When Your Hope Has No Pulse

Matthew 28:1-10

April 5, 2026 (Easter) • Mount Pleasant UMC

Jesus was dead. Everyone knew it. Many people had seen him die horribly on a Roman cross just days before. Some of them had stayed long enough to see a soldier stuck a spear in his side and they saw the blood and water flow out. Jesus was dead and his followers were in hiding. The world had finally beat mercy and righteousness to death (cf. McKnight, Matthew, pg. 410). Jesus was dead and whatever hopes anyone had for him being their savior, their rescuer, had died on the cross along with him.

Sometime late on Sunday, two former followers of Jesus were walking on the road from Jerusalem to a village 7 miles away called Emmaus when another traveler joined them. The newcomer wanted to know what the two were talking about, and they are amazed that this person hasn’t heard about what had happened to Jesus in the city. They tell the traveler all about Jesus, then come the devastating words: “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). But now he’s dead, and a dead man isn’t going to redeem anything.

You’ve been there. I know you have, and so have I. We had hoped this new job would be better than the last, but the new supervisor is somehow worse than the old one. We had hoped to be more financially stable by now, but the medical bills keep piling up. We had hoped to live happily ever after, till death did us part, but the cancer was aggressive and took him far too soon. We had hoped that the war would end, we had hoped that she could get into that college, we had hoped that the school bully would change his ways. We had hoped. Are there any more desperate or devastating words in the English language? We. Had. Hoped. But it was not to be.

When your hope has no pulse, what do you do?

The women went to the tomb. They went there to care for their dead friend—because, remember, Jesus was dead, without a doubt. The women, of all people, knew that to be true. They were among the few of his followers who had stayed to the bitter end (cf. Matthew 27:55). And it was bitter. They had watched the one they had hoped, even believed, was the savior be brutalized, beaten, stabbed and spit upon. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they had watched him die. They had watched him be buried. They had watched the heavy stone be rolled in front of the tomb. And they had waited. Friday night, all day Saturday—because you couldn’t do anything on the sabbath, the day of rest. All night Saturday they waited until they couldn’t wait any longer. Matthew says “at dawn,” when the first light broke over the horizon, they went to do what? “To look at the tomb” (28:1). The other Gospels tell us that they bring spices to the tomb (Mark 16:1; Luke 24:1). They’re going to finish the burial. They’re going to take care of their dead friend. Because Jesus was dead. And friends and family take care of their dead. That’s why they go early to the tomb, to finish what they couldn’t on Friday. They don’t come with any other expectations and they certainly don’t come with any hope.

Have you ever waited through the night, hoping against hope? In the morning, the doctor is supposed to call. Your loved one may not make it through the night. The payment will come in the morning. You’ll hear about the new job, one way or the other, in the morning. Have you ever waited through the night like these women did? I lost over a whole day when I had my cardiac arrest; I passed out on Friday morning and didn’t wake up until Saturday evening. My family had to wait through the night, not knowing what would happen. Have you ever waited through the night?

One thing we know: after the darkness always comes the dawn. And yet, when the dawn arrives on Sunday morning, the women don’t have any more hope than they did during the night. Still, out of duty, they arise and head out to the tomb while the men disciples are still snoring away. It’s not that the men have lost more hope than the women; it’s that they don’t feel the same sense of duty the women do. Why go to the tomb? Jesus was dead. There’s no point. That part of their life is over and done with. So dawn finally arrives after what had to be the longest night of their lives, and the women head to the tomb alone.

As they are on the way, God is already at work. Matthew says there was a violent earthquake, followed by an angel who comes down and pushes the stone out of the way of the entrance. Make no mistake: the stone was not rolled back so that Jesus could get out. By this point, he is already raised. The stone is rolled back so that people could see in and know he is gone. But all they know is that there is an empty tomb. They don’t know yet that Jesus has been raised. In other words, “the empty tomb is not proof, only evidence” (Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 249). One other thing the angel does: he scares the guards who were sent by Pilate to protect the tomb. I sort of picture the angel coming down, pushing the stone out of the way, sitting on top of the stone (which is kind of comical to think about because the stone was round and would have been hard to sit on), and then the angel looks at the guards and says, “Boo!” Matthew doesn’t say that; that’s just my imagination. But it is true that angels usually tell people, “Do not be afraid.” That’s almost always the first thing they say to people because, it seems, their appearance is frightening. Except this time. They do say that to the women, but they don’t say it to the guards. And so the guards pass out. Matthew says these big, burly well-trained Roman soldiers were “like dead men” (28:4; Keener, Matthew [IVPNTC], pg. 395).

