Bible Commentaries

Matthew 28:1

Did you ever read Isaac Taylor's Saturday Evening? In1842 B. Gregory introduced it to me. What it was all about I have forgotten, but not the deep tranquil impression made by it—

Light

Which broods above the sunken sun,

And dwells in heaven half the night....

Well, that was Isaac Taylor's Saturday evening, and this is mine; and for many years every Saturday evening I have felt just like that, "In the beginning of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week".

My dawning is begun, like the Jews" dawning, the evening before... for the sense of benignity and regard, outgoing and unrestrained, is always very strong upon me, being like deep waters—a tidal sway of affection—"of pure affection round earth's human shores"; and it is one of the most delicious feelings on earth. As Saturday evening is to the coming Sabbath, so is this feeling to the coming heaven.

—James Smetham.

References.—XXVIII:1.—R. M. Benson, The Life Beyond the Grave, p12. XXVIII:1-10.—T. A. Gurney, The Living Lord and the Opened Grave, p196. XXVIII:1-15.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—St. Matthew XVIII-XXVIII. p350. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No2323. XXVIII:2.—B. D. Johns, Pulpit Notes, p7. A. G. Mortimer, Jesus and the Resurrection, p82. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv. No863. XXVIII:2-5.—R. M. Benson, The Life Beyond the Grave, p33. XXVIII:4-6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlviii. No2773.

Seeking Jesus

Matthew 28:5

How much more do the angels know? If they know anything, they may know something more; they may be better acquainted with us than we suppose. We must be of interest to them because we are of interest to their God. The angels are inquirers, students; they desire to look into the meaning of the blood.

It is an angel who speaks in this most tender and imusical text. "I know that ye seek Jesus." This is in striking contrast to something that is also related nn the context—to the great earthquake. Man is eever so helpless as in an earthquake. God keeps the arthquake for special occasions. The sturdiest man amongst us withers away when he feels the earth rocking. The angel answered and said unto the women, "It is different with you, you have no need to fear"—"for I know that ye seek Jesus," and they who seek Jesus need never tremble; earthquake, or no earthquake, their sanctuary is safe.

I. The difference between the people who fear spiritual presences and the people who do not fear them and rather welcome them, is this: the one people seek the sepulchre, the other seek the Christ. There are many people who have no objection to the sepulchre, there are travellers who go long distances in order to see the sepulchre who would not move an inch to see the Saviour. Such men are lovers of form, special places, extraordinary ceremonies. To see the sepulchre is what they come for; they would be afraid if they saw Him who had lain in it but some three days ago.

II. "Fear not," though you are seeking Christ at the wrong place, as these women were. We must have greater sympathy with people who are trying by some stumbling way to get at the right end. We have been too severe with the stumblers. They are just as good souls as we are, they may even be nearer heaven than those whose Christianity is a mere correctness. Christianity is not an exercise in conventional correctness. Some poor honest souls are going to the wrong place, but they are going for the right thing; they are orthodox. He who seeks truth with an honest soul and a clean heart is orthodox, though he does not believe a word that I believe, in its merely alphabetical or controversial sense.

III. Our Christianity needs widening and deepening; we have all the earth part of it, but we want the firmament. No man was ever saved by correct notions. Man is more than a coat, man is more than a body. Man has a body, but he is a spirit. All this may be perverted by those who would pervert bread and water. We cannot always guard ourselves against the perverting spirit, it is a most mischievous and uncontrollable spirit; we must not therefore give way to those who would shut us up to our own little nutshell notions and say that there is nothing beyond. God has still more light, and we must find it, because to seek it is to obey an impulse Divine.

IV. Some seek Christ as an ideal. Ideal is the favourite word of the ecclesiastical hour; in fact, it is the idol-word of the political hour as well. Some seek Christ as an ideal, a novelty in poetry, a variety in intellectual life. Jesus Christ is enrolled and honoured and invited to a very high place in the pantheon, and He is told that this seat, this throne of ivory, is His own. He is regarded as an ideal. What did the angel say? He spoke other language, he spoke in accordance with tragic facts; the air was still hot with the terrible tragedy, and the angel caught its spirit and expressed it in a word. He said, "I know ye seek Jesus"—yes, but what Jesus? the ideal, poetic, transcendental Jesus? No—"I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified". That is His title; do not abbreviate it, do not corrupt it by excision; it will bleed to death if you do not give the full style, title, and address of the Son of God. "Jesus, which was crucified "—the man in whose palms the nails were driven and on whose brow the thorns were enwreathed; I know the Christ you are seeking; you know Him by blood-marks. That is the Christ we have too much forgotten. We are admirers, but not believers. Drop your admiration, and get back to living faith in Him who was crucified. Crucifixion meant redemption. On the one side the crucifixion was a Jew's murder; on the other, a Divine expiation, a new illumination, of the will of God, a grand interpretation of the purpose of the creation of human nature.

—Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vi. p194.

References.—XXVIII:5 , 6.—F. W. Farrar, Expository Sermons on the New Testament, p38. XXVIII:5-7.—J. Grierson, Scenes and Interviews with the Risen Saviour, p11. XXVIII:5-8.—R. M. Benson, The Life Beyond the Grave, p63. XXVIII:6.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i. No18; vol. xviii. No1081. W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Times, vol. xlix1903 , p512. I. Lloyd, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xli1892 , p246. R. W. Dale, ibid. vol. lxviii1895 , p230. A. L. Kemp, ibid. vol. lxvii1905 , p233. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p313; see also Sermons for the Aged (3Series), p53. R. J. Campbell, New Theology Sermons, p17. T. T. Munger, The Freedom of Faith, p295. A. G. Mortimer, Jesus and the Resurrection, p109. J. Keble, Sermons on Various Occasions, p523. D. Rose, Christian World Pulpit, vol. i. p321. G. W. McCree, ibid. vol. xxxix. p314. Preacher's Monthly, vol. ix. p214; vol. x117. Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii. p562. Armitage, American Pulpit of the Day, vol. i. p251. XXVIII:7.—T. T. Munger, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxviii. p273. XXVIII:8-10.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No2323.

Two Environments (Preached on Easter Sunday Morning)

Matthew 28:9

Jesus had a way of meeting people unexpectedly. He has never abandoned that significant and blessed way. Jesus waylays men; Jesus watches the travellers, counts their footfalls, observes the whole manifestation of their personality when they are in grief and wonder and tender communication one with another; and at the right moment, for Jesus keeps all the moments, He joins them, faces them, suddenly encounters them, and asks them delicate and feeling questions. The appearances of Jesus Christ would seem to be always sudden, though they have been expected for centuries; for they have been foretold by the most elaborate and dignified prophecy.

I. Shall we look at the environment of the Resurrection? What is that first object that you see? "It is a garden; there is a tomb in it." I do not speak of that, I reverse your sentence, retaining its history and enlarging its meaning. We could say moaningly and fretfully, almost, indeed, atheistically, There was a tomb in the garden. That is poor talk. How can you improve it? Easily, by almost inverting it: there was a garden round the tomb. That is better, the Gospel gleams in that nobler talk. In my lowest moods, in my saddest depression, I see only the tomb, and after some spirit has talked with me for a moment I lose sight of the tomb in the broader, lovelier view of the garden. Let the athiest say there was a tomb in the garden; I pray my God to help me to say there was a garden around the tomb.

Is there anything in the environment of the resurrection to match the garden beauty and the garden fragrance? Yes. What is it? Morning: "As it began to dawn". It always begins to dawn when we are conscious of the presence and the blessing of the dear Lord. His coming means light, morning, something that has to grow, an increasing light, a gleam of the heavenly lightning that makes and seeks the eternal that it means. So far, then, the environment is right, garden and morning, how they match one another! what a duet is that! let them sing their music to the accompaniment of the spheres. Garden and morning—what next? What we call spring, April, the time when the green blade is coming up or the little flower has fought its way through the frost and snow. When Christ rises all things rise; when Jesus comes up from the tomb there is no tomb, He has left it; now there is nothing but vernal beauty, vernal music thrills the responding air. A lovely environment, garden, morning, spring—what more? Angels. A beautiful picture it is to see the angel of the Lord coming and thrusting back the little pebble that was rolled to the door of the tomb, and—oh the subtle irony! oh the holy contempt!—rolling back the stone and sitting on it! Marmion waved the fragment of his blade in sign of victory, a sign in its way and at the time pardonable, but there stands out one utterance and expression of victory grander than Marmion's waving of his blade. The angel of the Lord flicked away the stone with its red Roman seal, and having set it a few inches away sat upon it. It is then a right beautiful environment, and full of holy suggestion, and wet with a very gracious pathos, wet as with sacred teal"s, such as might have dropped from heaven. Garden, morning, spring, angels; that is resurrection, resurging, coming back to flood and throne and final diadem.

