Lord,
as if the shock of Good Friday wasn’t enough for your closest followers…

We feel for those faithful women who went to visit you
just after sunrise on that Sunday morning,
and fled, trembling and bewildered and afraid.

You were not there.

Forgive us when we sanitise your death.
And forgive us, too, if we belittle your resurrection!

Please help us to see this most incredible of moments,
this greatest twist of any plot,
through fresh eyes,
on this bewildering, yet most joyful of mornings.

Help us to see it through the tear-filled eyes of those women.

Help us to see it through the disbelieving eyes of the men,
some of whom came running.

And help us to glimpse it through your own eyes,
which must have blinked into the early morning sunlight
of that first Easter Day,
from out of complete, and utter, darkness,
and refocused,
and creased, with a smile.

You are risen indeed.

 

 

Brian Draper, Christian writer in the UK 

 

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On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, 

    the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 

They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 

    but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 

While they were wondering about this, 

    suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 

In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, 

    but the men said to them, 

        “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 

          He is not here; he has risen! 

          Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 

           ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, 

             be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” 

Then they remembered his words.