Resurrection, Geography, and Gender in Matthew

Easter Vigil, Year A 2023

The resurrection account in Matthew (28:1-10) elaborates the pithier but potentially unsatisfactory version in Mark—which at least some scholars think is incomplete, part of the text lost—to present an account with two key traditions about the risen Christ.

Mark’s version had provided the cliffhanger that Jesus would meet the disciples in Galilee, and while it foregrounded the experience of the women at the tomb they did not see Jesus (at least in what remains of that text). Instead, the anticipated appearance in Galilee was the whole of the Markan Easter expectation (colored of course by the emphasis on their fear and silence).

Matthew—like Luke and John—knows a story of the women’s experience being crowned by an encounter with the risen Christ. This is woven into the narrative, without taking away from the promise and significance of the Galilean appearance to come. Matthew’s both-and allows the priority of the women’s experience at the tomb (cf. John 20), which was clearly something remembered across traditions and communities (Paul notwithstanding), but which still points to the appearance in Galilee as fundamental.

The Galilean tradition is also common beyond the Synoptic tradition, in that John includes a story related to it in the “appendix” of John 21, the appearance by the Sea of Tiberias (Luke omits all the Galilean material, apparently wanting to emphasize a mission that would start in Jerusalem and extend from there outwards). Apart from whatever this tells us about memories of appearances by Jesus, the significance of Galilee seems at least in part a contrast with Jerusalem itself.

White Angel of Mileševa Monastery, Serbia, 1230; image Levan Ramishvili

In Jerusalem the seat of royal power, Jesus the true king had been rejected, tried and condemned. In Galilee the poor man Jesus was acclaimed, healed the sick, fed the crowds, and taught those who would listen.

The strong emphasis on the Galilean nature of the appearances to the apostles—which we only hear fulfilled (on a Sunday at least) at Trinity Sunday—also resonates with the particular stories of their call. They are not going to meet him in Galilee just because it’s a sort of friendly “blue state” for a people’s Jesus, but because this is where they had once responded to him, and where their call will be renewed in the command to baptize and teach (28:16-20), which is a recapitulation of how, as well as where, they first met him (4:18-22). This point is picked up beautifully and more directly in John 21, where Jesus even has to call them from the boats again, but this is already clearly the idea in Matthew’s angelic announcement to the women. Galilee is the place.

And the women? Paul’s omission of them in his own catalog of resurrection appearance (1 Cor 15: 3-9) is lamentable, but can also be understood not as a deliberate erasure, nor an indication that the traditions about the women and the empty tomb were later, but as emphasizing—to a fault—the point that is also being made here and there about resurrection and apostolicity. The point of the resurrection isn’t experience or evidence, as we are constantly tempted to think, it’s action and response. This is where Paul was both right and wrong; right that apostolicity, not mere assent, is the consequence of Easter faith, but wrong that the women who were the first witnesses were not among the apostles themselves.

Matthew is almost as helpful as John in making the women’s apostolate clear, not only in attributing joy as well as fear to them as they rush to tell the disciples, but having them meet Jesus on the way. Yet this encounter is a still part of a journey that will take them all back to the place where it had begun.

Albert Schweitzer evokes this Galilean reunion better than I can:

“He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside,
He came to those men [sic] who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”¹

1. The Quest of the Historical Jesus, London: A & C Black, 1910, p. 401