We don’t hear too much about the angels in Easter sermons, but they did play an important role in what went on in the garden that morning. I acknowledge now that I got carried away in my youthful rhetoric in my political activism days in the early 1970s when I said in a speech, “On Resurrection morning, the angels committed the first Christian acts of civil disobedience.”
But they did do some illegal activity. The apostle Matthew reports that Pilate ordered a guard of soldiers to make the tomb “as secure as you know how” (27:65). The soldiers affixed Pilate’s seal to the stone barring entrance to the tomb (v. 66)—and breaking that official seal was a crime punishable by death. But Pilate’s efforts were to no avail. The angels struck down the military guard, and “an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone” (28:2).
The resurrection of Jesus was a defiance of Pilate’s authority. On Easter morning, the kingdoms of Jesus and of Pilate clashed. Whatever Jesus meant, then, when he told Pilate that the two of them represented different kinds of kingdoms (John 18:36), the unsealing of the tomb made it obvious that Pilate had no authority to cancel the Resurrection.
We should not be surprised, then, that the apostles later confronted local authorities with the proclamation “We must obey God rather than human beings” (Acts 5:29). And following the example of Easter morning, they welcomed angels—who often confronted political power elsewhere in Scripture (Dan. 3, 6; Acts 12)—who were sent to unlock the gates imprisoning them.
And then the women at the tomb: The words of women did not count for much in that patriarchal culture. A woman could not give testimony in a court of law. If one man killed another man and the only witnesses were a hundred women, no one saw it, from a legal perspective. But here Jesus tells Mary to report to the apostles what she has seen. Luke’s gospel captures the significance of this: “But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense” (24:11).
Mary Magdalene’s role in the Easter story certainly deserves an upgrade. Another time in the ancient past, the Lord searched for a woman in a garden. On that occasion, the woman and her husband hid from their Creator. Many Eves later, the risen Lord looked for a weeping woman in a garden, and he gently called her by name. Mother Eve had rejected God’s authority in response to the Serpent’s challenge to her to be her own god. On Easter morning, this daughter of Eve met her Lord in the garden and cried out to him through her tears: “Rabboni!” (teacher).
We rightly see the Easter narrative as having to do with authority: Some of us must accept it as true out of a fundamental trust in the utter reliability of God’s Word. But the actions of the angels and Mary’s encounter with the risen Savior point us more concretely to the authoritative power of Jesus Christ as the King of Kings and the supremely trustworthy witness to the truth.
Richard Mouw is a senior research fellow at the Henry Institute for the Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin University and former president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
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