He Is Not here

He is not here, the angel said to the women who had come to anoint his body. He is risen from the dead.

Quite a surprise on an early Sunday morning. He is not here. The women could see that for themselves. They were the first witnesses to peer into the empty tomb. Later, the men would come, but the greatest revelation of all time was entrusted to women whose testimony, because of their gender, would not be accepted in a Jewish court of law. They were inconvenient witnesses for the gospel writers,who, if they were making up a story to tell generations of followers, most probably would have chosen more credible corroborators. The women remain today, however, as the bearers of a startling truth: He is not here.

Everyone else stayed home that Easter morning, lost in their grief and belief that their dreams had been crushed. It was the women who went to the tomb to perform the one service they still could, even while fretting about the size of the stone they would have to remove in order to reach Jesus. The dream may have died, but somehow, they were going to give it a decent burial.

I wonder how the story would have changed had the women not gone to the tomb and verified the truth of the angel's statement: He is not here. It was hard enough for Jesus to convince the disciples that it was he and not a ghost who was conversing with them. It has been hard enough over the centuries to convince people that the disciples did not concoct the story. The empty tomb, attested to by societal nobodies, remains its own proof: He is not here.

The women remind us that it is when we search, we find; that when we give, we receive.

Amen.