"there has only ever been one perfect man, the Lord Jesus, and we killed him. I only missed a putt."

Berhard Langer on the 1991 Ryder Cup

He is risen

The gospel of Jesus Christ is a story, but it is quite unlike any other story we will ever encounter. In fact it is not something that we simply hear and understand but a reality in which we live and find our sense of belonging. His story is the living story that makes sense of all the other stories in our lives. On the first Easter Sunday morning the women set off for the tomb, taking with them spices that they had prepared for Jesus’ dead body. They thought the Jesus story had come to an end.

Peering into the tomb these women began to grasp that something in the fundamental structure of the world had changed. The graveclothes meant to hold the decaying body of the battered and bruised Messiah were left empty, rendered redundant and obsolete. Though they did not fully realize this at that moment, they had seen into a world where death was no longer the final frontier, where sin did not get the last word. They glimpsed a new world where resurrection is possible and where death is defeated.

This story is not primarily a matter of reading and understanding but of living. The empty tomb is an invitation to us to enter into new life in Christ where death is not the end.

Walter Brueggemann describes it as an invitation to “switch stories” and therefore to change lives. Easter is an invitation to switch stories, to enter into the new reality of a world where death is defeated and Jesus is alive. It is an invitation into an expansive place where the deepest longings and desires of human life are met in Christ, where all our fears about death and the ultimate end come face to face with the one who is risen from the dead. ‘What does it mean that death is not the end? What would it mean if one person had defeated death and been raised to life?

An extract from Living His story, Hannah Steele, London SPCK, 2020

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