Aly Hawkins

It’s difficult to piece together what exactly happened a few days after the good man was executed. (And if what happened was what the man’s followers claimed happened, this difficulty makes a good bit of sense: It’s not as if dead people came back to life at the drop of a hat in first-century Palestine, just as they are not known to do so very often here and now. Explaining such an occurrence to themselves and to each other—if that’s what happened—would have been quite a challenge.)

Here’s what we know: Not long after the good man—a man who had said, in many different ways, “God is here,” and who had traipsed about the countryside doing things that really only made sense if you believed it—soon after he was executed, his followers began to live as if what he had said was true.

Before his death, by their accounts, they had believed him—enough to leave their jobs and families to go traipsing along with him, nodding their heads when he said “God is here” while trying to understand what that could possibly mean. They had many opportunities to go back to their old lives, but something about the man’s words and actions was irresistible . . . too good not to be true. And yet, they didn’t know how his words could be true for them; they didn’t know how to live as if God were really, actually, darn-tootin’, right-fracking-here.

Not long after his death, however, something happened.

It didn’t happen all at once. It couldn’t happen all at once, because becoming takes awhile. But their becoming started with what happened on Sunday: The stone door between the tomb of belief and life lived with God—here!—was blown off its hinges.

There is both more and less distance than you might think between believing and living; sometimes all we need to close the gap is three days, a vacant tomb and some breakfast. What happened on Sunday began to change the man’s followers into people who lived the truth that God is here.

What happened on Sunday is happening in me.

Filed under: life, theology Tagged: | Easter, Jesus' disciples, the Resurrection