The Guards - Matt 28:11-15

There is so much going on during the morning of Jesus’ resurrection, that all of what we’ve been studying is kind of just the accounts of the different experiences of all who were involved. We have the Mary Magdalene, the other women, Peter and John, Jesus himself, what happened inside the tomb, the angels, but now we are going to consider the experiences of the men who were guarding the tomb. Let’s remember that Pilate allowed the chief priests to secure Jesus’ tomb on Friday night with guards and his personal seal of authority. Whether these were Roman guards or the personal guards of the chief priests is not specified but my own personal belief is that they were Jewish guards. There is a television show called “A.D” which is about what happened after the death of Christ, and on the show, it presumes that the guards are Roman and it shows that the men who were guarding the tomb were executed because they allowed Jesus’ body to be removed, or more likely because they were all thought to be asleep.

If the guards were Roman, their experience probably would have been an earthquake then men coming and Jesus’ body being gone. I think that Pilate probably would have interpreted that point of view to mean that Jesus’ disciples over powered the Roman guards and stole Jesus’ body. He knew that it would be possible for a group of many men to over power a small unit of Roman soldiers, and Pilate probably would have turned the city on its head looking for these disciples that accosted his soldiers, but since that didn’t happen, or at least there is no record of that happening, I’m inclined to believe that these were Jewish soldiers. Another argument of Jewish soldiers is that Matthew tells us that “some of the watch came into the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.” Just like we talked about the guards reporting to Annas after Jesus’ arrest, these guards reported to the chief priests. Surely any Roman wouldn’t go to the occupied leadership after a failed mission.
The chief priests were not interested in what had actually happened and this is another case of “really? Angels shake the earth, move the heavy stone and the man that you personally verified was dead walks out alive in a glorified body and your main concern is concealing this information from the public?” The chief priests “gave large money unto the soldiers, saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.” Clearly these were not Roman soldiers because the penalty for falling asleep on guard duty is death. But that’s not to say that Pilate isn’t invested in the outcome of Jesus’ death, because he put his own personal seal guaranteeing that the tomb would not be disturbed without Roman penalty. But the chief priests are pretty confident that if Pilate finds out what happened but they act like they aren’t upset about it, then he will be ok just letting the matter go because Pilate is very over all this mess with Jesus. The chief priests comfort the guards saying, “And if this come to the governor’s ears, we will persuade him, and secure you. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.”
The IM gives the best insight into this whole lying mess, saying, “The lie recorded in Matthew 28:13 is extraordinary. It would have been very unusual for Roman soldiers to fall asleep on guard duty- the penalty for doing so was death. It is also unlikely that the disciples could have removed the stone and taken the body of Jesus Christ without the guards taking notice. The implausibility of the story shows the desperation of the chief priests, who as Sadducees did not believe in resurrection. In the weeks that followed the Resurrection, they continued to suppress news of the Resurrection. Matthew said the story of the body being stolen was still ‘commonly reported among the Jews’ at the time he wrote his Gospel, probably sometime after A.D. 70.”