II. We do not see all the beauty of that environment until we contrast it with the environment of the birth. What do we see at the nativity of Christ? A manger, and no garden; night—"and there were shepherds keeping their flocks by night". This Child is going to be born in the darkness, He may bring the light with Him, He has always done Matthew 28:10

In Thomas Boston's Memoirs for9 December, 1710 , the following entry occurs: "This night I was in bad case. I find it is not easy for me to carry right, either with or without the cross. While I was walking up and down my closet in heaviness, my little daughter Jane, whom I had laid in bed, suddenly raising up herself said, She would tell me a note; and thus delivered herself: Mary Magdalen went to the sepulchre. She went back again with them to the sepulchre; but they would not believe that Christ was risen, till Mary Magdalen met Him; and He said to her, "Tell My brethren, they are My brethren yet". This she pronounced with a certain air of sweetness. It took me by the heart: "His brethren yet" (thought I); and may I think that Christ will own me as one of His brethren? It was to me as life from the dead."

O infinite mercy! How dost Thou raise their titles with Thyself! At first they were Thy servants, then disciples; a little before Thy death, they were Thy friends; now, after Thy resurrection, they were Thy brethren. O mercy without measure, why wilt Thou, how canst Thou, O Saviour, call them brethren, whom in their last parting, Thou foundest fugitives? Did they not run from Thee? And yet Thou sayest, "Go, tell My brethren!"

—Bishop Hall.

References.—XXVIII:10.—F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life, vol. i. p187. XXVIII:11-16.—C. S. Robinson, Sermons on Neglected Texts, p100. E. D. Matthew 28:19

I. Among the characteristics of Jesus" teaching which have passed into the higher consciousness of Christianity is an inextinguishable optimism. If He called apostles they were to disciple every creature, and if He died it was for a world. His generation might condemn Him, but they would see Him again on the clouds of heaven. He looks beyond His own land, and embraces a race in His plans.

1. This high spirit has passed into the soul of Christ's chief servants. The directors and pioneers, the martyrs and exemplars of our faith have no misgivings; the light of hope has ever been shining on their faces. They might be losing but their Commander was winning. The Cross might be surrounded with the smoke of battle, it was being carried forward to victory.

2. They were right in this conviction, but do not let us make any mistake about the nature of this triumph, else we shall be caught by delusions, and in the end be much discouraged. The kingdom of God will not come through organization but through inspiration. Its signs will not be the domination of a Church, but the regeneration of humanity.

II. Have there been no grounds for optimism? Has the splendid hope of Christ been falsified? One may complain that the centuries have gone slowly, and that the chariot of righteousness has dragged upon the road. But Christ has been coming and conquering. We are apt to be pessimists, not because the kingdom of God is halting, but because it has not raced, not because the Gospel has failed to build up native churches in the ends of the earth with their own forms, literature, martyrs, but because every man has not yet believed the joyful sound.

1. There are two grounds for the unbounded optimism of our faith, and the first is God. How did such ideas come into the human mind? Where did the imagination of the Prophets and Apostles catch fire, where is the spring of the prayers and aspirations of the saints? Whence do all light and love come? Surely from God.

2. The other ground for optimism is Jesus Christ. Does it seem that the perfect life for the individual and for the race is too sublime: that it is a distant; and unattainable ideal? Christ lived as He taught. He bade men lose their lives and He lost His; He bade men trample the world under foot, and He trampled it; He commanded men to love, and He loved unto death. This He did as the forerunner of the race. Why not again with Christ as Captain?

Only one institution in human society carries the dew of its youth; and through the conflict of the centuries still chants its morning song. It is the religion of Jesus.

—J. Watson (Ian Maclaren), The Inspiration of Our Faith, p37.

References.—XXVIII:18-20.—R. Rainy, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii1893 , p300. C. Gore, ibid. vol. Matthew 28:19-20

I. Consider first, the deposit of the Church. The one truth emphasized in this phase of the Missionary Manifesto is that of the absolute authority of Christ; His supremacy and sovereignty; the fact that He shares the throne of empire with none. The word here translated "authority" does not suggest power in the sense of energy or might. The first intention of the word is that of the power of choice—that Matthew 28:19-20

This idea, that the sense of Christ's presence is vouchsafed to obedience and service, is illustrated by Mr. Hutton's well-known phrase about "the sacramental power of common everyday duty".

"No one who does not go away, leaving all and going alone," said Gilmour of Mongolia as he sailed from England, "can feel the force of this promise; and when I begin to feel my heart threatening to go down, I betake myself to this companionship, and, thank God, I have felt the blessedness of this promise rushing over me repeatedly when I knelt down and spoke to Jesus as a present companion from whom I am sure to find sympathy."

