“He is risen!”
Countless Christians around the world hear these words and say them to each other on Easter Sunday. They aren’t meaningless, nor are they some spiritual mumbo-jumbo. They have a very specific, very concrete, very real-world meaning. They mean that Jesus—a man brutally and very thoroughly put to death with all the efficiency that the Roman empire could muster one Friday afternoon—got up on Sunday morning… and simply walked out of his tomb.
These words are stunning. And they are absurd. They are, on their face, not just implausible; they are crazy. After all, when someone tells you that a dead person just got up and walked away under his own power, the normal reaction is to conclude that this person has lost his or her mind.
But it turns out, the words themselves aren’t the craziest part. The truly crazy thing is that they’re true.
The beaten, whipped, nail-punctured, spear-pierced man who died a painful, bloody, horrible, and very public death in front of countless witnesses really did just get up and walk away on the third day. Without medical attention, without help from anyone on earth, his heart, his lungs, his brain, and all his other organs started up again. And he stood, stepped out of the tomb, and in that moment split all of history in two.
Hundreds of people saw him walking, talking, eating, and drinking long after he was supposed to be—no, really was—dead and buried. The people who knew him best were so certain that he had risen from the dead they were willing to die horrible deaths of their own rather than deny that Jesus was still alive.
He is risen. This one fact changes everything about how we understand the world around us. It must. The only question is: what will you do about it?
He is risen!
Happy Easter.
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