"“Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay." (Jn. 20.5-6)
See the place where he lay. That's all we have. There are no "primary relics" of Jesus. No snippets of hair, fragments of bone, or even his whole skull (unlike his cousin John the Baptist whose skull has been passed around over the centuries). What we do have is the report that His tomb is empty, and that HE emptied it, not some verklempt disciple or some other with less than clear motives. Clearly angelic beings (and they're rarely mistaken for people in Scripture unless they're trying really, really hard to blend in!) told astonished visitors to the grave site, "Nope. Not here. Calm yourselves, it's not that bad. He told you this would happen, silly."
Still, it would be unsettling. Oh, whom are we kidding? It would have set them on their posteriors. Yes, he raised Jairus' daughter. Yes, he raised, what was his name again? Oh, some widow's son at the village of Nain. Yes, he raised Lazarus. Once it sunk in they probably would have realized that this was not out of the question, but His death was so horrible, so final, the damage to His poor body irrecoverable. But no, He still beat death.
The realization had yet to sink in that He hadn't just beaten death. He. Had. Destroyed. DEATH. Death, which had claim on every human being suddenly no longer had its greatest prize, but its hold on everyone else was permanently weakened. Certainly, som could persist in Death if they wanted, but because God the Word descended into Death's realm, the radiance of the Uncreated Light dealt the absence of life a crippling blow which will, at the consummation of the age, serve as its complete undoing.
Come, see where He lay.
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