References.—XXVIII:19 , 20.—F. D. Maurice, Lincoln's Inn Sermons, vol. iv. p29; see also Sermons, p33.

The Abiding Presence

Matthew 28:20

I. Such is the promise of the Lord Christ. It is exactly like Himself. It is like Him, first, because of its sublime, unhesitating self-assertion. He speaks and acts always as with an absolute certainty that to the salvation of the world, and of the soul, to the whole depth and range of human need—its sin and its sorrow, its perplexity, its death—He is necessary and He is adequate. Listen to this imperial Prince and Leader, who is so absolutely sure of Himself, and then, with hearts open and unreserving, make sure for yourselves of Him. The human soul that has come to know itself, its sin, its wants, its hunger and thirst, its true ideal, and then comes to look with worshipping desire towards Christ, finds Christ, in self-evidencing justness, the key to fit its lock, and thus knows Him with a knowledge as unshakable as our certainty of ourselves. And to know Him, what is it in its issues? It is the life eternal. It is heaven poured out into the necessities of time.

II. Further, these words of our Lord are just like Him because what they promise is His personal presence with His followers. And this is just like the Lord Jesus Christ, because at every turn in the Gospel story you see Him as the leader who not only leads but also positively delights in the company of His followers. He haunts them through the Forty Days, week after week, in His new and wonderful life, till at last He ascends indeed out of their sight, but with a final positive promise to return in visible glory, and undertaking meanwhile to be with them all the days and all day long, in a mysterious unseen companionship, as intimate as possible, even to the end.

Such is the heart of our Lord Jesus Christ towards us. We are entirely unworthy of Him; we are ignorant, we are far more sinful than we know, we are indeed a contrast to His pure glory. Yet such is His heart. "His delights are with the sons of men." As Creator of our nature, as Redeemer of our souls, He takes pleasure in us. There is no surer index of a perfect affection than the desire and purpose of perpetual company. And He says, "I am with you, all the days and all day long".

III. The Christian life—what is it at its heart? It is to know that we belong to the Christ of God, and to live that condition out.

How shall it be lived? Who is sufficient for such a life? The answer, as I take it, is given us here, direct and clear: He is sufficient, be he man or boy, who uses his Lord as a living Presence all the days and all day long.

—H. C. G. Moule, Christ's Witness to the Life to Come, p135.

The Real Presence

Matthew 28:20

Jesus is here! If we could repeat these words with the reverent simplicity of little children, a new power of believing prayer would be kindled in the heart of the Church of England.

I. We modern Christians explain the promise of the abiding presence of Jesus as a theological influence. The first disciples accepted it as a concrete fact, verified from day to day in a rich and living experience.

II. Now it is just when we look at the life of the early Church that we see how simple was their belief in the real presence of their Lord. It was because they believed that Jesus was really with them still, that the brotherhood of which they were members became the home and temple of His Spirit, that the sacraments whereby it was welded into one were a ministration of the life and powers of the world to come. Jesus was there—not merely the Spirit manifested through Him, but the very Lord who showed them His hands and His side. Jesus was there in the midst of the Church, guiding, controlling, inspiring, choosing His ministers, comforting His saints!, receiving His martyrs.

This was the secret of the grand and simple faith of the early Christians. To them Jesus was no sentimental idea, no romantic abstraction of the mind which a warm and ardent fancy clothed with the attributes of a tender personality.

III. What a majestic faith is here! It is the faith of children. But alas! our lot has fallen upon other days. We falter where they firmly trod. And yet no other faith is Christian. It is what the Church needs Today, the sure and certain conviction that Jesus is Himself here, that Christ is with us always even to the end of the days.

—J. G. Simpson, Christian Ideals, p309.

The Presence That Never Faileth (Whitsunday)

Matthew 28:20

It was the last promise that He gave to His disciples. And now we read them as the Saviour's legacy to the Church. For these words are unlimited in their application. Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the ages, even to the final consummation, when His purpose will be completed and the work of the Church done.

I. This is substantially the truth which is brought before our minds Today, the truth which Whitsuntide recalls and emphasizes. The one Divine fact which underlies all the rest is this: that Christ on that day began to fulfil and prove His last promise. All that they saw and felt on that day and every day afterwards were manifestations of His presence. He had come again; He was in their midst; His spirit was in contact with theirs; His power rested upon them; He swayed them, in fact, more mightily than ever He had done during His life. Aforetime He had been outside their lives, a face to behold, a voice to hear, a master to follow. Now He was even nearer, He was within them; they were the temple in which He dwelt; He had become a part of their very nature, and in all they said and did they felt the movements of His spirit, and laboured and suffered with a power greater and Diviner than their own.

