Fear and Excitement: The Women Met Jesus Alive
Daily Scripture
Matthew 28:8-10
8 With great fear and excitement, they hurried away from the tomb and ran to tell his disciples. 9 But Jesus met them and greeted them. They came and grabbed his feet and worshipped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Go and tell my brothers that I am going into Galilee. They will see me there.”
Daily Reflection & Prayer
The resurrection accounts consistently include a mix of “fear” and “excitement”—utterly true to life for meeting Jesus alive after seeing him die on the cross. As one scholar noted, the accounts “go back to genuine personal memory, told again and again to incredulous friends and neighbors, in the tone of voice of someone saying, ‘I know—I almost couldn’t believe it myself! It still seems totally amazing. But this is how it was.’” *
- Author Philip Yancey noted that the resurrection witnesses’ lack of “slickness” made them more credible. “Accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb sound breathless and fragmentary. The women were ‘afraid yet filled with joy,’ says Matthew; ‘trembling and bewildered,’ says Mark. Jesus makes no dramatic, well-orchestrated entrance to quell all doubts; the early reports seem wispy, mysterious, confused.” ** Have you ever struggled to share an amazing, life-changing event? How does the witnesses’ breathless confusion make their testimony more believable?
- Most of us are used to the Easter story (whether we’ve always believed or not). But those first witnesses saw nothing ordinary about it. Scholar N. T. Wright said Matthew “clearly intended to write of something that had actually happened, something that had not only changed the women’s hearts but had torn a hole in normal history. This event had changed the world forever.” *** In what specific ways is your view of life completely different because Jesus defeated hatred, evil, and death?
Prayer
Living Lord, you told your disciples, “Because I live, you will live too” (John 14:19). That promise includes me. Thank you for decisively shattering death’s tyranny. Amen.
GPS Insights
Brandon Gregory
Brandon Gregory, who serves as a volunteer for the worship and missions teams at Church of the Resurrection, wrote today's Insights. He helps lead worship at Leawood's modern worship services, as well as at the West and Downtown services, and is involved with the Malawi missions team at home.
The Easter story is triumphant and full of hope. Long-time readers will probably not find this surprising, but I’m prone to melancholy and endless pontifications, so my thoughts today are a little more grounded and reflective. Understanding our faith can be different now than it was in the past.
The philosopher Heraclitus gave us the phrase, “The only constant is change.” His philosophy dealt with the fluid, changing nature of life and how it shapes us. There’s another one of his quotes that helps me think about faith. The original quote is, “No man can step into the same river twice, for the waters flow around him.” A more modern interpretation is, “No man can step into the same river twice, because it’s not the same water, and he’s not the same man.”
I think back on the faith of my early life sometimes and wish I could capture that sense of wonder that made me so passionate. God’s love was overwhelming and bigger than I knew what to do with. Faith was easy, and everything seemed clear. I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I was in the right spot.
It’s been hard to accept that trying to rediscover that youthful sense of wonder and confidence is like Heraclitus warning me that I can’t step into the same river twice. The river is full of different water, completely unrecognizable from what it was 30 years ago. I can search and search for that river again, but I’ll never be able to step into the same water and come out the same person.
Over the years, I’ll admit, I’ve become a rather cynical person. I don’t have faith because it seems like it’s the only logical choice; I have faith because I choose to believe, even when it doesn’t seem logical. I don’t always feel like I’m in the right spot, but I choose to keep moving regardless, with the best information and understanding I have. It doesn’t always feel right anymore. In fact, it all feels wrong a lot more than I’m comfortable with. But I choose to keep going anyway.
The Easter story has always been a part of my life, and that makes it harder for me to understand as the years go by. I can’t experience it in the same way that I did 30, 20, or even 5 years ago; I’m not the same person, and everything in my life has changed. I have to ask what it means to me now, in this moment, in this environment. It will look different. It will change me in different ways. The way I understood it in the past won’t help me figure things out now. But if there’s a time to think about what faith means in your life, it’s Easter.
© 2026 Resurrection: A United Methodist Church. All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* Wright, N. T., Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (The New Testament for Everyone) (p. 198). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.
** Yancey, Philip, The Jesus I Never Knew (p. 213). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
*** Wright, N. T., Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (The New Testament for Everyone) (p. 199). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.
