Love's Redeeming Work Is Done

Introduction

Paul writes in the earliest creed of the church: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins … that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day … and that he appeared…”(1 Cor. 15: 3-4)

On Easter morning, the church does not gather to celebrate an inspiring symbol, a private spiritual feeling, or a metaphor about new beginnings. We gather to proclaim a fact at the center of the Christian faith: Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead.

That claim is not a legend the church slowly invented to cope with grief. It is the witness the church has proclaimed from the very beginning. The tomb was found empty. The disciples did not expect resurrection; they were startled by it. As

N.T. Wright states: “We weren’t expecting it. Dead people stay dead. Dead Messiahs stay dead. Everybody knows that.” And a reminder from John Lennox: “I don’t accept or reject the Resurrection on the basis of science. I accept it on the basis of eyewitness accounts of historical events.”

Even the first witnesses tell us something important: they were women, whose testimony in that culture would not have been the sort of detail one would invent to make a story more persuasive.

The frightened followers of Jesus became bold proclaimers of his resurrection, and they did so in the very world where his death had been publicly known. Christianity did not begin because people kept Jesus’ memory alive. Christianity began because they bore witness to the fact that Jesus is alive.

Now, that does not answer every question an honest person might have. But it does mean that Easter faith is not a leap into fantasy. It is a response to the God who has acted in history. And Matthew does not tell this story as though resurrection were a comforting religious idea. He tells it as an event that shakes the earth, opens the tomb, and changes the world.

So if you come this morning full of faith, hear again the good news. And if you come with questions, hesitation, or even doubt, hear this clearly: the Christian proclamation rises or falls on this one claim—that the crucified Jesus is now the living Lord. And Matthew 28 brings us to that dawn where heaven answered the grave.

Charles Wesley gives us a great Easter line: “Love’s redeeming work is done.” It is a line full of triumph, full of joy, full of resurrection hope. It tells us that in Jesus Christ, death has been defeated, the grave has been broken open, and God has spoken his final word over the Son whom the world rejected.

But Matthew does something striking. He does not take us straight to celebration. He takes us to dawn.

He takes us to that hour when the darkness is lifting, but the day is not yet full. He takes us to women walking toward a tomb, carrying grief and confusion. He takes us to a world still marked by suffering, still shadowed by death, still haunted by Friday’s violence and Saturday’s silence. And he lets us feel the question that hangs over the whole scene: was Jesus truly the Son of God, the promised King, the Holy One of Israel? Or has the grave spoken the final word?

That is the great tension of Easter. The tension between what has been promised and what has not yet been seen. The tension between Good Friday and resurrection morning. The tension between the world as it is and the new creation God has begun in Christ.

And if we are honest, that is where the church often lives too. Between promise and appearance. Between hope and grief. Between prayer and silence. Between what Christ has already done and what has not yet come in fullness.

Easter begins in tension

The women come at dawn, but the scene still belongs to death. The tomb, the stone, the guards all say the same thing: final.

But then heaven interrupts the scene.

Matthew does not describe a quiet discovery. He describes divine invasion. The earth quakes. The angel descends. The stone is rolled away. And in one of the most striking details in the passage, the angel sits on it.

That image is almost triumphant in its calm. The stone that had marked the supposed victory of death is now reduced to a seat beneath the messenger of heaven. The obstacle has become a footstool. The symbol of the grave’s finality has become the place where heaven sits in untroubled authority.

And notice this: the stone is not rolled away so that Jesus can get out. Matthew never suggests that the risen Christ was trapped inside, waiting for release. No, the stone is rolled away so that witnesses may see what God has already done. The tomb is opened, not to make resurrection possible, but to reveal that resurrection has already happened.

This is Easter’s great announcement. God has answered the grave. The cross was not the collapse of Jesus’ mission. The tomb was not the end of his story. The deepest tension of the Gospel is resolved: the crucified Jesus is the risen Lord. Jesus is alive!

God resolves the deepest tension

The women come at dawn. Everything before them seems to declare that the story is over, that the world’s verdict has won, that the crucified Jesus has been silenced by the grave.

But then heaven interrupts the scene.

Matthew does not describe a quiet discovery. He describes divine invasion. The earth quakes. The angel descends. The stone is rolled away. And in one of the most striking details in the whole passage, the angel sits on it.

That image is triumphant in its calm. The stone that had marked the supposed victory of death is now reduced to a seat beneath the messenger of heaven. The obstacle has become a footstool. The symbol of the grave’s finality has become the place where heaven sits in untroubled authority.

And notice this: the stone is not rolled away so that Jesus can get out. Matthew never suggests that the risen Christ was trapped inside, waiting for release. No, the stone is rolled away so that witnesses may see what God has already done. The tomb is opened, not to make resurrection possible, but to reveal that resurrection has already happened.

