Father, As we look at this rightly familiar story which forms the core of our faith in your son, help us to see something different which may help us more than usual today. Thank you that you raised Jesus from the dead. Thank you that You paved the way back to what you always intended for us. Jesus, thank you for laying it all aside. Thank you for sacrificing it all so that we can be with and become a part of the communion that you are with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, thank you for guiding us in the way that the Father would have us walk, thank you for being the seal of our salvation. In Jesus’ name, Amen. Christ is risen! It is Resurrection Day. The day that we focus on the reason why we are different from every other religion on the planet. Today we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead by the power of the Father. Today we celebrate that we can become one with God, that God made a way, through the cross, and showed us that it worked by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. With that introduction... It was early on the first day of the week. It was just growing bright when Mary and Mary and one or two other women headed to the tomb where Jesus’ body had been laid at the end of the day on Wednesday. They planned to treat the body with more aloes and spices, for preservation against decay. But when they got there, they found that the tomb was open. A strange man appeared to Mary Magdalen, she initially thought that he was the gardener and had somehow not only unsealed the tomb, taken out the guards, and moved Jesus’ body somewhere unknown to her. He told her that He was Jesus... The rest of us, after she ran back to the upper room, were taken aback by this, so Peter and John ran as fast as they could to the tomb, not fully knowing what to expect when they got there. When John got there (and he got there first), he poked his head into the tomb, to see the gravecloths folded neatly on the slab where Jesus’ body had been laid. When Peter finally puffed up, he went all the way in, just like Peter to do that. He encountered an angel, who asked him who he was looking for. The angel explained that Jesus was not dead any more, that he had been raised to life. John heard this as well. They walked back to the Upper Room, stunned. That was a rare thing for Peter to not be running his mouth, but the whole way back, they walked in silence. They were processing what they had just seen and heard, but words failed them. They could hardly believe it. Jesus is alive. John watched Him die on the cross, he had been there the whole time. He watched the “trials”, the scourging, the crowd being coerced into calling for His blood, Pilate passing sentence and washing his hands, the staggering journey to Golgotha, the nails, the mocking, the hours of anguish... To the very end, when Jesus gave Mary and John to one another as mother and son, then pled for forgiveness for all who had put Him where He was, then when He gave up His spirit and was pierced through the heart by that spear. John was there. Peter hid. Peter was ashamed of the betrayal that he had perpetrated. It nearly crippled him for days. How many of us have denied knowing the Lord when things got hairy? Have you always stood strong, or have you chosen the easy, silent way to avoid strife or ridicule? How would you feel if an angel told you that the man whom you’d denied to save your own skin was alive, after all? How would you feel if you were John? You watched Him suffer and die. You were probably there helping to bury the body before the beginning of the High Sabbath. I didn’t have words for my feelings, either. When they got back to the Upper Room, and confirmed what Mary had been telling us, we weren’t sure what to make of it, either. Stunned doesn’t quite cover the emotion that was so thick in the room that you didn’t even need a knife to cut it, you could easily cut it with the edge of your hand. Fear, confusion, wanting to believe this amazing news, shock... So many emotions. We weren’t sure what to think either... We didn’t dare to be joyful, though over the course of the day, that started to creep over us as well. As we sat down, we 10 (Thomas had left on business during the day, and the traitor had already hung himself in the Potter’s Field), Jesus walked through the wall into the room. We nearly hung from the ceiling at that point, because we’d never seen anyone do anything like that before, so all we could think was that it must’ve been a ghost in our midst. Jesus bade us be at peace... Yeah, right... That was gonna happen in that moment. We started to calm down as he grabbed and ate a piece of the fish we’d prepared for dinner. We didn’t understand it yet, but prophecy had been fulfilled in our midst. Jesus was truly alive. We still hid much of the time, as the Jewish leadership had a vested interest in quashing any story of resurrection, and indeed, they still work hard to deny the truth of the resurrection, as it makes Jesus’ message and claims carry more weight than they could bear. He is ALIVE! Death could not hold Him. Hallelujah!!!