The Resurrection Still Surprises Me
Perhaps we've become so familiar with the story that we've stopped noticing how strange it really is.
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Every Easter, we tell the resurrection story as though it were a nice, tidy story.
We know who arrived at the tomb, what happened next, and how the story ends. We have heard it so many times that it feels familiar, almost predictable. It has become one of those stories we think we already know.
Except that is not really the story the Gospels actually describe.
Read them carefully, and something surprising begins to happen. The closer you look, the stranger the resurrection becomes.
Not because hidden details have suddenly appeared, but because we begin to notice things we have learned to overlook. Over the centuries, we have smoothed out the rough edges, harmonised the accounts, and explained away the moments that refuse to fit perfectly together.
Through that, perhaps we have gained clarity, but we may have also lost some of the wonder.
— • —
One of the most extraordinary moments in the resurrection story appears almost in passing.
Matthew tells us that when Jesus died, tombs were opened. Then, after his resurrection, many holy people who had died came out of those tombs, entered Jerusalem, and were seen by many.
Imagine reading that for the first time. It spawns so many questions.
Who were these people? How were they recognised? What happened afterwards? Did they simply disappear from history again? How did the city react?
Matthew does not tell us.
He offers no explanation and no attempt to satisfy our curiosity. He simply records the event and moves on.
It is one of the strangest passages in the New Testament, yet it rarely receives more than a passing mention, and I have never preached or heard anybody else preach on it.
Perhaps that is because it leaves us with so many unanswered questions.
We prefer stories that resolve themselves. We like everything to fit together cleanly. Yet Matthew seems entirely comfortable with the mystery unresolved.
What matters is not solving the puzzle, but recognising what it points towards.
The resurrection is already overflowing its boundaries, and something has begun that cannot be contained by a single empty tomb.
— • —
Here is another detail that often surprises people.
Nobody actually witnesses the resurrection itself.
We get told about the empty tomb and see the stone rolled away. We hear the angel’s announcement, and later we encounter the risen Jesus. But the resurrection itself remains unseen.
If we were writing the story today, we might have described the moment in dramatic detail. We would also probably place witnesses nearby, recording every remarkable second.
The Gospels do nothing of the sort.
The central event of the Christian faith happens beyond human sight. Instead, the writers invite us to recognise it through what follows.
An empty tomb.
Confused disciples.
Lives transformed.
People who slowly begin to realise that the world is no longer quite the same.
Faith, it seems, is not built upon watching the miracle happen. It grows through recognising its consequences.
— • —
Then there are the Gospel accounts themselves.
They refuse to behave like a modern biography. One Gospel speaks of one angel. Another speaks of two. Some resurrection appearances take place around Jerusalem. Others point our attention towards Galilee. The order of events is not presented as one perfectly synchronised timeline.
For centuries, people have worked hard to harmonise every detail. Sometimes those efforts are helpful. Sometimes they risk making the accounts feel tidier than they actually are.
Perhaps the differences are not a problem to eliminate but part of the story itself.
Each writer remembers, selects, and emphasises different moments. Together, they give us something richer than a single polished narrative. The resurrection arrives through overlapping voices rather than one carefully edited report.
There is an honesty about that.
The writers are not trying to remove every question.
They are trying to bear witness to something that exceeded their expectations and stretched the limits of their language.
— • —
I suspect we do this in other areas of life as well because we like certainty and clear sign-posted endings. We like explanations that leave nothing unresolved.
The resurrection refuses to cooperate. Instead, it unfolds gradually.
People fail to recognise Jesus at first.
Some doubt. Some misunderstand. Some only recognise him in the breaking of bread or the sound of their own name being spoken. Again and again, the Gospels suggest that resurrection is recognised slowly.
Perhaps that should not surprise us.
Many of the most significant moments in life are only understood afterwards.
We look back and realise something had already changed long before we found the words to describe it.
— • —
There is a kind of certainty that comes from having every answer. The resurrection offers something different. It does not remove mystery. Instead, it invites us to trust that mystery can still reveal truth.
The first disciples were not handed a perfectly organised explanation.
They were given encounters. Questions. Unexpected recognitions. Slowly, they became convinced that death had somehow lost its final word.
That conviction emerged over time.
Perhaps ours often does too.
I sometimes wonder whether we have spent so much time trying to make the resurrection easier to explain that we have forgotten how astonishing it really is.
The Gospels present it as the beginning of something that continues to unfold in a messy way, and perhaps that is why the story has never stopped speaking to people. Not because every question has been answered, but because it refuses to become merely predictable.
It still surprises us. Or at least, it can, if we allow it to remain as strange as the Gospel writers said it was.
So perhaps the question is not simply whether we believe the resurrection happened. Perhaps it is whether we are willing to read it carefully enough to let it surprise us again.
Because the closer I look, the more convinced I become that the resurrection is far stranger and far more beautiful than I ever imagined.
And perhaps that is precisely what makes it so beautiful.
Thank you for being a Sacred & Secular subscriber. I really appreciate it.
Paul.
We have the benefit of knowing the Easter story. They did not.
They had to become astonished on their own accord. We accept mysteries as true when we are able to satisfy them ourselves and in whatever way it works with our mind. And sometimes that is even through the words of another.
One of my favorite Resurrection stories comes from Luke’s Gospel when the women came to the tomb and were kind of scolded by the angels, “why do you seek the living among the dead? Here is not here…Don’t you remember all He told you?”
They had all forgotten his words that He told them just days before. They were now living in a post-resurrection world, but with a pre-resurrection mindset.
But that would all soon change.
I appreciate your going boldly where so many dare not go. When one of my university classmates died, all kinds of "spiritual" events took place. I won't tell the long story here, but Gene appeared to me in the aisle of a church while one of his several memorial services was taking place. I had never encountered a dead or resurrected person before. I had feared such a thing ever happening to me when I was younger. In that moment, I felt as though I knew Gene far more completely than I had in life when we were casual acquaintances who had chatted briefly at school events a couple of times. I do not know the "significance" of our encounter except for precisely that awareness of his continuing life that I was granted. I often have thought about that Good Friday "opening of the tombs" and think it must have been like Gene's appearance to me (and I've had other similar experiences a couple of times since then) but happening to a great many people simultaneously. Something similar may have happened to Mary in the Garden, to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. It is harder to square that type of event with Jesus' appearance that included Thomas's doubts being resolved, but it would be foolish of me to assume anything based on my own limitations.