, then we will see him in Galilee, not in Jerusalem. As the angel said to the women in Jerusalem, “He is not here.”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 