II. This is the greatest of Christian facts. It is the truth which gives our faith all its substance and certainty and which inspires the believing heart with all its confidence and hopefulness. That which makes the Christian life is an undoubting belief in a present living mightily working Christ. His ministry was not for three years, but for all the ages.

III. His unseen presence and power make the perpetual miracle of Church history and Christian life. It is a strange thing that since He vanished from the view of the disciples He has never been seen again by mortal eyes, never again, save by one man—Paul. But there is a far stranger thing than that It is an infinitely more wonderful thing that He has done all His most wonderful works among men since His visible presence was taken away, and without showing Himself at all. Millions of men and women in every period of Christian history have been more moved and inspired by the unseen Christ than the most devoted of His disciples were moved and inspired by the sight of His bodily form. He is to the moral world what the vital forces are in the natural world. No one can see those vital forces or explain how they work. We can only see the results. They clothe the landscape with verdure, they cover the hedges with blossoms, they change ugliness into beauty, and waste places into gardens of delight. And thus the unseen Christ works in the moral world. Everywhere moral life springs into beauty where His visible hand has been.

—J. G. Greenhough, Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, p123.

The Abiding Presence (Ascension Day)

Matthew 28:20

To none whom we have known was it ever given to say, "I am with you alway". And one intention of their going, and of our going presently, is to make us turn from all that is dying and changing, to Him to Whom alone it belongs to say, "Lo, I am with you alway".

The contrasts of this world are essential to the setting forth of the eternity of the Resurrection-life of Christ, and the value of His abiding presence.

I. He spake these words after He had Himself passed through death, after He had proved and tasted the bitterness of separation.

What joy to hear the voice of some lost dear one at our side once more, saying, "I left you for a little while; it was needful that I should go; but now I am back again, to stay with you for ever!" Listen, then, to Him Whose love surpasseth every love: "I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore". "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen."

But some man will say, "Oh! that that presence were but visible! I cannot realize, or enjoy, an invisible presence."

Certainly. It does require strong exercise of faith; that other sense added to the natural faculties—a gift of God—to be prayed for and cherished. But that invisible presence once apprehended, it is more real, more precious, than a visible. For a visible must come and go, as Christ did in the flesh. We could not have it always; it is not in the compass of our present nature. But now, always and everywhere, we carry it along with us without the possibility of interruption, without the shadow of a change, because it is invisible: "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world".

After our Lord's Resurrection He never once showed Himself, or uttered a single word, to unbelievers; all that He said and did was for believers only. To His own people alone Christ spake during those forty days, and His last and best words were, "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world".

II. But observe the full meaning of the words more literally rendered. "Lo, I am with you all the days, until the consummation of the age."

What force and beauty there is in those words, "all the days". They convey, before the mind of the Speaker, that "all the days" lay ranged in order, to the end of time. To Him they were altogether but so many "days"; and yet each "day" was distinct and separate, with its own proper history, in His sight. And all along that line of "days," and around the "days" of our father's lifetime and our own, and our children, and children's children, on each and on all the "days" He saw the Changeless Presence in the midst of the changeable and changing—that constant, lasting presence. "Lo, I am with you all the days, unto the end of the world" (or, the consummation of the age). "Amen." We are always stepping out into an unknown future; but the foot cannot fall outside the presence of Jesus.

III. As to the method and nature of that presence, it were better to leave it, as if some dear dying friend had said, in his last moments, "I shall never be far from you: though you see me not, I shall be about your path and about your bed; and not a single day or night shall pass but I shall be with you there". So simply did my Saviour say it, and so simply would I take His words.

References.—XXVIII:20.—W. Branscombe, A Book of Lay Sermons, p235. T. L. Cuyler, Christian World Pulpit, vol. Leviticus 1899 , p167. A. Murray, ibid. vol. lxx1906 , p62. E. L. Hull, Sermons Preached at King's Lynn (3Series), p168. H. C. G. Moule, Fordington Sermons, p46. G. A. Chadwick, Aids to Belief, p84. W. J. Knox-Little, The Perfect Life, p301. Henry Jellett, Sermons on Special and Festival Occasions, p123. George A. Gordon, Christian World Pulpit, lxxvii. p227.