When the women do arrive, there are then three ways God reveals the resurrection to them. First, he does it through words—specifically the words of Jesus. The angel tells the women, “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said” (28:6). “Over and over Jesus predicted both his death and his resurrection” (McKnight 411). On at least one occasion when he did so, the disciples—Peter specifically—told him he was wrong. They were at Caesarea Philippi, way in the north of Israel, under the shadow of a mountain that was dedicated to all sorts of different gods. Peter had just confessed he believed Jesus to be the Son of God, and with that confession, Jesus felt free to begin to tell them what was going to happen, that he would be killed “and on the third day raised to life.” But Peter pulls him aside and says, “Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” (Matthew 16:13-22). Never, Lord? Those two words shouldn’t go together. I can’t imagine having the guts to tell Jesus (you know, the Son of God) that he was wrong. But the point is—they should have known this was coming and yet they missed it all because it didn’t fit in their box. It wasn’t what they expected out of the Messiah. When did God become so tame? When did God start doing only what they expected? I think we could ask the same question of our lives. How would we react if God did something out of the ordinary, something we didn’t expect, something outside of our box? He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. If Jesus said it, you can count on it. So first the angel pointed to Jesus’ words.

The second thing the angel points to is the material evidence: “Come and see the place where he lay” (28:6). Take a look for yourself. He’s really not here. Now, Matthew doesn’t tell us that the women went and looked into the tomb. Mark’s account (16:5) is the only one that says they do, but either way, we’re told that they hurry away from the tomb “afraid yet filled with joy” (28:8). Something has changed for them, and the only real explanation is that they saw with their own eyes that the tomb was empty. Now, what would you assume if you saw an empty tomb where, just days before, you had seen them put the body of your friend? There’s pretty much only two choices at this point. Either someone stole the body, which is the first assumption of those who see the tomb (cf. John 20:2), or (again pointing back to Jesus’ words) he really is risen from the dead (cf. Rawle, The Final Days, pg. 29). The angel says: look in the tomb and make your decision.

Of course, there were some (and still are some today) who claim that the resurrection is a made-up story. A fairy tale. A myth. That either the disciples carried his body away at night and made up the story of resurrection or that they all felt close to Jesus after his death and had a mass delusion that he was somehow still with them. That first story—that the disciples had stolen the body—is what the religious leaders told the guards to say so that they could avoid punishment. But do we really think these frightened disciples who were too tired and depressed to go to the tomb on Sunday morning could somehow overcome the elite training and strength that Roman soldiers had? And that they could keep up a lie the rest of their lives, a lie that most of them would be killed for? I’ve told this story before, but Chuck Colson, who was an advisor to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal, said that the most powerful men in Washington couldn’t keep a lie alive to protect the president. One by one they crumbled. Colson wrote this: “What we know today as the great Watergate cover-up lasted only three weeks. Some of the most powerful politicians in the world—and we couldn’t keep a lie for more than three weeks…Can anyone believe that for fifty years that Jesus’ disciples were willing to be ostracized, beaten, persecuted, and all but one of them suffer a martyr’s death—without ever renouncing their conviction that they had seen Jesus bodily resurrected? Does anyone really think the disciples could have maintained a lie all that time under that kind of pressure?” (https://breakpoint.org/watergate-and-the-resurrection/). Besides all of that, “those inventing an empty-tomb tradition would hardly have included women as the first witnesses…and Jesus’ resurrection could hardly have been proclaimed in Jerusalem if people knew of a tomb still containing Jesus’ body” (Keener 396). Look in the tomb! The material evidence points to this truth: Jesus was raised just as the angel said he was.

And if that wasn’t enough, the women got a third piece of evidence, though not from the angel. After all this, on their way back to tell the men disciples what was going on, they met Jesus himself. In Matthew’s Gospel, he doesn’t say much, but his presence is enough. Matthew says they “clasped his feet and worshiped him” (28:9). We know from all the accounts in the various Gospels that Jesus could come and go at will, appear and disappear, and yet he was solid, he could be touched, he could eat food. He was not a ghost. He has some kind of new body, a body designed and meant to live for eternity. He is raised forever, and we’re told in the letters of Paul that just as Jesus was raised, so we will be raised as well if we put our trust in him (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20). Jesus’ resurrection is the promise of our own, that we too will be given a new body to live forever. I would imagine that as they remembered Jesus’ words and saw the empty tomb, their hope began to be rekindled, but when they actually saw Jesus himself, alive and breathing again, their hope was resurrected. The new life that he had also became new life and new hope in them.

