Daily Devotion 30th July 2018

They supposed it would take a group of them to roll the stone sealing the tomb and must have been relieved if puzzled when they spotted it was moved.   Until the startling appearance of 2 dazzling men asking “Why look for the living among the dead?” What a thing to ask! He had been crucified, dead. They knew he was dead, they all had experience of preparing the dead for burial.  Life and death were not the sanitised experiences of the 21st Century but raw, hands on, familiar in every family; Joseph of Arimathea was unlikely to be mistaken.

Perhaps they barely took in the following sentence “he is risen”, as they shielded their eyes from the dazzle and grappled with what must have sounded like the wrong question.  No one would have bothered to ensure women were familiar with philosophic discussions of the meaning of prophecies. They knew something about prophecies of Messiah but the idea that he would be killed, dead, buried and would rise was obscure.   So “he is risen” is a bombshell that we cannot replicate, much better to keep it simple with the statement “after three days he rose again”.