Jesus will not stay where you put him, because he has not left you where you are. The one who would not stay in the tomb will not leave you in yours. Your fear, your sin, and your death are no longer prisons. The risen and living Jesus is a wonderfully inconvenient truth, because he will not stay where we put him – and that is our hope.

1. We Come to Jesus with Spices

I suspect we would prefer it if Jesus had not risen.

It would be a far less complicated end to the story.

A tragedy is sad, but manageable on our own terms. It fits with our sense that the world should be tidy – that everything ought to have its place.

Jesus’ place is, surely, in the tomb, like a shirt in a drawer or a car in a garage.

This needn’t be the sentiment of someone who wants Jesus dead and done with. It could be the perspective of someone who admires him. We come to the tomb as the women came, with our spices, to anoint his lifeless body. That is where we can keep him, to memorialise him – as if Easter were the religious equivalent of Anzac Day.

But this dead Jesus disturbs and disrupts nothing. He leaves us with a vague notion of Christian ‘values’, from which we may pick and choose as we suit – an ethical code that we can mould to our own lifestyle. He challenges us to no particular change. In the tomb, he becomes an option.

2. Jesus Refuses to Be Found Where We Put Him

But what did the women find?

The first thing to notice is what they didn’t find. The stone was rolled away, and the grave was empty. The tomb was vacant. And all the rationalisations must have flooded in at that point: we’ve come to the wrong tomb, someone’s taken the body, there must be some mistake.

But that is not it.

And this is where things get weird. While they were wondering about this, the women had a breathtaking encounter with heavenly glory:

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!

It’s time for an honesty moment here.

You might think that I should be embarrassed, as a 21st-century educated adult, to stand here and tell you, without a flicker of irony, that this is what I believe actually happened. You might be saying:

‘He is not here’, I can believe. But ‘he is risen’? Seems unlikely.

Surely, this is where I bring out my modern theological trickery and say something like:

Of course we aren’t meant to take this literally, it is a metaphor for the hope within us all. Nothing out of the ordinary happened that day: just the regular rising and setting of the sun, with the dead still dead, and some of the living imagining that they saw angels.

But these explanations are just an attempt to keep the world closed – to keep death where it belongs; to keep Jesus in his box; to keep the stone rolled across the tomb.

What we call the miraculous is not incidental to Christianity, as if it could be simply redacted from the story. It is essential to it.

Because if Jesus is risen – truly risen – then nothing is where we left it.

3. Jesus Speaks and Redefines Reality

But before the women can gather their thoughts, the angelic beings speak to them:

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.

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