Look at what God declares over Jesus in this moment. The crucified one — the one the world rejected, mocked, shamed, and dismissed as powerless — is vindicated. The one they nailed to a cross is the very one God raises in glory. The world called him a fraud. The Father declares him faithful. The world declared him defeated. Heaven declares him Lord.

Even the Roman guards, those symbols of earthly power, cannot stand when heaven breaks in. They fall like dead men in the presence of the living God. Matthew is showing us that the authority of this world collapses when confronted by the authority of heaven. The whole scene begins to quake. The earth trembles. The stone is moved. The grave is opened. The world that seemed so stable, so settled, so sure of itself gives way before the glory of God.

And the women — these faithful women — come as servants of sorrow, and they leave as witnesses of resurrection. They come expecting to tend to the dead, and they leave bearing news of the living. They come weighed down by grief, and they are sent out with the first announcement of Easter morning.

What seemed settled is unsettled. What seemed final is overturned. What seemed closed is opened. What seemed defeated is vindicated.

This is Easter’s great announcement: God has answered the grave. The cross was not the collapse of Jesus’ mission. The tomb was not the end of his story. Death was not the final authority. The deepest tension of the Gospel is resolved here: the crucified Jesus is the risen Lord.

And yet, even with the deepest tension resolved, the women do not leave the tomb with detached certainty, but with fear and great joy.

Yet the women still leave with fear and great joy

Matthew tells us the women left the tomb with “fear and great joy.” That is not a contradiction; it is resurrection truth. They are joyful because Christ is risen. They are fearful because the living God has broken open the world they thought they knew. This is not the fear of condemnation, but the trembling of holy encounter. The old order has been shaken. Death has been answered. Heaven has drawn near. And when that happens, the heart does not respond with shallow cheerfulness. It responds with joyful fear—with wonder, awe, urgency, and worship.

Joyful fear is holy awe flooded with Easter hope.

This is the life of the church

Here is the great divide Easter creates: the same resurrection that awakens holy fear and great joy in the women hardens the guards and the religious leaders in doubt and rebellion. The women tremble, but they run toward worship and witness. The powers of this age tremble, but they retreat into denial and deception. Faced with the breaking in of heaven, the women surrender to the truth of God; their aggressors try to manage it, suppress it, and explain it away. That is always the dividing line of resurrection. Some meet the risen Christ with holy awe and are changed. Others meet the evidence of God’s new world and cling more tightly to the old one.

And this is where Wesley helps us. As Carla Works notes, John and Charles Wesley preached a salvation that transforms people by grace and produces outward holiness, yet John Wesley’s mature hope widened beyond individual renewal to the renewal of the whole creation. That same Pauline vision helps us hear Colossians clearly: the gospel is not about escaping the world, but about God’s refusal to abandon it. If God has not abandoned creation, then the resurrection of Jesus is the first bright sign that its renewal is already underway. So when Paul says, “If you have been raised with Christ,” he is calling the church to live now in light of the world God is already renewing.

So Easter is not only the vindication of Jesus, and it is not only comfort for troubled hearts. Easter is the breaking in of God’s new creation. It begins in the risen Christ, it lays claim to his people now, and it will one day encompass the whole redeemed cosmos. The challenge, then, is to remain a people of hope and a people of holiness: to keep longing for the fullness of Christ’s kingdom, and to let that coming kingdom shape our lives in the present.

Easter has happened, and yet the world is not yet fully new. Christ is risen, but creation still groans. The kingdom has broken in, but it has not yet come in fullness. And after so many centuries, many no longer feel the urgency of that promise. The temptation is either to stop expecting Christ at all, or to confess his resurrection without allowing it to reorder our lives. Yet Paul will not let us do either. If we have been raised with Christ, then we are called to live now as citizens of the coming kingdom—so that in our bodies, our homes, our speech, our mercy, our holiness, and our love, the world may catch a glimpse of what it means to pray, “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Conclusion

The world still knows sorrow, but death does not get the last word. The church still waits, but not without hope. The women still run, but not without news. The tension has been broken open by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Easter does not tell us that every tension in our lives vanishes by Sunday morning. The women still tremble. The disciples still must go. The world is still the world. But the deepest tension has been resolved forever: the crucified Jesus is risen. And because that is true, every fear, every sorrow, every unanswered ache now lives under a new horizon. We are an Easter people living in the already and the not yet—not pretending the struggle is over, but knowing the victory of Christ is sure.

Citations

Works, Carla. “Finish Then Thy New Creation:” God’s Promise to Inherit the World. Paper presented at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, 2018.