He Is Risen

He Is Risen

Mary Magdalene came to the tomb in the dark, before sunrise, carrying spices. She came expecting a sealed tomb, a sealed body, a sealed ending. She found instead an open tomb and two angels — and then a gardener who called her name. That's the whole Easter story in a sentence: everything expected to be sealed was open, everything expected to be dead was alive, and the risen Lord called her by name first. The women were the first witnesses to the resurrection — in a culture where a woman's testimony was not accepted in court. God chose the culturally disqualified witnesses for the most important event in history. He always does.

The resurrection is Christianity's central claim. Paul says bluntly: 'If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile' (1 Corinthians 15:17). This is not peripheral; it is the load-bearing wall. And the resurrection is not primarily about going to heaven when we die — though it has those implications. It is about the in-breaking of God's new creation into the old one. The resurrection body of Jesus was the first fruit of a new kind of humanity — physical and real, but no longer subject to decay and death. 'He has risen' means the future has arrived in the present. Death does not have the last word. The grave did not hold the One who made all things, and it will not hold those who belong to Him.