Apr. 5, 2026 - Christ is Risen

The journey to Easter Sunday isn't just a calendar countdown—it's a spiritual pilgrimage that transforms how we understand God's heart and our place in His story. After forty days of Lenten preparation, Holy Week intensifies our focus, drawing us through the Last Supper's intimacy, Good Friday's brutality, and finally to the glory of resurrection morning.

We've sanitized the crucifixion. We prefer a pristine, poetic version of Christ's sacrifice—something we can contemplate without wincing. But the reality was horrifyingly different. The torture Jesus endured wasn't metaphorical or symbolic; it was visceral, gruesome, and deliberately brutal. Roman crucifixion was designed to maximize suffering and humiliation.

Why does this matter? Because the extent of the horror reveals the extent of God's love. When we soften the brutality, we diminish the magnitude of what God was willing to endure to reach us. The blood, the beating, the mockery, the nails—all of it demonstrates how far God will go to bridge the gap between divinity and humanity.

This isn't about dwelling on violence for its own sake. It's about recognizing that God didn't observe our suffering from a distance. God entered fully into human pain, experiencing the absolute worst of what we can inflict upon each other.

When the women arrived at Jesus's tomb that first Easter morning, they expected to find exactly what human experience had taught them to expect: a decomposing body. Death, in their experience—and ours—is permanent. When someone dies, they stay dead. This is our universal human reality.

The women came prepared with spices and oils to anoint Jesus's body, performing the sacred ritual of caring for the dead. They knew where the tomb was. Everyone knew. Joseph of Arimathea had placed Jesus there, close to Golgotha, in a tomb where someone could walk out if—by some medical miracle—they weren't actually dead.

But by the third day, death was certain. If Jesus hadn't emerged by then, He never would. Just as Lazarus was truly dead by the time Jesus arrived—"he stinketh," as Martha so memorably put it—Jesus should have been irreversibly gone.

Instead, they found an empty tomb.

And here's where the story takes a turn that would have shocked its original audience even more than the resurrection itself: Jesus chose Mary—a woman—to be the first witness, the first evangelist of the resurrection.

In first-century Jewish and Roman culture, a woman's testimony was considered legally invalid. Women couldn't serve as witnesses in court. Their word was deemed unreliable, emotional, untrustworthy. The same applied to slaves and non-Romans. Society had clear boundaries about who was credible and who wasn't.

Yet the resurrected Christ appeared first to Mary and commissioned her with the most important message in human history: "Go and tell everyone that I am risen from the dead."

This wasn't an oversight. This was intentional.

God doesn't care about our human hierarchies, our stereotypes, our carefully constructed boundaries about who's in and who's out, who's worthy and who's unworthy, who's capable and who's incapable. God sees individuals—unique creations made in the divine image—and calls each person according to their gifts and God's purposes, not according to society's limitations.

This is what lies at the heart of God: a radical disregard for human prejudice and a profound respect for each person's inherent value.

Throughout the Lenten journey, one question echoes: What is at the heart of God? What makes God's heart beat? Because whatever matters most to God should matter most to us.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for the sheep, who guides and nourishes and protects. Jesus is the resurrection and the life—not just promising eternal existence in some distant heaven, but offering abundant life here and now, in our present pain and confusion.

When our lives twist out of recognition, when we're buried under grief or failure or shame, when we can barely recognize ourselves anymore—this is precisely when God wants to be most present, most active, most real. The resurrection isn't primarily about what happens after we die; it's about new life breaking into our deadest moments right now.

And God's heart beats for those the world overlooks, dismisses, or marginalizes. God chooses the unlikely, empowers the powerless, and gives voice to the silenced.

Here's an uncomfortable truth: we don't have the empty tomb as proof. The early disciples could point to an actual location and say, "Look! It's empty!" We have a story, a tradition, an annual celebration—but no physical tomb we can verify.

So where's our proof?

The proof of the resurrection has never been in an empty tomb. The proof is in transformed lives.

The proof is you. The proof is me. The proof is every person whose life trajectory changed completely when they surrendered to this crucified and risen Savior. Every person who can say, "My life was going this direction, but when I gave everything to Christ, I became a new creation."

The proof is in how we love—not sentimentally, but sacrificially. How we forgive the unforgivable. How we serve without seeking recognition. How we put others first. How we speak about and to each other. How we go the extra mile. How we transform from self-centered to others-focused.

When people see Christians living radically different lives—lives marked by genuine love, authentic forgiveness, humble service, and courageous truth-telling—they're seeing the living proof that something extraordinary happened 2,000 years ago.

Every Easter presents us with the same question Mary faced: Will you respond to God's call in your life, regardless of what society expects or what seems culturally appropriate?

Will you let the resurrection be real in your life—not just as historical fact you intellectually affirm, but as present power that transforms how you think, speak, act, and love?

Will you be living proof that the tomb is empty?

The resurrection isn't just something we remember; it's something we embody. It's not merely an event we celebrate; it's a reality we demonstrate. Every act of unexpected love, every moment of undeserved forgiveness, every choice to serve rather than be served—these are resurrection moments, proving that death doesn't have the final word.

This Easter, the invitation stands: become the proof. Live the resurrection. Let your transformed life be the evidence that convinces a skeptical world that something impossible actually happened, and continues to happen still.

Because when we love as Christ loved, the world sees an empty tomb.