The readings for Easter Sunday are the same for Years A, B, and C. Since they have been the subject of homilies in Years A and B, this homily will instead comment on Year A, Matthew’s resurrection account (27:62-28:20), part of which was read during the Easter Vigil. Matthew describes events that begin with the passion account to the resurrected Christ’s commission of the disciples.

Two threads are in play. One thread consists of one group’s attempt to prevent divine activity by placing Roman guards at the tomb (27:62-66), bribing them to say that Jesus’s body was stolen rather than resurrected (28:11-15). The other thread consists of events authenticating the resurrection: earthquakes, bodies of saints emerging from tombs, tomb guards becoming senseless, and the brilliant angel announcing, “He is not here, for he has been raised as he has said.” Brendan Byrne describes the two dynamics playing out concurrently and the triumph of one as “the emergence into daylight of what has been running below the surface all along, namely, that though the passion was something malevolent human beings did to Jesus, it was also something that God was doing, in the person of the obedient Jesus, for humankind” (Lifting the Burden, 221). 

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary arrive at the tomb as the earthquake returns (27:51) and are told that Jesus “is not here” and “he has been raised from the dead and he is going before you to Galilee.” On the way, Jesus meets them and changes the angel’s command from “tell his disciples” to “tell my brothers.” 

Jesus meets his disciples on a mountain, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” The passive construction denotes divine agency. God’s raising Jesus from the dead is at the same time exalting him to the right hand of God the Father. His last words are tender: “Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age,” echoing the opening of the gospel in 1:23, “Behold, the virgin shall be with child and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means “God is with us.”

Richard Clifford, S.J., has taught biblical studies for 55 years, most recently at the Clough School of Theology and Ministry, Boston College, and has written many scholarly and popular books and articles.