At some point in the early hours of the sixteenth of Nissan, the seventh month of the Jewish Calendar, our Easter Sunday, something extraordinary happened to the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He had been executed by the Roman authorities and laid to rest nearby in the unused tomb of a wealthy man not much more than 24 hours before. His death had been so violent and gruesome that the words Isaiah once used to describe the Suffering Servant of God fittingly applied to him: “so marred was his appearance, (he was) beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals” (Isaiah 52:14). Flogging, abuse, and crucifixion had resulted in his total annihilation, leaving no inch of his body without its laceration, no element of his anatomy without its wound. According to the soldiers present at the scene – expert assassins – Jesus was beyond dead, his body a hopelessly mangled corpse. Any attempt at resuscitation, even with modern twenty-first century means, would have been useless; the damage was absolutely beyond repair.

The fact that his body went missing three days later – and was never found – and that his followers soon proclaimed him to be alive and well, full of grace and power, has no human explanation. It is true that they could have taken and hidden – or even destroyed – the body, but there is no way to account for their sudden change from complete apathy and hopelessness to undaunted audacity and brazen courage. They doubted and misunderstood him while he was alive. They abandoned him at the first sign of danger and failed to present themselves in the hour of his death. Why would they now, of a sudden, at the moment when his life and mission concluded in failure, usher forth from their hiding place and sacrifice their lives for him?

They had to have seen something.

Something portentous, earth-shattering, totally beyond human imagination had to have occurred.

The Resurrection of the Christ is the single, most important event of all history.

I hope my reflections on the Gospel passages pertaining to this mystery will help you come to know the Risen Lord and love him more deeply.