CAC staff member Mark Longhurst recounts the Easter story which revealed the good news of Jesus’s resurrection—and our own:
Each year Easter is, for Christians, a celebration of the rising of Christ, but this rising is far more than one person’s death-defying divine act. The resurrection of Christ is expansive: Jesus the person rises and launches God’s resurrection movement that brings everyone and everything along with it.
It starts with a body or, rather, a body’s absence. Mary Magdalene and other women are at the tomb before sunrise to preserve Jesus’s body with spices (Luke 24:1). A rolled-away stone ensures they can enter the tomb easily, but the body is missing. Two men—angels—stand near them wearing clothes that dazzle like the very lightning of the sky. They point out the befuddled obvious: “He is not here” and the more shocking, “He has risen” (24:5).
Jesus Christ rises first on Easter morning to the women. [In Luke’s Gospel] shortly after, he will make appearances to two disciples on the road to Emmaus (24:13–35) and to disciples gathered in Jerusalem (24:36–49), but it’s the women who first see the empty tomb and believe. Jesus Christ rises to Mary Magdalene, the devoted disciple extraordinaire, to Mary the mother of James, to Joanna, who—Luke chapter eight tells us—is married to the manager of Herod’s household himself, and to the other women who were with them at the tomb (24:10). You could even say that the women are rising with Jesus. They are the first to witness the empty tomb, the first to herald a new message of hope, the first to glimpse a renewed world where love is stronger than death….
The implications of the empty tomb are not seen by those looking for an eyewitness investigative account of what did or did not happen. Only those whose hearts bear the capacity to love can see the resurrection and dream a new way out of no way. The men lack this consciousness—Luke says they “did not believe them” [See 24:10–11]. It’s to Peter’s credit that he follows his awakening heart, still bruised from his threefold betrayal of Jesus, and runs to check the tomb himself. Perhaps he hopes for a last-ditch chance to demonstrate his faithfulness. Perhaps out of aching desperation, Peter is rising, too….
Jesus rising, however, is only the beginning or “first fruits” of resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20). In Jesus Christ, God’s resurrecting movement has begun, and it sweeps everyone and everything up within it. Dying and rising are a central pattern and truth of reality—and so to talk about Jesus’s rising is somehow to approach the weighty paradox of death and life evolving together at the center of the universe. Mary, Joanna, and the other women are rising, Peter is rising, I’m rising, you’re rising, and the universe itself is rising.
Reference:
Mark Longhurst, The Holy Ordinary: A Way to God (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024), 64–65, 67.
Image credit and inspiration: David Becker, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a spring flower rising into golden light, Christ keeps unfolding into our world even now.
Story from Our Community:
As a kid, I never missed an Easter service, and in my later years, I made it to a few sunrise services as well. I remember the awe of watching the sky turn pink with the coming sunrise. Imagining the first Easter morning has always filled my heart with hope and my soul with joy. God’s love demonstrated on that first Easter, and over and over again throughout my own life, brings me to tears. This morning, as I lay in a hospital bed, looking outside, I’m waiting for that eastern horizon to break with the first pink glow of His Son-rise.
—Ed W.
