“He has risen!” – Mark 16:6
My friend was once driving along an interstate highway out in the middle of nowhere when suddenly her car stalled. Being near an exit she managed to coast off the freeway and out of traffic. For twenty minutes she sat before deciding to contact AAA, but just in case she turned the key one more time. Sure enough the car started right up as if nothing was wrong. So, on she went, until twenty minutes down the road –the exact time her car had been stalled – she came upon a deadly multi-vehicle accident. Had her car not mysteriously stalled my friend would surely have been one of the victims.
My friend seemed hesitant at first to share this incident with me, perhaps concerned whether I could be trusted to believe such an unbelievable story. She did, though, either because she perceived me to be a person of deep religious faith, or maybe because I’m just whacko enough to believe in such mysterious stories. The truth is, I’m probably a little bit of both; that is, a person of faith, but also a little whacko at times, even to the point of doubting on occasions, depending on which side of the bed I wake up on.
If I am all those things – believer, whacko, and occasional doubter – at least I am in good company. According to scripture when Mary Magdalene and the other women discovered Jesus’ tomb open and empty, a young man sitting beside it informed them that Jesus was not there. “He has risen!” he exclaimed, then instructed them to go tell Peter and the other disciples what they had seen and heard. But when she told them they did not believe it, not at first anyway. They doubted such a tale, thought it was whacko.
“Part of what it means to believe in God,” author and theologian Frederick Buechner once wrote, “is to believe in the possibility of miracle.” Maybe that’s why my friend felt confident to share her story, because she thought I might believe in the possibility that a car-stalling angel could show up on an interstate out in the middle of nowhere. But the greatest miracle of all, the one that has changed people throughout the centuries, from Mary Magdalene and Peter and the other disciples, the miracle that changed my own life and has given me both peace and purpose, is Jesus Christ raised from the dead. “He has risen!” exclaimed the young man. May this greatest of all miracles give you peace and purpose as well. The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed! Happy Easter.