Happy Easter!

Mary Magdalene ran...and ran....until she found Peter and John. "They've taken Him!" she cried, "His body is gone!"

Gully Where Stone was Rolled
to Close & Open Tomb

Peter and John took off, running to the tomb where they knew Jesus had lain hours before. In his Gospel, John, the youngest of the disciples, makes sure to tell us that he got there first, outrunning the older, perhaps larger, Peter. But Peter is the one who went inside, through the miraculously opened door, who saw first the burial clothes of Jesus, the face cloth folded away from the rest.

The two men, not positive what it meant, went home. Mary Magdalene, forgiven, loving, frightened, anguished from the disappearance of His body, stayed.......and Jesus showed up for her, giving her the news to go and tell his other disciples.

Courtyard of Church
of the  Holy Sepulcher

And it began. Jesus talked to different groups of people at different times, in quiet rooms, on the beach, fishing, preparing a meal. I would love to have been with two of them walking to Emmaus where Jesus, hiding his identity from them, explained His appearance in Old Testament Scripture from Moses forward.....

Most of those men and women who saw him in those days after Easter before He left their sight finally for this life, most of them died gruesome, horrific deaths because they had seen Him--and told others. Those who heard them, worked with them, and believed, many of them also died cruelly. They did not die,

though, for a fairy story or a myth.....they died for the Christ whose tomb no longer held Him.

A bit of controversy hovers over the site of Jesus' grave. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher (the outside seen above) stands over one traditional site of the grave. Not far away, another bears a door that says, "He is Risen!" and looks inside like the description given in Scripture of the grave where Jesus was buried. There are, of course, some people who KNOW, but truly, no proof either place.

And the reason no certainty can, really, exist is....He is not there.

Second Possible Tomb

The Romans & religious Jewish leaders immediately started with, "Someone stole it!" That, of course, doesn't explain the people who, saying they had seen the Risen Christ, willingly lived harshly and died willingly in manners of nightmares.

He is not there.

And, that is what we celebrate this Easter Morning.

Happy Easter.