Hello my friends,

I hope you have had a peace filled and meaningful Holy Week. I hope that you have found both respite and inspiration to keep moving forward in our broken and fearful world today.

With Holy Week concluding and moving into the Easter season, I wanted to reflect with you on Matthew's account of Jesus' resurrection and how it critiques imperial power and resists victory through dominion.

Resurrection As Resistance.

A Reflection on Gospel of Matthew 28:1–10.

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

"Seismos"

After everything those first disciples just walked through, the betrayal, the violence, the abandonment, the cross, they arrive at the tomb. And they find it quiet. Two women come simply “to see” it. Matthew doesn’t give us much more than that. No elaborate explanation as to why they were there. Just grief doing what grief does, returning to the place where love was lost.

They are not expecting resurrection. Even though Jesus had predicted his resurrection, the evidence of death seemed to overwhelm any hope of that coming to pass.

And then, everything suddenly changes. Matthew tells us there is a "seismos," an earthquake. The ground itself trembles. Matthew uses this word sparingly throughout his gospel, but it is always at moments when God is disrupting the assumed order of things. It is when Jesus enters Jerusalem, when he dies, and now, when he rises.

The resurrection In Matthew's gospel is not hidden or subtle. It is God declaring, in no uncertain terms, that what we thought was stable, like death, empire, fear, and control was never as secure as it seemed.

An angel descends and the stone is rolled away. Not to let Jesus out, but to show that he is already gone. And then the angel does something that you could easily miss reading through this passage. But it is something defiant. He sits on the stone as if to say, this is no obstacle at all. The symbol of death’s finality, sealed and guarded by imperial authority, becomes a chair for him that he easily moves around as he likes.

At the sight of this, the guards, the representatives of state power, the same state that executed Jesus, collapse in fear. The empire's machinery of control is rendered powerless.

“Do Not Be Afraid”

Then the angel speaks: “Do not be afraid.” This actually tells us something very important. The two women are afraid and the angel sees that. Matthew says they leave with both fear and great joy after being instructed to go and share the news that Jesus is alive.

Here we get the sense that this is what resurrection feels like. It unsettles before it comforts. It disrupts before it restores. Because resurrection means that the world we thought we understood is no longer the world we live in. It is a world where death no longer has the last word over us. Can we even what a world like that would be like?

The First Witnesses

Just as it was to those who first witnessed Jesus' birth in Matthew's gospel, it is not generals, rulers, or religious elites who are entrusted with this news of his resurrection either. It is these two women. In fact, in all four gospels, it is always women who are the first sent to preach the good news of the resurrection to everyone else. In a world where their testimony was often dismissed, they are the first to see, the first to hear, the first to be sent.

When Jesus meets them suddenly on the road they are traveling down, they fall at his feet. Matthew uses language that can mean reverence, devotion, and/or worship. However we translate it, their response makes it clear that they recognize him immediately and are overtaken by awe. How could they not be? He is alive. He is living and breathing. He is risen.

And what does Jesus say? He repeats the words of the angel and says, “Do not be afraid.”

And then he says, “Go and tell my brothers…” Resurrection becomes their mission.

A Word for This Moment

We are watching people in positions of power invoke the name of Jesus while pursuing domination. We hear prayers asking God to guide bullets from the Secretary of Defense. We hear faith used to dismiss concerns about climate change. We hear the president ask law makers to skip going home for Easter so that they can vote on the Save Act, and tells them to “do it for Jesus." We hear the president compared to Jesus himself by the White House Advisor of the office of faith.

While this is always unsettling and deeply disturbing and should never be normalized, this is not new. It is what authoritarianism has always tried to do: attach itself to God in order to justify itself.

This is the point this passage from the Gospel of Matthew is trying to drive home. Jesus does not need empire to succeed. He does not need a military. He does not need political or cultural dominance. He does not need a nation to uphold his name. Because he has already confronted the greatest weapon power has ever used: death itself. And he defeated it. Not with violence. Not with coercion. But with self-giving love.

The Power That Undoes All Other Power

Authoritarian power always relies on the threat of suffering and death. Comply or suffer. Submit or be silenced. Death is its preferred tool of enforcement and always its final argument. It was true for Rome and it is true for modern nation states today. But resurrection takes that argument away. It renders that tool useless.

If death is no longer final then fear is no longer ultimate. And if fear is no longer ultimate then the systems built on it begin to crumble. This is why the resurrection is so deeply political, not in a partisan sense, but in a profound, human sense. It declares that no ruler, no empire, no system that depends on fear and death gets the last word.

God does. Healing does. Life does. Love does.

The Question Before Us

So what kind of Jesus do we believe in? A Jesus who needs power to survive? A Jesus who must be defended by governments and enforced by laws? A Jesus who looks more like Caesar than Christ?

Or the Jesus from here in Matthew 28? Risen. Uncontainable. Unafraid. Already victorious.

One invites us to grasp for control. The other invites us to live in trust, to courage, and to love, even when the world feels like it is unraveling.

One is worshiped by Christian nationalism and the other is featured in the gospel accounts of scripture.

A Hope That Cannot Be Buried

The women leave the tomb quickly. They are still afraid, but they are moving. Because resurrection does not remove fear, it transforms what we do with it. It gives us reason to keep going, to keep speaking, to keep loving. Even now. Especially now.

And maybe this is our prayer in this moment. That the small, fearful, power-hungry version of Jesus being lifted up in our world would finally be laid to rest and that the true Jesus, the one who conquered death by love, would rise again in our imagination, our faith, and our lives.

He is risen.

He is risen indeed.

Prayer for Resurrection in Our Time

Risen Christ,
You stepped out of the tomb
while the powers of this world still believed they had won.

You did not rise with violence in your hands,
but with peace in your voice.

Forgive us
for the ways we have made you small
for the ways we have tied your name
to power that looks nothing like your love.

Free us
from the fear that drives us to grasp for control.

Give us courage
to trust that your resurrection is enough
that your life cannot be contained,
and your kingdom cannot be enforced.

Teach us to follow you
not in domination,
but in humility,
not in fear,
but in hope,
not in silence,
but in truth.

And in a world still trembling
under the weight of death and injustice,
make us witnesses

people who live as if resurrection is real.

Because it is.

He is risen.

He is risen indeed.

Amen.

Now I'd like to hear from you! Did you find this helpful? What thoughts came to your mind as you read? Feel free to respond to this email and share your thoughts with me. I look forward to reading them. A Lent Day Devotional: I wrote a daily devotional in hopes to provide a companion for people seeking to follow Jesus through the season of Lent. There is also an audiobook version. You can read more about both below: $20.00 When Love Gets The Last Word: A Lent Devotional Each day of this Lenten devotional will focus on a portion of scripture and invite us to reflect on our lives and our... Read more Get it now! ​ $20.00 Audiobook: When Love Gets The Last Word. Each day of this Lenten devotional will focus on a portion of scripture and invite us to reflect on our lives and our... Read more Get it now! ​ Ways to support: If you'd like to support this project, you can do so through one-time-gift of any amount you feel is right. You can also subscribe through a $5/mo, $15/mo, or $25/mo. Several others have also asked for a recurring gift option that is different from the ones offered here, like this one. If you'd like me to set up a different option for you, please just send me an email with the word "support" in the subject line. As always, I really want to thank all of you for reading and for all the ways you support me and this project every single week. I'm thankful for the ways we are building this together and hope it creates a lasting, positive change in our world along the way! I sincerely appreciate you all, Ben Remember, you can now view this and all previous newsletters as well as invite friends to join through this link: https://benjamin-cremer.ck.page/profile.

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