Easter Sunday: They Were Right to be Afraid
RESIST: A HOLY WEEK SERIES
They Were Right to Be Afraid
EASTER SUNDAY
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The first response to the resurrection was not joy.
It was fear.
Mark's Gospel — the oldest one we have — ends with the women running from the empty tomb, trembling, saying nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. Matthew says they left with fear and great joy. Luke says the disciples thought it was an idle tale. John says Mary stood outside the tomb weeping, and when she finally saw Jesus, she didn't recognize him.
Nobody in the resurrection accounts reacts the way we do at Easter — with lilies and trumpets and a triumphant chorus of He is risen. They reacted the way you react when something happens that you have no category for.
Because resurrection isn't resuscitation. Lazarus came back to the same life. Jesus came back to something else entirely. The resurrection is not a reversal of Friday. It's a verdict on it.
Here's what the resurrection says: Rome was wrong. The Temple establishment was wrong. The crowd that chose Barabbas was wrong. The logic of domination, exclusion, and state-sanctioned execution — the logic that said this is how power works and there's nothing you can do about it — that logic lost.
Not because Jesus overpowered it. Because he went all the way through it and came out the other side.
The resurrection doesn't mean suffering doesn't happen. It means suffering doesn't have the last word. It doesn't mean empire doesn't kill. It means empire doesn't win. It doesn't mean the darkness isn't real. It means the darkness is not final.
This is the claim that makes Christianity politically dangerous — not in the way Christian Nationalism is dangerous, using Jesus to bless the powerful — but dangerous to every system that depends on the fear of death to maintain control. If death doesn't have the final word, then neither does the threat of it. If the tomb is empty, then the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of empire has been disarmed.
That's why they were right to be afraid. Not of Jesus. Of what his resurrection meant for everything they'd built.
We are Easter people. Not because life is easy or justice is winning or the arc is obviously bending. But because we have staked our lives on the claim that love is more durable than power, that life breaks through death, that the story is not over when empire says it's over.
He is risen.
That changes everything.
Reflection: What would change in how you live and resist if you genuinely believed that death — in all its forms — does not have the final word?
