The Empty Tomb

I don't believe it.  I saw him die three days ago.  Nobody comes back from the dead, not after three days.  I won't believe it unless I see him again, alive, in body, and can put my fingers in his hands and feet and side.

It's easier for me to believe that he was God incarnate than it is that he died, really truly died, and then came back to life.  And it is easier for me to believe that he died and came back to life than that this means I will.

Give me a break.  We all die, every one of us, and that's that.  Sure, there are all those stories about people coming back from the dead, but those were just little excursions of the soul, not true death.  Not the kind of death that has maggots eating away at your entrails.  Not the kind of death you die after the medical examiner finishes her autopsy.  Or after a soldier puts a sword through your side.

They did something with his body, that's the only explanation I can think of.  But why?  Who did they think would believe them?  They didn't even believe him when he told them that he would die and rise again.  Why would they change their minds after running away?  The women may have believed him, but they were going to his tomb to anoint his body, not to take it away.  Could it be that it was really gone when they got there?  But where?

It is so much more comfortable leaving all of this in the abstract.  Sure, God exists, but out there somewhere, in the realm of transcendent ideas.  Not here in the world in the flesh, walking around.  God is much easier to believe in as a philosophical concept than as a living, breathing human being.  "Incarnate in a virgin's womb"--pull the other one, it has bells on!  And now you're telling me that this guy whom you thought was the Christ promised to lead us out of slavery isn't dead anymore?  Wishful thinking, that's all I can say.

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