Matthew 28:9

The Text

The women are running. They have just been told by an angel that the tomb is empty and that they must deliver the news, and while they are still on the road, breathless, carrying fear and joy in the same chest, Jesus Himself steps into their path. One word: "Rejoice!" It is an ordinary greeting, the first-century equivalent of "good morning," and it is spoken by a man who was dead on Friday afternoon. They do not debate it. They fall, grab His feet, and worship. Then He speaks again, and what He says first is not a rebuke for their slowness but a commission wrapped in tenderness: don't be afraid, go tell my brothers.

The Core

Everything in Christian faith stands or falls on whether that body on the road was real. Matthew is almost crude about it: "They came and took hold of his feet." Not a vision, not an inner certainty, not a comforting sense that His spirit lives on in the community. Feet you can grab. The resurrection is not a metaphor for hope; it is the bodily vindication of the crucified One, God's public verdict that this death was not a failure but the payment it claimed to be. And notice who receives this first. Not the eleven, not the priests, not Rome. Two women, legally useless as witnesses, are made the first evangelists of the risen Lord. Grace behaves exactly as it always has: it goes first to those nobody would have chosen.

The Common Thread

From the very beginning of Scripture, God's rescue has a body. He makes a garment of skins, He walks in the garden, He wrestles in the dust with Jacob, He puts His glory in a tent pitched among tents. The long story was never about escaping matter; it was about God coming close enough to be touched. Matthew knows this. He began his Gospel with a name, God with us, and he ends it with women clutching the ankles of a man who had been in a sealed grave. The thread runs straight: promise, incarnation, cross, empty tomb, and then, seven verses later, "I am with you always." The resurrection is not an appendix to the plan of salvation. It is the moment the whole thread is pulled tight and holds.

The Mirror

Notice what He does not say. No reproach for the disciples who ran, no lecture to the women about their doubts at the tomb, no explanation of what the last three days cost Him. Just "Rejoice!" and then, almost immediately, work to do. If you are someone who assumes that encounters with God begin with your failures being itemised, this verse quietly dismantles that. He meets people on the road, mid-errand, with a greeting. And if you are someone who has let faith become a set of positions you defend rather than a person you hold on to, the women's instinct is a rebuke: they did not analyse, they grabbed. Your body knows things your arguments do not. Today, kneel. Actually kneel, on the floor of your bedroom or your office with the door shut, and say out loud: "You are alive, and You are my Lord." Ten seconds. Then get up and go back to what you were doing.

The Detail

The word Jesus speaks is chairete, the standard Greek hello, something like "good day." But Matthew has just used the same root one verse earlier: the women left the tomb with "great joy." He is playing. The ordinary greeting that passed between strangers in the market now lands on women who are already carrying joy they cannot contain, and it detonates. There is something almost comic in the restraint. The Lord of heaven and earth, three days out of the grave, opens with "morning." No thunder, no explanation, no speech. Which tells you something about how God tends to arrive: not usually in the earthquake of verse two, but in a familiar word spoken by someone you did not expect to be standing there.

The Profile

Matthew's first readers were Jewish believers who prayed the Shema daily, who knew that worship belongs to one God alone and that bowing to a man was the sin their ancestors had been exiled for. So when Matthew writes that the women "took hold of his feet, and worshiped him," and records no correction from Jesus, no "do not do that," he is saying something that would have made the hair stand up on the back of their necks. Add this: they lived with the rumour Matthew records a few verses later, the story that the body was stolen, still circulating in their streets. Their neighbours had an explanation ready. Matthew answers it with two women who touched His feet, knowing full well that no court in their world would accept their word.

The Intertext

Matthew bookends his Gospel with worship. Near the start, foreign stargazers fall down before a toddler in Bethlehem and open their treasures, the first outsiders to recognise what Israel's own capital missed. Here at the end, two women fall down before the risen man on a road outside Jerusalem. Both scenes involve people on the margins, both involve bodies on the ground, both are offered to Jesus without protest. In between, after He walks on the water, the men in the boat worship Him too, but then scatter at the arrest. Matthew is not interested in worship as a feeling. He traces it as a response to who Jesus actually turns out to be, and he notes, without comment, that it is usually the unlikeliest people who get there first.

Reflection

The women were interrupted while obeying an instruction they had barely understood. Where in your life are you currently moving forward on orders you do not fully grasp, and what would it mean to expect Christ to meet you there rather than at the destination?

If the resurrection is bodily and not merely spiritual, what difference should that make to how you treat your own body, your work with physical things, and the people whose physical needs you could meet this week?

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