An Empty Tomb - Reflections on Matthew 28:1-10, Easter Sunday, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Friday, January 30, 2026
In my 55 years of ordained ministry, I have preached exactly one Easter sermon. That fact requires some explanation. I was an associate pastor for two years, and the senior person insisted that he preach on that momentous day. Then I was a professor of Bible in two schools for 36 years. During those years, I was asked to serve as an interim senior minister for two churches in the area. During the second of those two interim assignments, part of two months there included Easter Sunday, amazingly enough, so finally, and for the only time, I was charged with the Easter sermon. I remember—it was nearly 30 years ago—feeling anxious and excited for the opportunity to proclaim the gospel on that day to a sanctuary bursting with people, a choir primed for joyous song, ending, of course, with Handel’s unmatchable “Hallelujah Chorus.”
I chose Mark’s version of the event as the basis for my sermon, simply because I find his account both the most amazing and the most mysterious of the Gospel’s tellings. I just love his brilliant ending, where the women “leave the tomb with fear and trembling, because they were terrified, and said nothing to anyone” (Mark 16:8). What a way to end the great story of the need for the announcement of the appearance, ministry, death, and resurrection of the Messiah, and instead the ending is silence! What Mark is up to there is the stuff of an interesting sermon, and I hope I offered one with at least minimal interest.
But this year we have Matthew’s account, and it surely is a different kettle of fish than Mark’s! Matthew does base his story on Mark’s, as he does quite often in his Gospel, but he here both expands and reworks what Mark has done. He seems to be trying to make clearer what he thinks Mark has left a bit cloudy. I frankly think that Matthew has failed to understand just what Mark was up to, and, like a University Professor, proceeds to “correct” Mark’s paper, which he finds rather unsatisfactory! Matthew first carefully names the two women who were witnesses to Jesus’ death, burial, and empty tomb (Mt.27:55, 61; 28:1), correcting Mark’s inconsistent lists (Mk.15:40,47; 16:1). There is no talk in Matthew of the women “anointing Jesus’s body,” since he had been already anointed by the “unnamed woman” (Mt.26:12). Mark tells that story, too (Mk.14:8), but has the women come to the tomb for an anointing anyway, a confusion—to Matthew at least—of a double anointing.
The “young man” in Mark 16:5 is identified in Matthew as “an angel,” consistent with Matthew’s heavily supernatural series of events (Mt.28:2,5). And Mark’s mystery of how the huge stone over the tomb got moved back (Mk.16:3-4), is made plain by Matthew’s angel whose angelic power rolled the stone away. Jesus’ resurrection has an apocalyptic cast when Matthew refers to a seismos (earthquake) occurring (Mt.28:2,4), as well as the figure of the angelic interpreter (Mt.28:5-7). Perhaps the most important alteration of Mark’s account by Matthew is the reworking of Mark’s astonishing fear and silence of the women into a joyful proclamation to the disciples of Mt.28:8: instead of “fear and trembling and silence,” Matthew speaks of “fear with great joy,” and a mad dash to tell the disciples, a completely different scene than Mark’s (Mt.28:8). In short, one might say that Matthew’s narrative has a sort of Cecil B DeMille tint to it, a loud, technicolor canvas, featuring guards, shaken by the earthquake, prone on the ground “like dead men” (Mt.28:4), a heavenly angel pushing the huge stone aside like a pebble, and seated on it (Mt.28:2), his “appearance like lightening” (Mt.28:3), Jesus himself appearing to the running women, who reiterates the command of the angel to them by saying, “Go tell your brothers that they should go off to Galilee, and there they will see me” (Mt.28:10). It is a scene fully worthy of Hollywood, and so movies have tried over and again to depict it on film. Mark’s silent and trembling women make for poor cinema!
Thus, it is Matthew’s version that gets by far the larger press, given its vast and detailed canvas. Still, the story, however differently conceived, remains the same enigmatic and mysterious one. The crucified Jesus is somehow alive, and the empty tomb is the witness to that astonishing reality. The fact that some of those prone guards at the tomb eventually get up and go into Jerusalem to tell the “chief priests” what they think has happened, and get paid off by the priests and the elders to spread the word that the disciples have stolen Jesus’s body while the guards slept, suggests that early reports of the story of Jesus’s supposed resurrection from the dead were circulating and needed to be quashed. The elders tell the guards, during the payoff, that they need not fear the wrath of Pilate due to their lack of vigilance at the tomb; the elders will take care of Pilate. Hence, says Matthew, “this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (Mt.28:15), that is down to the time of Matthew, perhaps 80CE, nearly 50 years after the event itself.
Some in my long-ago Easter crowd were anxious for me to say that Jesus had surely moved from death to life that day, somehow then proving to them what they had long heard and suggesting that they, too, could follow him at their own death. I did not do that for them. I told them the story, because that is where I find the truth—in the story. It is a story of the power of life over death, the certainty that death is not the final authority in life, that life of an eternal quality may be lived now in the power of Jesus, and that our grasp of the kingdom of heaven today is the call of Jesus to all of us. And we leave to God what may happen after we die. Further, because Mark’s women witnesses were silent, it is up to us to speak the truth of the story. As Frederic Buechner’s “Godric” says so eloquently, “All the death there is, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” Happy Easter to you!