“He is not here, but has risen…”
Luke 24:1-12
We enter into Holy Week and the Easter story. I know having heard this story since I was so small I cannot recall not knowing it, that we can take for granted the extraordinary details and truth that comes from it.
If you are born into the West, it may just become a blur amidst Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. But let us pause and pick up the details again, as if for the first time:
Women see the empty tomb first.
Two men in dazzling white tell them that ‘Jesus is risen as he said he would be and so is not here’.
The women rush back to tell the disciples.
The disciples do not believe them.
Then Peter goes and finds the cloths in the tomb and it is ‘empty’ as the women said it was.
We know now that these clothes were kept as treasured possessions by the disciples and that the exact location of the tomb is disputed.
Why does that matter?
You do not look for the living among the dead. You do not need a tomb to worship if your leader is still alive and asking you to tell others this “good news”.
Every leader of a major cult or religion has a sacred burial site you can visit- even communists can go and see the embalmed body of Lenin!
Except Christianity. Christians have no such site, a city yes where Jesus walked and lived, and the “garden tomb chapel” which may have been it- or, under “the church of the holy sepulchre” - which may also have been it. But for the first few hundred years, it wasn’t even sought. Nothing built. No shrines.
Why?
You don’t seek the living among the dead. As the angels said…”He is not here- he is risen…”
The first witnesses found it hard to believe that fact too, but it is the only rational explanation for why nearly every one of the disciples, after initially not believing it, then later after being filled with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost went on to die for this very belief- the belief that Jesus was and still is alive and resurrected from the dead. That we too can partake in this and commemorate it every Sunday as we reenact his last supper on earth.
It is the death of martyrs that is the second strong proof and of course it also makes sense if he rose again that is the same reason why we do not know Jesus’s exact burial place even to this day.
His body didn’t remain in the tomb.
He is risen! He is not here!
Let those words sink in for a moment, as if you’ve heard them for the first time.
If you dared to believe that good news too today- if you knew for certain that death was not in fact the end, but just the beginning of a life of love lived with God- what would you do differently right now?
How would you show that love shown to you, in your own heart, and life and way today? How would and could you follow Jesus right now, if you knew for sure he really is “the way, the truth and the life”?
Perhaps ask God now to show you how….and….
Be blessed!
He is not there! He is risen! Hallelujah! He is risen indeed
!