Matthew 28

Resurrection Morning: Awakening, Witness, and the Birth of Mission

Matthew 28 reads less like a report of events and more like the final act of an interior drama: a soul waking from an old identity and discovering that the imagined self that was crucified has been transformed into a living presence. In psychological terms, the chapter stages a sequence of states of consciousness — fear, collapse, illumination, proclamation, resistance and finally the confident assumption of creative authority. Each character and scene is a state of mind or imaginative gesture that together describe how inner speech and imagining reshape experience.

The scene opens at dawn — the borderland between sleeping belief and waking awareness. Dawn here represents the threshold consciousness where night thoughts (habit, fear, identity-fixed narratives) give way to the earliest stirrings of a new self-conception. Two women come to the sepulchre: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. They are aspects of attention: one part of the psyche devoted to memory and mourning, the other part tasked with witness and devotion. They approach the tomb carrying past impressions, rituals and expectations. Their intent is to look upon the place where that which they loved was laid to rest. Psychologically, they represent the part of us that goes back to the scene of defeat to see if the old story remains true.

At that threshold an earthquake occurs. This interior quake is the sudden dislocation of familiar meanings — the felt sense that the ground of identity has shifted. The rock rolled away is not a geological detail but the removal of an inner barrier: the stone of disbelief, the rigid conviction that the old self is final. When imagination and inner speech apply pressure on a belief long held, the stone moves. The angel who descends and sits upon it is the moment of illumination: a flash of insight whose countenance is lightning and whose raiment is white. Lightning stands for sudden understanding; white raiment for clarity and unambiguous awareness. The angel is not an external emissary but an emergent faculty of consciousness — the part that speaks with certainty and dissolves the paralysis of old narratives.

The guards ‘shake and become as dead men.’ These guards are habitual defenses, the mechanisms that keep the old story intact. They were placed to ensure the continuity of a narrative that identifies with fear, limitation, or failure. When true illumination descends, these defensive voices freeze or go still. They cannot move because their role is to guard the tomb; when the tomb is emptied of its old authority, their function is exposed as powerless. Their death is not annihilation but neutralization: old defenses become inert in the presence of a transformed imagination.

The angel’s words, ‘He is not here: for he is risen,’ articulate a psychological axiom: what you identify as lost or dead is a condition of consciousness and can be changed by the imagination. To see ‘‘the place where the Lord lay’ is to examine the old identity and recognize its emptiness. The instruction to ‘go quickly and tell his disciples’ is the imperative to communicate the new conviction within — to bring the imaginative fact into relationship with other parts of the psyche that have not yet accepted the shift. In fragmentary consciousness, some aspects already know of the awakening; others remain asleep. The messenger aspect must move swiftly because the moment of waking can be subtle and may be overwhelmed by reactivity if not anchored by inner affirmation.

As the women run, their inner state mixes fear and great joy. Fear signals the anxiety of change; joy signals the pull of the new reality. These competing feelings mark every genuine transformation: the unknown evokes fear; the truth seized by imagination yields joy. Meeting Jesus — the realized self — they hold him by the feet and worship. Grasping the feet symbolizes clinging to the newly revealed presence with humility and recognition. Worship is the psychological surrender to the reality imagined and then realized: an acknowledgment that this renewed identity is sovereign.

When Jesus instructs them not to fear and to tell his 'brethren' to go to Galilee, the message is about communicative integration. 'Brethren' are the fragmented centers of thought and belief that need to be summoned to a new summit. Galilee functions as a symbol for a place of beginnings and familiar ground where the re-embodied self will reveal itself. Jesus going before them into Galilee illustrates that the imagined future — the wish fulfilled — precedes the full sensory proof. Imagination precedes experience; it moves ahead to set the stage.

The reaction of the chief priests and elders introduces the social dimension of inner change: the collective ego that maintains the old story. They contrive a lie and pay the soldiers to spread it: 'His disciples stole him away.' This is the archetype of denial and rationalization. When a personal awakening occurs, the collective mind often fabricates explanations that preserve old structures. Bribing soldiers mirrors how the ego enlists memory, explanation and gossip to defend itself. The persistence of the rumor among the people shows how a collective conversation can resist a new possibility by repeating a familiar narrative. In psychological terms, social myths are consolidated inner conversations agreed upon by many who refuse the discomfort of revision.

The eleven disciples withdrawing to Galilee and meeting Jesus on the mountain represent the assembly of the conscious faculties: reason, intuition, feeling, will and imagination gathering where higher perspective is possible. The mountain is a classical symbol for elevated states of consciousness where one sees the whole field. Some worship, and some doubt. The presence of doubt within that assembly is candid psychology: not every part yields instantly to the new story. Doubt is not condemned; it is recognized as a remaining state to be integrated. The process of imagination transforming identity must allow for residual skepticism and resolve it through repeated inner acceptance, not through coercion.

Then comes the declaration: 'All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.' Here the language of authority is the language of imagination wielding its creative power. 'Power' is the imaginative capacity to assume and persist in the feeling of the wish fulfilled. 'Heaven and earth' correspond to inner and outer states: the inner world of thought and the outer world of experience. To claim all power is to recognize that consciousness — imaginative assumption — is the operative cause of outer manifestation. The Great Commission that follows is a psychological mandate: go and teach all nations, baptize them, and teach them to observe all things. Teaching all nations is the work of extending the new imagination to all parts of the self and to the world of relationships and roles. To baptize is to immerse the disciple in the identity — to initiate a full experiential adoption of the new state. Teaching them to observe what has been commanded is an insistence on persistence: the imagined state must be rehearsed in inner speech until it becomes the habitual life.

Finally, the promise 'I am with you always, even unto the end of the world' settles the interior drama. It is the assurance that once the imagining has been assumed as reality, it accompanies every action and perception. The 'end of the world' is not cosmological doom but the end of the old world of limited identity. The creative power operating within human consciousness is not an external miracle but the continuous activity of inner speech shaping reality.

Thus Matthew 28, read psychologically, is a primer in imagination as the agent of resurrection. The tomb is belief; the stone is scepticism; the earthquake is insight; the angel is realized imagination; the guards are frozen habit; the women are receptive attention carrying testimony; the chief priests are collective denial; the mountain is heightened perspective; the Great Commission is the instruction to employ creative imagination deliberately and persistently. Resurrection is not a single event somewhere in ancient history but a present capacity: the capacity to let go of dead identities, to assume the living state, to speak and act from that assumption, and to communicate it until the new story solidifies in both inner and outer worlds. In this way the chapter teaches a psychological law: imagination, faithfully sustained and spoken inwardly, rolls away the stone and makes what was dead live again.