Utter emptiness…

The Galilean rabbi, whose preaching attracted multitudes, whose signs enthralled the masses, whose message comforted the afflicted & afflicted the comfortable, lies dead in a stone-cold tomb.

As though

it could be any

other way

I should know. Two righteous men placed him inside me. After he endured a travesty-of-a-trial by his co-religionist leaders. After that coward Pilate scourged him, then washed his hands of him. After he chanted psalms while slowly asphixiating on a Roman-erected cross.

that any

of the just could

so endure

His mother held his warm corpse as tenderly as she once held him as a nursing babe. His pierced side and nail-carved wrists and ankles still dripped blood. With sunset drawing near, as the women who remained weeped, those righteous men gathered the miracle-working, crowd-attracting rabbi and laid him to rest within my void, then sealed the stone in place.

what else

could one expect

at close of day

What can I say of the mystery that followed? What can I say of the corpse that was a corpse no more? Of a stone opened, and burial clothes left behind before the break of day? Nothing. I’m only the garden-placed empty tomb the Risen One left behind.

Easter

that shudder of awe

arising

& the feasting with family

that follows