Easter

He Descended. He Rose.

He rose where no lilies grow
in a quarry gnawed by centuries,
where the shroud lay folded
like the law,
fulfilled and set aside.
The slab was not rolled.
It was dismissed.
A subpoena revoked
in the court of the grave.

He rose not effulgent,
but real.
Nails still tattooed in his hands,
side opened like a legal document
not closed, but sealed with witness.
This was no apparition.
This was the body
Mary swaddled,
now striding through dimensions
like a priest through a torn shroud.

The tomb did not echo.
It confessed.

We came with aloes,
with our Sabbath silence still sticky
in our mouths.
But he spoke
and it was Genesis again:
Let there be.
And there was.

His voice did not console.
It called.
Like Lazarus, like Saul,
like every Adam
still hiding behind fig leaves of doctrine.

He bore no crown of thorns now
only the authority of bruised heels
and broken curse.
The Gardener,
they called him,
and were more right than they knew.
For out of death’s furrow
came the Firstfruits,
and the harvest has never stopped.

This is not a tale.
This is tectonic.

We do not sing because we are sentimental.
We sing because rocks would scream if we did not.

He is risen
not in allegory,
not in memory,
but in bone and blood
that cannot die again.
The Second Adam,
having passed through Gethsemane’s press
and Golgotha’s gavel,
now holds the keys
and jangles them in the serpent’s face.

So we gather
not with pageantry,
but with table and torn bread,
with wine poured like judgment overturned.

We do not worship a ghost.
We follow a man
who walked out of death
with Eden in his eyes.

And we will follow him
past the silence of morgues,
past the scatter of ash and grief,
past even the memory of pain
into gardens that do not wilt,
into mornings that do not end,
into the thunder-song of saints
who have traded graves for gladness.

Death has no body left to feed on.
Christ has filled it with himself.
And we,
having died with him,
will rise
spines straightened,
mouths full of hallelujahs
that death can’t digest.

O grave,
get used to your emptiness.

For He is risen.
He is risen, indeed.