SUNDAY, APRIL 4, 2010

EASTER

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Dear Friends in Our Lord Jesus:

No one believed them. Not even their closest friends and traveling companions. Not even those who had journeyed with the disciples and their rabbi for the better part of three years. Not even the “inner circle” of the apostles. No one believed.

And so the initial reports of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus fell as empty words upon the ears of the apostles and their friends.

A group of women visited the Garden Tomb early on the morning of the first day of the week -- today -- to anoint the body of the Lord Jesus and prepare it with dignity and carefulness for the final resting place. But the women discovered, to their shock and horror, that the tomb was opened, the stone was rolled away, and the body of the Lord was gone. As the fears of the women multiplied in their hearts (thinking, no doubt, that grave robbers had stolen the body), suddenly “two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them.”

Luke’s Gospel tells us that the “women were terrified” beyond measure. But the angels announced to them: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.”

And the women remembered the Lord’s three-fold prediction of his passion, death, and resurrection. They ran back to the Upper Room in Jerusalem to report the miraculous news to the apostles. But the men did not believe the excited women. Even more, the words of the women “seemed to them as foolishness.”

One of the apostles, Simon Peter, ran to the tomb, but he encountered only the empty grave, the discarded stone, and the abandoned burial clothes. He left in amazement and bewilderment.

The event that changed the course of history and just occurred. And the world would never again be the same. Never.

-- The Very Rev. Dr. Steve Sellers +