If It's True

Holy Week Has a Way of Sneaking Up on You

Holy Week has a way of sneaking up on you.

One moment you're moving through an ordinary Tuesday, and then suddenly you realize the calendar has carried you here again, to the edge of the most extraordinary story ever told. Palm branches. A borrowed upper room. A garden in the dark. A cross on a hill outside the city walls. And then, on the third day, something that is so outside of human experience.

The Resurrection.

Paul puts it plainly in his letter to the Corinthians: If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. He doesn't dress it up. He doesn't soften the stakes. He simply says: this either happened or it didn't, and everything depends on which one is true.

That kind of honesty is bracing. It doesn't leave much room for sentimentality.

We can observe Easter as a season of family and tradition. We can enjoy the liturgy and the music and the particular smell of Easter morning. None of that is wrong. But Paul won't let us stay there. He insists that underneath all of it is a historical claim, a claim as concrete and verifiable as any event in history: the tomb was empty. The body was gone. And the man who had been crucified appeared again, not as a ghost, not as a memory, but bodily, recognizably, with wounds still visible in his hands.

This is either the truest thing that has ever happened, or it is nothing at all.

I find myself sitting with that this week. Not arguing it, just holding it. Letting it be as strange as it actually is.

If It Happened, Everything Has Changed

Because if it is true, then we are dealing with something that reshapes every area of our lives.

We are not talking about a great teacher whose ideas outlived him. We are not talking about a movement that survived its founder's death. We are talking about a man who claimed to be God, who died a criminal's death, and who walked out of a sealed tomb three days later. If that happened, then the universe has shown us its hand. We know something now that changes everything.

We know that love is stronger than death.

We know that the one who made everything also entered into everything, including suffering, including abandonment, including the grave, and came out the other side defeating all of them.

We know that the God of the universe is not distant. He is not unmoved. He came here. He touched lepers and ate with tax collectors and wept at a tomb before he raised the man inside it. He washed feet the night before he died. He asked the Father to forgive the people driving nails into his hands.

That is the shape of God, as revealed in Jesus Christ.

And if that is true, it is the most stunning thing a human being can contemplate.

Don't Rush Past the Wonder

I don't want to rush past the wonder of it into application too quickly. I think we do that sometimes. We hear the story, we affirm the doctrine, and then we move immediately to the to-do list, as if the Resurrection were primarily a motivational event rather than a revelation.

But maybe the first movement is simply to stop. To let it be as large as it is. To sit with the fact that if this story is true, we are not alone in a cold and indifferent universe. We are known. We are loved with a love that proved itself willing to die, and powerful enough to rise.

That kind of love doesn't leave us unchanged. It doesn't ask for nothing in return. But the change it calls forth comes from wonder, not obligation. It comes from having seen something so beautiful that you can't help but want to be near it, to reflect it, to share it.

What It Would Look Like to Actually Believe It

So what does it mean for us personally? If Jesus proved that he was who he claimed to be, then his teachings don't carry the weight of good advice. They carry the weight of the voice that spoke the world into existence. That changes how we hold them.

And the shape of his life becomes the shape we are being invited into.

The God of the universe came as a servant. He didn't arrive with power and demand. He arrived in a feeding trough in an occupied territory and spent his ministry among people that higher society had written off. He moved toward the ones everyone else moved away from. The leper. The tax collector. The woman caught in the act. The thief dying on a cross next to him.

If that is what God looks like, then it asks something of us that is quietly devastating.

Do I love the way that he loved? Do I see the overlooked and the marginalized, or do I look past them the way everyone else does? Do I love the unlovable? Do I love the undeserving, knowing full well that I am also among the undeserving?

These are not comfortable questions. But they are the natural questions that follow from the Resurrection. If he rose, then he is Lord. And if he is Lord, then his life is the pattern. Not a suggestion. Not an inspiration board. A pattern.

Sit Here First

But I don't want to end on obligation. Because I don't think that's where Easter begins.

This week, before the questions about how we should live, I want to sit in the fact that it happened. That the stone was rolled away. That Mary heard her name spoken in a garden and knew the voice. That the disciples who had hidden behind locked doors walked out of that room and gave the rest of their lives to a story they knew firsthand was true.

The grave could not hold him.

And because it couldn't, we don't have to be held either, by fear or failure or the smallness of the lives we settle for when we forget what we believe.

It's truer than any event in history. And it is ours.