The Worst Thing is not the Last Thing

Nobody who wanted to invent a religion would have invented this one.

If you were making it up — trying to build a following, start a movement, get people to believe something — you would not have the first witnesses be women. In first century Palestine, women couldn't testify in court. Their word didn't count legally. If you were fabricating a resurrection story you would have picked better witnesses.

You would not have the disciples hiding in a locked room. You would not have Thomas refusing to believe until he could touch the wounds himself. You would not write that much doubt and confusion into the founding story of your religion.

Made-up looks clean. This doesn't.

The tomb was empty. Nobody has ever been able to explain it. And everything — every single thing that follows — flows from that one inconvenient, impossible, world-altering fact.

Here is what Easter actually means. Not that life is easy now. Not that nothing bad will happen if you believe hard enough. Not that God fixes everything the way you wanted it fixed.

It means the worst thing that ever happened was not the last thing.

Death itself — public and brutal and final — turned out not to be the end of the sentence. God took the period and made it a comma. Whatever has been trying to bury you does not get to write the ending.

Death no longer has dominion.

That is the most ferocious thing anyone has ever said. And we say it every year, in churches packed with people who are carrying all kinds of things, because we keep needing to hear it.