Matthew 28:1–10
After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. But 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, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
My favorite movie is The Princess Bride. Most of you know it. Here is what you need to
know if you don’t. Buttercup has been kidnapped by the slimy, velvet-clad Prince Humperdinck. Her true love Wesley is on his way to save her. But then – a slight problem. Wesley dies. His life is sucked away on a terrible machine in the Pit of Despair. His friends Fezzik and Inigo Montoya muscle his body to Miracle Max, who is part magician, part plot device, played by Billy Crystal. Inigo says Wesley is dead. Miracle Max scoffs: “Ooh, look who knows so much! It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There is a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead means… he’s slightly alive.” Max makes an enormous chocolate-coated pill. Wesley startles back to life. Eventually, they storm the castle and true love wins.
On Easter Sunday, we declare that Christ, over death, has won. We proclaim Christ’s resurrection with brass and choirs and cover that terrible machine of death, the cross, with flowers. True love triumphs. Every pit of despair is filled with unstoppable hope. Matthew in his Gospel goes out of his way to make one thing clear: Jesus was not mostly dead. He breathed his last. He gave up his spirit. He was taken down from the cross, wrapped in linen, sealed behind a stone, and guarded by soldiers whose job was to ensure no funny business. He was all dead. The empire made sure of it. The religious leaders made sure of it. Death itself made sure of it.
And then, the earth shakes. The stone rolls away. An angel blazes like lightning. And Jesus Christ is alive. Not mostly alive. Fully, gloriously, impossibly alive. This is not Hollywood. This is the great mystery. The kind of thing that makes your heart swell before your brain can catch up. The kind of thing that feels like music before it feels like meaning.
What strikes me this year is not only what happened. It is how people responded. Because there are two reactions in this story – two entirely different ways of meeting the impossible.
The first is the reaction of the guards. They saw everything. The earthquake. The blazing angel. The stone rolling back. And Matthew says: “For fear of him, the guards shook and became like dead men.” The Greek word is nekroi – dead. They don’t actually keel over, but they are paralyzed. Frozen. Overtaken. They encountered something they could not understand, could not control, could not categorize, and they shut down. They became, in a way, mostly dead. I understand that. Fear does that. When the ground shifts beneath your feet, when you feel powerless and exposed and wildly confused, the body freezes. The mind retreats to what it already knows. The guards, I suspect, went back to their posts. Back to the version of the world that made sense to them. Resurrection was unfolding three feet in front of their eyes, and they could not take it in.
Then there are the women. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, arriving in the blue hour before dawn. Not carrying spices, as in the other Gospels… Matthew simply says they came to see. Just to be near the place where everything had come undone.
They were afraid too. Of course they were. Creeping around tombs before dawn would frighten anyone. But in Pilate’s Jerusalem, fear was not an event. It was the architecture of daily life. Crosses lined the roads. Violence was public on purpose. Power was absolute and merciless. Perhaps you understand that kind of fear: not a spike of adrenaline but fear in the atmosphere, a cortisol fog you never fully escape.
So notice this. The angel says, “Do not be afraid.” Jesus says it too. And still, they are all afraid. It strikes me that fear is not optional in these stories. It is not a spiritual defect or a failure.
It is a completely human response to a world that has given you every reason to be afraid. Easter does not require you to be fearless. It meets you right there.
And then Matthew says something extraordinary: “They left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran.” Fear and great joy. At the same time. Not fear first, then joy once everything settles down. Not fear replaced by joy. Both. At once. In a single racing heart. And they ran before they understood. They ran before they had language. They ran before they could explain it. They ran because something in them refused to go dead inside. They were afraid and alive enough to move.
There is something crucial to know about Mary Magdalene. She had been dead inside before and wasn’t going back. The Gospels tell us that she met Jesus when he cast seven demons out of her. Whatever that meant in her time, we know this: her life had not been safe or simple. She knew what it was to lose herself. To come close to the edge. And she knew what it was to come back to herself. Mary knew the difference between mostly dead… and still alive.
So when the earth shakes, and the angel blazes, and the world comes undone, she is afraid. But she is not finished. She is still alive enough to move. And that is what resurrection often looks like. Not lilies and trumpets. Sometimes it looks like speaking or singing at your own spouse’s funeral. Sometimes it looks like showing up to both the sanctuary and the AA meeting in the same building on the same day. Sometimes it looks like sitting with a frightened family in an ICE hearing, not because you knew what you were doing, but because you couldn’t not go.
This week, I asked people a simple question on Facebook, I know, daring. But I am so glad I did. I asked, have you ever moved forward… while afraid? And story after story came creeping out like munchkins from the forest of the algorithm. People told me about the moment a diagnosis arrived like lightning on a screen, and what it was like to put on the super big girl pants and keep going anyway. People described hiking sheer cliffs, starting companies, or coming out to their parents, while caring friends sat at a table on the other side of the restaurant in support. Several people said: “I couldn’t let my kids see me back down.” One person wrote: “I didn’t realize how scared I was until I was safe enough to look back.”
They were afraid. And they moved anyway.
Then I received a message that stopped me cold.
She was nineteen. Pregnant. Terrified of becoming a single mother. So she followed the script – the one handed to her about what good girls do. She married him quickly. But even then, something in her knew. She spent the night before her wedding sobbing, she told me, because part of her was still alive enough to tell the truth to herself.
The marriage became abusive. It hurt her. It hurt her son. It rippled outward and hurt others. And in the end, the very thing she had been most afraid of happened anyway. The relationship ended. He was incarcerated. She became a single mother.
And she said: “I wish I had known I could do it. I wish I had known I would have been loved and supported. By family and by church. I wish I had known I could have chosen a better life sooner.”
That is what fear does at its most devastating. It can scare us mostly to death. Death in that we do not move toward the new life that is already trying to find us. What shocked me most about this story was who sent it. This is a woman who, in my book, is practically the definition of vibrant, even athletic faith. She runs marathons but she also delivers homemade lasagnas to struggling folks in southeast DC or Alexandria, many of whom are single moms. And maybe now I know why. Which tells me this: Resurrection is not a one- time event. It is an ongoing work. In many ways, it is a posture. And like Mary, the woman who sent me that message lives with a kind of eternal Easter inside her that propels her forward. She lives with good news so powerful that she wanted me to tell all of you not to let fear hold you back either.
Howard Thurman wrote: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Mary Oliver wrote: Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say ‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
That is the posture Easter asks of us. Easter puts a question to each of us this morning. It doesn’t ask, Are you afraid? Of course you are. Some of you are watching your life’s work be dismantled. Some of you are afraid to drive to the grocery store. Some of you are grieving a country that feels unrecognizable, or working so hard to hold it together that you’ve lost track of yourself entirely. That is not weakness. That is just Tuesday in the DC area in 2026.
Easter doesn’t ask, Do you understand everything? Of course we don’t. It asks us: Are we alive enough to move toward the promise of new life? The women ran before they understood. They moved before they had answers. They acted, and then they encountered the risen Christ. Jesus did not wait until they had it figured out.
He met them on the road. In motion. That’s the part that undoes me every time – Jesus did not appear to those who had everything sorted. He appeared to two women running, terrified, full of joy, with no idea what came next. And he said: Greetings.
I wonder if that is still how it works. We move afraid. We tell the truth afraid. We show up afraid. We love afraid. We forgive afraid. We begin again afraid. And we are surprised, surprised by resurrection, greeted by new life. And somewhere along the road, we are met. By grace. By life. By Christ himself. He is not here. He has been raised. Go quickly and tell. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Amen.