The Scandal of Easter: When Truth Becomes True, True

There's a peculiar category of truth that emerged in a conversation between a former lawyer-turned-pastor and his concerned clients. They wanted to know: "You don't really believe all this stuff, do you? It's good for you, but you know, you live your truth and I'll live my truth. This stuff isn't like true, true, right?"



True, true. That well-defined new category of truth that transcends personal preference and subjective experience. The kind of truth that exists whether we believe it or not—like gravity, like the balance in your bank account.

Easter forces us into this uncomfortable territory. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ isn't presented as a nice story or a helpful metaphor. It's offered as something that either happened or didn't happen. And if it did happen, it changes absolutely everything.

The Evidence That Demands a Verdict

The Gospel of John gives us a front-row seat to Easter morning. Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb while it's still dark and discovers the stone has been removed. She runs to Peter and John with devastating news: "They've taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they put him."

What follows is almost comical—John makes sure to mention that he outran Peter to the tomb. But what they found inside was anything but amusing. The grave clothes were there, carefully arranged, but the body was gone.

The empty tomb presents a problem that has challenged skeptics for two millennia. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, where did the body go? The theories that attempt to explain away the resurrection crumble under scrutiny:

The swoon theory suggests Jesus didn't actually die but merely passed out and later revived. But Roman executioners were breathtakingly efficient at their job. The flogging alone—compared by scholars to being hit in the back by a shotgun blast at close range—was enough to kill some victims. No one survived Roman crucifixions.

The stolen body theory proposes that someone took Jesus' body. But who? The Romans had every reason to keep it where it was. Grave robbers would have taken the valuable burial linens, not left them behind. And the disciples—a depressed, disillusioned group—had nothing to gain from perpetuating a lie that would only bring them persecution and death.

Chuck Colson, one of the Watergate conspirators who later became a Christian in prison, put it brilliantly: "I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. Twelve men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then proclaimed that truth for forty years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned, and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled twelve of the most powerful men in the world, and they couldn't keep a lie alive for three weeks. You're telling me twelve apostles could keep a lie alive for forty years? Absolutely impossible."

More Than a Miracle

But the resurrection isn't just about a man coming back to life. John hints at something far more profound when he writes that the disciples "still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead."

The resurrection is the culmination of a promise woven throughout the entire biblical narrative. It echoes back to that first "first day of the week" in Genesis, when the world was dark and empty and void, and God breathed out His life and said, "Let there be light."

Humanity was created to live in perfect attachment to God—a relationship of love, mercy, community, and goodness. But we walked away. We chose independence over intimacy, and everything started to come apart in cycles of pain, injustice, brokenness, and dysfunction.

Yet God didn't discard what was broken. He promised to fix it, to heal it, to defeat the enemies of sin and Satan and death. And on Easter morning, that promise was fulfilled.

John begins his resurrection account with deliberate language: "Early on the first day of the week"—an echo of creation's first day. Jesus appears to Mary as a gardener, just as God was present like a gardener at the advent of creation. This isn't just resurrection; it's re-creation. The beginning of a whole new world.

From Brokenness to Beauty

Mary Magdalene knew brokenness intimately. She had experienced ongoing oppression from demonic spiritual forces. She lived as a woman in a society that overlooked and rejected women, treating them as property. She was someone on the margins, broken, with a traumatic past.

Most people probably left Mary alone. But Jesus didn't push her aside. He included her. He cleansed her. He started putting her life back together again.

And when she thought He was gone forever, when she stood outside the tomb weeping, Jesus appeared to her. She clung to Him so tightly that He had to ask her to let go a little. She had found hope in Jesus, and she wasn't about to lose it again.

What honor Jesus gave Mary by choosing her to be the first witness of His resurrection. He saw beauty where others saw brokenness.

We all carry brokenness, don't we? The anxiety, the addictions, the fear, the scattered pieces of our lives tangled up with hurts that haunt our hearts, hang-ups that cause us pain, and habits that mess up our lives.

There's a Japanese practice called kintsugi—the art of mending broken pottery not with invisible glue, but with seams of gold. It doesn't hide the cracks; it highlights them, turning something broken into something more beautiful than before.

This is what the resurrected Jesus does. He doesn't discard what's broken. He restores it and makes it more beautiful.

From Shame to Worth

Peter knew shame. He had denied even knowing Jesus three times on the night Jesus needed him most. Can you imagine waking up the day after Jesus' crucifixion, carrying not just grief but the crushing weight of betrayal?

Many of us know that feeling—the guilt over what we've done, but also the deeper shame that whispers, "Maybe there's something wrong with me."

When the resurrected Jesus came to Peter, it wasn't to compound his shame. It was to offer forgiveness and love. Jesus dealt with our sin and guilt and shame on the cross by nailing it to Himself, so we could stop nailing ourselves to the cross.

By the time John wrote his Gospel, he had internalized this truth so deeply that he referred to himself throughout as "the one Jesus loved." That was his core identity—not his failures, not his brokenness, but the overwhelming reality that he was more loved than he could possibly imagine.

From Fear to Hope

Later that Easter evening, the disciples huddled together in a locked room, terrified. Jesus was dead, and they feared they were next. Death had gripped them.

Death is our greatest enemy, and it wins 100 percent of the time. We try to avoid it, delay it, hide from it, postpone it. But eventually, we all must face it.

Then Jesus walked through those locked doors. His first words? "Peace be with you." And then He showed them His hands and His side—the wounds that proved He had taken the sting of death so they wouldn't have to.

Think about the power of death. Nothing can stop it. No human being, no mountain that won't eventually erode to pebbles, no star that won't eventually burn out. Yet Someone came who overmatched death. Jesus Christ was swallowed by death and exploded in its bowels.

Because His tomb is empty, ours can be empty too.

The Knocking at the Door

If this is true, true—if Jesus actually rose from the dead—then He's still alive today, still transforming brokenness into beauty, shame into worth, fear into hope.

But here's the reality: Jesus forced His way out of that grave, but He will not force His way into our lives. He is knocking, but we must open the door. We must welcome Him. We must say, "Jesus, I want to be reattached to God. I want to know Your healing, Your love, Your freedom, Your life."

The scandalous claim of Easter is that it isn't just true for some people. It's either true for everyone or it's not true at all. And if it's true, it doesn't just change history. It changes real people—people like Mary, like Peter, like you, like me.



The tomb is empty. The question is: what will you do with that truth?

Real Questions We All Ask About Easter

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