It’s a strange fact about Christianity, but one that we can easily observe, that the Gospel is sometimes better understood by those who are not Christians than by those who are. It’s not that those who are not Christians believe it. They probably disbelieve it, but at least they understand what it’s about while those who are Christians and do believe sometimes appear vague and muddleheaded in their confession.
We certainly have an example of that in the passage which is our text. Because while those who are Christ’s disciples were confused about His death and were scattering back to their homes, those who were His enemies reflected clearly on the things that He had been teaching during the days of His earthly ministry and began to guard against any claim that Jesus had risen from the dead. It wasn’t that they believed in the resurrection—though I believe they feared it—but they did remember that He had said while He was alive that he would rise again on the third day and therefore, lest there be any accident, anything that would be destructive to them and their place in society, they determined to do everything in their power to see that nothing happened. And so they went to Pilate, who was in charge of Jesus’ execution and burial, and remind him of this particular teaching and ask that the tomb of Jesus Christ be sealed and soldiers be posted as a guard.
The next day, the one after preparation day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive, that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first” (Matt. 27:62-64).
I don’t know what Pilate thought when he heard that request, but I suspect that he must have been amused. Obviously if Christ was only a man, a mere man, then it wasn’t necessary to guard Him. He was dead. On the other hand, if He was God as He claimed to be (and perhaps about which Pilate himself had some intimation because of the trial), then all the guards and all the seals in the world would never keep Him down.
He granted their request. He said, “Take a guard. Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.” And that’s what they did. They went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting a guard.
I find those verses very interesting. In the first place, they show as I’ve already indicated that these enemies of our Lord understood something about His teaching—perhaps in some ways the most important thing about His teaching—because connected with this prophecy of the resurrection and the doctrine of the resurrection is involved practically all of the great truths of the Christian religion. We have to remember that this phrase “in three days” or “on the third day” was something that had been cropping up again and again throughout Christ’s ministry and which had figured prominently in the trial.
Early in the trial there had been a number of illegalities: the arrest by night, the lack of a formal charge before the trial, the conduct of the trial itself, including the intervention of the high priest, and the absence of any defense. But in spite of all of these obvious illegalities, there ran underneath the conduct of the trial a certain current of legality in the sense that on the surface at least they were concerned to conform to certain requirements of Jewish law, and one of these was that there had to be an accusation worthy of death established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. We read about it in all of the gospels that in this early stage of the trial they tried to find something about which they could accuse Him but they failed in the attempt even though many false witnesses were brought. And then something happened. The time came in the trial when two witnesses stood up and testified to something that was very serious indeed (Matt. 26:60-61).
