The watch and the chief priests.
I. THE REPORT OF THE WATCHERS.
1. Their flight. They were all aghast with terror; they knew not well what had happened. The earthquake had terrified them at first; then there came a vision dazzling like the lightning. From that moment they were as dead men; they knew nothing more. When they recovered from that deathlike swoon the angel had vanished; all was still and quiet. Perhaps they examined the sepulchre. The stone was rolled away; the tomb was open; it was empty. What could they do? They had been posted there to guard it; they were in danger of death. Some fled away in terror; some, bolder than the others, or deeming perhaps that to tell the truth was the safest course, came into the city.
2. Their account. If they were, as it seems most probable, Roman soldiers, they were responsible to the governor; but they felt sure that he would disbelieve their story, and punish them for neglect of duty. It seemed safer to go to the chief priests, who were the persons most interested in the safety of the tomb, who might advise them what to do under the circumstances. They told them all the things that were done; they told them the facts of the case; the earthquake, the vision which they had seen, their own prostration, the empty tomb; they left the chief priests to draw their own conclusions.
II. THE ACTION OF THE CHIEF PRIESTS.
1. The council. A meeting of the Sanhedrin was hastily called. The chief priests were Sadducees; they believed that there was no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit. Now they must have been in a difficulty. The great darkness of Friday, the earthquake, the rent veil, had appalled many hearts. The very thing had happened which they had anxiously tried to prevent; the sacred body had disappeared, and the soldiers brought strange stories of awful apparitions, of earthquakes and lightning, and the supernatural removal of the great stone from the door of the sepulchre. But men can always discover reasons for disbelieving truths which they wish to repudiate; they can always invent difficulties, discrepancies, explanations. The chief priests probably affected to believe that the guards, worn out by long watching, had been so bewildered by the earthquake as to see in the lightning flashes the fancied form of an angel. The Pharisees in the council did not share in the Sadducean heresies; but they had joined with the chief priests in the application to Pilate for a guard (Matthew 27:62). They were, equally with the Sadducees, hostile to the Lord, equally interested in preventing the people from believing his resurrection. Doubtless those few counsellors, such as Joseph and Nicodemus, who had taken no part in compassing the Saviour's death, were not summoned to the meeting. To the rest the Resurrection involved awful consequences. It threw them into such an abyss of tremendous guilt and terrible condemnation, that we are not surprised if men who were evidently selfish, cruel, hypocritical, obstinately refused to admit the evidence of its truth. So, in the face of all testimony, in spite of the fact that the holy body was gone, and the certain knowledge that foe would not, and friend could not, have borne it away, they deceived themselves, or forced themselves into a disbelief of the Lord's resurrection.
2. Their decision. They pretended that what they had feared had really taken place. They made an arrangement with the soldiers; they were to say that while they slept his disciples came by night and stole him away. It was a dangerous thing for the soldiers; they might be punished with death for sleeping at their post, as Herod afterwards treated the keepers of the prison from which St. Peter was released by the angel. So the chief priests undertook to secure them; they promised to persuade the governor if he should hear of the matter. They meant probably to bribe him; and so they would set the soldiers free from anxiety. It was a wicked falsehood, an awful sin; for they were fighting against God; but the only alternative was an open acknowledgment of the truth, and that would have brought upon them a tremendous disgrace. It would have been a confession of guilt—a confession that they had been in the wrong throughout, that they had been selfish, hollow, hypocritical, and that the Prophet of Galilee whom they so utterly hated, whom they had murdered, was indeed the Christ, the Son of the living God. They could not bring themselves to this. They were the rulers of the people, the chiefs of the hierarchy; they could not humble themselves. They chose the alternative of falsehood. Thus it is that sin leads on to sin. One sin forces a man (or seems to force him) to commit another; each wilful sin strengthens the grasp of Satan upon his soul, and brings him nearer to that awful state when repentance becomes impossible. Let us beware, and take heed to ourselves.
