Matthew 27:52

This verse is part of Matthew's account of Jesus' crucifixion. At the moment Jesus died, Matthew records a cluster of extraordinary events: the sky had gone dark, the temple curtain tore, the earth shook — and here, tombs cracked open and people who had died came back to life. Matthew notes elsewhere that these resurrected saints appeared to people in Jerusalem after Jesus' own resurrection on Sunday. This event appears only in Matthew's Gospel and has puzzled readers and scholars for centuries. What Matthew seems to be pointing toward is this: the death of Jesus was so cosmically significant that death itself began releasing its grip — the graves could not stay sealed when the Author of life was dying on the cross.

Lord, even the earth knew something impossible was happening at the cross. Help me to truly believe that death — in all its forms — does not get the final word in my life. Where I have sealed off hope, crack open the stone. I want to believe again. Amen.

Nobody gives this verse its own sermon series. We skip it at Easter, racing toward the empty tomb on Sunday morning. But Matthew — writing for people who had witnessed or heard firsthand accounts — felt it was important enough to record. Dead people walked out of graves. The earth cracked. Something so seismic was happening at the cross that the boundary between the living and the dead started blurring. This was not a quiet spiritual event happening somewhere in the invisible realm. It shook rock. It opened tombs. The cross was not a private transaction quietly filed away in heaven — it rattled the physical world. There is something worth sitting with in the detail that the tombs opened before Jesus himself rose. Death, sensing what was coming, began loosening its grip while Jesus was still in the grave. Whatever ending feels sealed and certain in your life right now — a relationship you have given up on, a dream that feels buried, a version of yourself you think is gone for good — this strange, overlooked verse whispers something. Cold, sealed, final-looking endings are not beyond the reach of what happened on that hill outside Jerusalem.