So let me ask again the question I asked earlier: when your hope has no pulse, what do you do? I don’t know what the rest of the world does or where the world finds hope, but followers of Jesus cling to the promise of resurrection. No matter what else happens, that promise remains. There is always hope and there is always a new beginning. You hear me say it often, and certainly every year at Easter: friends, if resurrection means anything it means that the worst thing is never the last thing. Say it with me: the worst thing is never the last thing. In the end, cancer does not win. Divorce does not win. Joblessness does not win. Drugs and addictions do not win. Broken relationships do not win. Death does not win. Paul says that the last enemy of all of us is death (1 Corinthians 15:26), and if Jesus has defeated even that, then there is nothing more we need to fear. That’s why at every funeral I do, I remind people of the hope of the Gospel, using Paul’s words: “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54). Nothing in this world will win because Jesus has already won.

One of my favorite children’s book was written in 1950, so it’s 76 years old this year. It’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, and it became the beginning of a whole series of books set in the magical land of Narnia. Netflix is adapting the books into a series and I’m really hoping they don’t mess it up. But the first book in the series is really a retelling of the story of Jesus. During World War II, three children find their way into Narnia, where the land is frozen under the control of the White Witch. It’s always winter and never Christmas, so the story goes, because their redeemer, the great lion Aslan, has been missing for some time. The residents of Narnia hold onto the hope that when Aslan returns, spring will come. In the course of the story, Aslan does return, and in order to save one of the children, Aslan submits to the power of the White Witch. He gives himself to set the child free from the Witch. It’s a rather scary scene as the witch takes Aslan away and kills him, which breaks the hearts of the children. They wait and they cry and they wait some more. And within a short time, there is an earthquake and the place where Aslan was lying breaks in two Suddenly when they look he is alive again. The very first time I was reading this story to Christopher, I will never forget, he sat up at the moment when we got to that point in the story and said, “That’s Jesus!” Up until that point it had been a wonderful fantasy story for him. But when Aslan was raised, that gave the story away. That’s when Christopher knew. And that’s when we all know, too. When Jesus is raised, we know that hope has returned and spring has come again—because resurrection tells us that the worst thing is never the last thing.

Jesus stands before them and tells them not to be afraid. And then he gives them specific instructions: “Go and tell” (28:10). There are many times throughout the Gospels Jesus heals a person or does something and then tells the recipient not to tell anyone. It never stops them, but he at least tries. Some people think he was trying to keep his presence and his actions a secret, but at no point does he say that instruction is for all time. He just wanted people to wait to tell until the story was complete. He didn’t want only half the story to be told. Now, after his death and resurrection, he says, “You can tell anyone you want. Start with the disciples!” And then, later in this same chapter, he tells them to go tell everyone. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he will say (28:19). Go and tell—not just a few, but everyone! It’s not a secret, not anymore, because new life and new hope is available to literally everyone. So that person who struggles to find hope because they’ve lost a loved one this past year—go and tell them that Jesus is alive! That person who lost their job and is struggling to find a new one—go and tell them that Jesus is alive (and maybe help them with their resume)! That person who is deep into an addiction that they can’t break on their own—go and tell them Jesus is alive (and that he can break those chains for them if they will let him)! That person whose marriage is on the rocks—go and tell them Jesus is alive (and wants to be a part of all of their relationships)! And to yourself when your hope has no pulse—go and tell that Jesus is alive and because he’s alive, everything has changed.

So we’re going to do something a little different this morning. Every few years, Easter falls on a first Sunday of the month. And the first Sunday of the month is our usual communion Sunday here at Mount Pleasant. And when these two things coincide, there’s always the discussion: do you have communion on Easter? Every time we discuss it, I always come back to this question: why not? Why not share in this practice that reminds us of his death but also points to his resurrection? When we take the bread and the cup in holy communion, we “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). He’s coming back—because he’s alive! On this side of the first Easter, his death points toward his resurrection. We know how the story ends! So this morning, in joyful hope, we are going to come to the table and receive the bread, his body, and the cup, his blood, and we will give thanks, we will celebrate, we will remember and we will live as people of hope. Will you join me in prayer as we prepare to come to the table?