The tomb is still empty

Reflecting on the morning after Easter

It’s Monday morning, the morning after Easter. It’s gray and cool today, in contrast to the sunny and warm Easter Sunday I enjoyed yesterday with my family, celebrating with church, a backyard Easter egg hunt, and what has become our traditional Easter lunch: shredded beef tacos with all the fixings and capirotada, a Mexican bread pudding that is traditionally served during Lent and Easter. We also had carrot cake and deviled eggs!

It was the loveliest of lovely days, and probably the best part of it was when my husband excitedly explained to the grandchildren about how the empty plastic Easter eggs reminded him of the empty tomb—empty because Jesus was dead, but he has risen!

This morning, before sitting down to write this newsletter, I took some time to gather up the remaining plastic eggs and baskets and put them back into storage to wait until next year. The only sign that Easter has just passed is the little bunny bowl on top of the hutch in the dining room. No doubt at the stores all the leftover Easter items will be marked half off, the shelves cleared and then filled again with appropriately themed candies, decor, and other trinkets for the next holiday. Before long, Easter will be but a pastel-colored memory. As is the pattern, life goes back to normal.

I can’t help but imagine what that Monday was like all those centuries ago. The morning after Jesus’s followers discovered that, “He is not dead. He is risen, as he said.” Had they stayed up long into the night, talking and marveling until the fire became cool gray coals and the eastern sky glowed with the pink of a new morning? Had they tried to sleep, but been kept awake by their racing hearts and wondering thoughts? Had they stayed watchful, hoping to see their risen lord appear before them?

If anything is sure, it’s that life never went back to normal for Jesus’s followers after that first Easter. They didn’t tuck the good news into a nice little box of happy memories and go on with their lives as they did before. They moved forward, living out their new life with boldness, sharing the good news with everyone they could.

As a Christian I know that the good news of Easter doesn’t end on Monday morning. It doesn’t end ever! So even though my Easter eggs and baskets are put away, I am still celebrating. And I still want to keep spreading that good news—good news that comes with the gift of life for all who receive it.

There are some people who like to refer to the risen Jesus jokingly as “zombie Jesus.” And I get it. It’s easy to scoff at something that sounds so impossible. But Jesus isn’t walking around with flesh rotting off his bones. He’s not the living dead or the walking dead or undead. He was raised back to life in a literal, physical, human body, gloriously perfected except for the scars on his hands and side. And because of this, the tomb is still empty.

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Poem: A Tourist at the Birth of the Cosmos

Give me a pair of binoculars 
and a digital camera
and send me through time
to time’s very birth. 
I want to see the spirit of God 
hovering over the waters 
and feel his voice speak light
into existence.  
To see the world formed,
not from nothing,
but from him,
breathing his word into the cosmos,
his life into Adam’s dusty lungs. 

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Some of my favorite faith-based children’s books

• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (middle grade)

• The Other Side of Tomorrow by Tina Cho, illustrated by Deb JJ Lee (lyrical graphic novel)

• Miracle Man: The Story of Jesus by John Hendrix (picture book)

• God’s Little Astronomer by Tina Cho, illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguéns

• Goodnight, Ark by Laura Sassi, illustrated by Jane Chapman

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