This leads me to the fourth and last point, which is the word “tell.” There’s a wonderful sequence to these four words. If we come, if we see that the tomb is empty, if we are commissioned to go, then it is inevitable that we must have a message to tell. Good news must be told. If we don’t tell it, we don’t really recognize how good it really is. If your children hunt for eggs on Easter Sunday morning, have you noticed that they never find an egg without telling you about it? If you have three children in your family, as I do, each egg is reported on three times. In our house we hid twenty eggs, so we had sixty announcements at home. Every time an egg was found, the little one said, “Look, I found an egg!” And then the next oldest said, “Yes, Jennifer found an egg!” And then the oldest confirmed it, “It’s true, Jennifer found an egg!” Three tellings of the tale, and one egg.
Well, the greatest news in all the world is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. How can we who are Christians not tell the world about it? You ask, “What shall we tell?” Let me suggest three things: first, that He is risen; second, that death is conquered; and third, that God has made this same Jesus whom men crucified and killed, both Lord and Christ. And the tomb is the evidence. The resurrection is the proof. I wonder if we understand that message. Do we really understand it? Have we really entered into what it means? Do we really rejoice in it? Well, if we do, then we must tell other people about it.
You know, this is a perfect message from the angel. I don’t know how the greatest of sermons can be condensed in three verses. First of all, you recognize the announcement: “He is not here. He is risen.” Then there are the four imperatives: “Come,” “See,” “Go,” and “Tell”—those are the points. Then at the very end there is this marvelous promise, “And behold, He goes before you to Galilee. There you will see Him.”
Why is this important? It’s important because we might be shy about the message. We might be timorous. We might be overcome with what seem to be the difficulties of making a supernatural message known to a secular world. Here were women, whose testimony was not regarded highly in antiquity, about to go with the greatest message that the world has ever heard, a message so stupendous that even the disciples weren’t believing it when they heard. And if they had said to themselves, “No one will believe us,” certainly they would have been right by human thinking.
Yet what does the angel say? “Jesus is going on ahead of you.” Is that just for the women? No, that was the message for the disciples and for us too. It’s what we find just a little bit later where Jesus is talking to the disciples and commissioning them to the task of world evangelization. He begins with His authority: “All authority is given unto me, in heaven and earth.” And then He gives commands: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And then He gives the promise, “And lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the age.”
Those are the last words of the risen Christ in Matthew’s gospel. Jesus goes before you as you go. How then can you fail to rejoice in such a great message? How can you be faithless about proclaiming it to the world?