3. The conduct of the soldiers. They did as they were taught. Interest and fear combined to make them the willing tools of the chief priests. The priests bribed them largely, and the soldiers were absolutely in their power. If the priests accused them of neglect of duty, they must have been condemned; their only chance of escape seemed to coincide with their interest; so they took the money offered them, and repeated the falsehood which the chief priests put into their mouths.
4. The acceptance of the story. It was commonly reported among the Jews. But it is a manifest falsehood; it is encompassed with all manner of improbabilities. The soldiers, if they had slept, could not have known what had happened. The disciples, terror-stricken as they were, could not have dared to attempt to break open the tomb. They did not wish to remove the sacred body; it had been laid in an honoured grave. Their only wish was to render the last offices of love and reverence. If they had removed it, what would have been the value of a dead body to them? Could a dead body have kindled that zeal, that intense enthusiasm, which urged them to forsake home and all earthly comforts for the love of Christ? Would they have embraced a life of hardship and constant danger, with the almost certain prospect of violent death, for the sake of preaching a lie? It is impossible that zealous, self-denying men like the apostles, could have been impostors; it is impossible that men who wrote what they wrote—simple, artless records, full of indications of truthfulness, full also of little differences which show that there could have been no concert, no collusion; or letters of Christian counsel beautiful in their transparent simplicity, full of high, holy, heavenly teaching, such as the world had never heard before—it is simply inconceivable that such men should have invented a lie, should have suffered, should have died, for what they knew to be false. But perhaps no one maintains this incredible hypothesis now. Then could they have been deceived by others? Who could have deceived them? Whose interest was it? Who could have wished to deceive them? Could they have deceived themselves as to the Lord's resurrection? Did they so treasure in their hearts their Master's promise? Did they so constantly expect to see him again? Did they look for his reappearing so eagerly that they imagined that they saw his form and heard his words? Did they in honest enthusiasm unconsciously create supposed appearances of the Lord out of the lightning's flash, or the uncertain moonlight, or the thousand causes which have from time to time deceived honest men? But the Scripture narratives, artless and truthful as they are, completely exclude this hypothesis. The disciples had forgotten the Lord's promise, or had wholly lost faith in it; they regarded him as dead, as lost to them. Two of them had laid him in the tomb, and had closed it with a great stone. The women were preparing to anoint the body. None of them had any expectation of seeing the Lord again. Even the empty tomb, strange as it may seem to us, did not at once suggest the Resurrection. St. John, indeed, believed when he went into the sepulchre; in the sepulchre itself, in the home of death, he saw by faith the victory over death. But it seems doubtful whether St. Peter even then realized the truth of the Lord's resurrection. And certainly the absence of the body brought sorrow, not joy, to Mary Magdalene. She stood at the sepulchre weeping, and that because, as she said, she knew not where the body of the Lord was laid; her one wish was to recover those loved remains, and, it seems, to remove them to a grave where they might lie in peace (John 20:6-15). Thank God, the central fact of Christianity rests on the surest historical evidence. The great Christian Church has not risen out of a dream, a vision. The greatest moral and spiritual revolution which the world has ever seen was not the work of a few honest but unintelligent and easily misled enthusiasts. Nothing but the truth of the resurrection of the Lord can account for the immense and sudden change from the deepest despondency to the most wonderful zeal and joy and courage and endurance. Nothing but the presence of the risen, living Lord can account for that strong conviction, that dauntless energy, that sustained persevering labour, which overcame all the superstitions of heathenism, all the inertness of religious scepticism, all the mighty power of Rome, and went on conquering and to conquer till the victorious eagles bowed before the mightier cross, and kings and emperors bent the knee in worship of the Crucified.
LESSONS.
1. Guilt conceals itself by falsehood. Hate sin, love the truth.
2. To offer bribes or to receive them is alike evil. Covetousness is idolatry.
3. The fact of the Lord's resurrection is incontrovertible. Let us cling to it as the ground of all our hopes; let us seek to realize its spiritual power.