Easter Ritual or Miracle?



How was Easter for you and your family?  Was it special and filled with worshipful wonder and the laughter of children searching for hidden eggs?  I hope it was that for you, and more.

I began the day enjoying an amazing worship time with my church family in Murphy.  Our young church is just starting it's 8th year of ministry, and I found myself giddy with excitement over the number of families that crowded into our last service of the morning.  The singing was wonderful, but then again, I'm a singer, so for me the singing is always wonderful!  I am grateful every week for a pastor who unflinchingly proclaims the truth of scripture and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but I was especially grateful this morning for how God used him to share with us, verse by verse, the story of the two women coming to the tomb on Sunday morning.

I have not heard the perspective he shared, and it made an impact on me that I'd like to share with you.  You see, these two women were coming to the tomb expecting to find a dead Jesus.  They brought with them the anointing oil and perfume customarily used to prepare the dead for burial...embalming fluids, in today's common way of saying it.

These ladies didn't come expecting a miracle.  They came with crushed hearts because someone they loved dearly had just died.  They came because it was the ritual of Judaism to properly prepare the dead. They were doing their duty as observant Jews.

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of people went to Easter services today because it is the ritual of "Christian" people to attend church on Easter?   I wonder how many men and women and young people, and children...came simply because they felt obligated to show up? Or because a Mom or Grandmother inflicted upon them such guilt, it was least painful to go to church simply to avoid the family argument?   Surely today, as is probably true every year on Easter, there were 10s of thousands, perhaps 100s of thousands of dutiful Christians arriving at the church simply fulfilling their duty as observant Christians.

Back on that first Easter morning when the two women arrived at the tomb, they found no place for ritual.  There was not even the opportunity for ritual.  The ritual they anticipated had been replaced with a miracle.  A stone rolled away, an angel sitting by the tomb in dazzling white...but no Jesus.   There was no dead Jesus to anoint.  There was no dead Jesus to properly prepare for burial.  The angel told the women, "I know you came looking for Jesus of Nazareth, but He is not here. He has risen, just as He said."

In place of the ritual there was a miracle, and the miracle of Jesus' resurrection is the single-most powerful fact in all of history.  Of all the leaders of all the world's philosophies and rituals and religious systems, only Jesus walked out of His tomb alive.  All the others have long since been buried and have rotted in the ground.  All of the rituals and devotion in the world will never make a single one of those other religious leaders as powerful as Jesus, because not a single one of those leaders has or will ever triumph over death.  Jesus is the One.  The only One.  He is the source of life itself and death has no power over Him.  For all of us who put our trust in Jesus, death has no power over us either, and that is the miracle of Easter!