“King of the Jews.”
“So they say.”
“D’you think he’ll stay dead?”
The older man laughed. He’d been a soldier long enough to know,
the dead don’t walk. “We killed him son.” And if they could keep the body
guarded, maybe peace would return to the violent province.
They sat around the fire, telling war stories to flames,
cursing the land, scorning people who might be foolish enough to try to steal a
corpse.
Then they saw what they could not see, and heard what they
could not hear. In the morning, the grave stood empty; the dead had walked.
John 11:25 “…I am the resurrection, and the life…”
Jesus walked the earth again for forty days. His disciples
saw Him. Huge crowds ate and talked with Him. And those who chronicled events
wrote their tales, while eye-witnesses still lived to disagree. Like newspaper
reporters today, each stressed his own version. But together they tell one
story, one the authorities couldn’t suppress, though it would have been so easy
to disprove—if there’d only been a body.
After the forty days, Jesus disappeared. After fifty, at the
Jewish Pentecost, the Holy Spirit turned frightened fishermen into Fishers of
Men. And two thousand years later Christians still follow the carpenter.
