Week 4 March 2026, Devotion Part 1

…The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.  Matthew 27:51

One commentator called this the gospel writer’s “weirdest passage.” Some chose the  term “enigmatic.” The most acclaimed early church fathers such as Jerome, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, all held to the historicity of the resurrection of those New Testament era saints. Matthew Henry (1662-1714), the English Presbyterian minister and widely beloved Bible expositor, would have us meditate on the complete, God-breathed passage beginning with verse 50 of the crucifixion narrative: “And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.” We are to notice how Matthew goes out of his way to stress the presence of reliable eyewitnesses. The centurion and others “saw” the earthquake and everything else, and the resurrected saints appeared to many in Jerusalem. The language is quite similar to that of 1 Corinthians 15.

Matthew wrote his gospel with Jewish Christians in mind. Thus he used the passive voice to make his enigmatic text quite plain to them. It normally weakens the plot when “a ball is being thrown”, since it does not immediately specify who threw it and why. In this case the verbs are in the passive voice, meaning the subject of the verb is receiving the action. When the biblical writer uses it, it serves as a “divine passive,” with God implicitly acting as the one initiating these miraculous events in response to Christ’s death on the cross.  When a Jew read, “…and the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and the earth was shaken…,” it left him without doubt in the matter of” divine passive.” Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel had written about the dead rising from their graves. The Jewish Christian would recognize those renowned OT passages as pointing to Christ’s resurrection and its dramatic impact on His followers.  Part 1 of 2

Comment: It comes as a bit of a shock to find that “pop-culture-conditioned Christians” wonder if zombies poured into Jerusalem.  Actually, these fictional undead creatures came out of Haitian folklore and were reanimated by Voodoo magic. The modern flesh-eating version was popularized by George Romero’s 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead.”  In the first ever movie of that genre, “White Zombie” in 1932, they were not yet cannibalistic or contagious.  The infecting agent is now thought to be a virus, but the CDC likely to be headed by a celebrity outside the medical field, is still debating it.  In the A-Z “passive voice” of political writings, pets are eaten by Aliens in Ohio, but its citizens are only seen wearing zombie outfits in the city streets on Halloween.