A question like “Why are you crying?” can come across very differently depending on the tone of voice.

With sharpness and disdain, it sounds like a frustrated parent to a child who is upset over not getting a second helping of ice cream.

With softness and compassion, it is an invitation to share one’s innermost grief with a trusted friend who is ready to hear and help bear anything.

You can’t bear to go home, so just stay where you are. Alone. Out in the wild world, under the wide-open sky. As close to your loss as you can be. Let grief happen wherever it needs to happen. It’s ok to sit. To let your sorrow hold you there for a while. Eventually, in time, the weight will lift.

Sometimes, when something shocking and life-altering happens, the worst thing we can do is rush away and try to get on with our lives.

Go home. Sit among family and friends and objects and routines and smells that you are familiar with. Sleep in your own bed. Sit at your own table. Recline on your own porch. Be in your own skin.

The space between a life-altering experience and understanding it is an uncomfortable place to be. One of the things that makes humans unique amongst all the creatures is that we create meaning. Not only that, we thrive on meaning. We do not tolerate “senseless” very well.

Yet “senseless” experiences will come our way. Losses, changes, tragedies, failures, and fallings. Hopefully few and far between. Yet whenever they come, I’ve found that it doesn’t often do much good to ask “Why.” At least not immediately, nor very emphatically.

Yet what I am seeing might only be partial reality. Thus, what I am believing might only be partial truth.

This is not cause for doubt, or disbelief, or cynicism, but rather for hope. Hope that there might be much, much more than what I am currently experiencing.

There is always more to see. Always more to believe.

Any faith system that keeps seeing and believing locked-up, boxed-up, or fenced-in is an inadequate faith for the expansive universe in which we see and believe. Any faith system that does not leave room for a larger God than it can currently conceive of is more concerned with itself as a container than with the God that is meant to fill it.

When Simon Peter stepped into the empty tomb, saw the burial clothes, and noted the absence of a body, “He saw and believed.” What did he see and believe? He saw no body, and so he believed that it was gone. Which was, true, as far as anything could be true to him at that moment. That is all. It wasn’t until later, when he saw the risen Jesus, that he then believed in the Resurrection.

There is always more to see. Always more to believe.

Was going on in the early hours on the third day after Jesus had been crucified. Back and forth. Pounding hearts. Breathless lungs. Sweating bodies. Surprise. Shock. Panic. Just trying to put the story together. Just trying to get the facts straight. Just trying to tell as many others the breaking news as quickly as possible.

The initial explanation (the only one that made sense at the time, really) was that his body had been stolen. What? Who? Why? Where? There were so many questions. And the disciple’s feet couldn’t carry them fast enough to uncover the answers.

John begins his account of the resurrection of Jesus like this: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark…” (John 20:1)

Early. First day. Dark. These images, this tension, this emptiness are all meant to recall another day, the very first day: “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep…” (Genesis 1:2) John is creatively drawing some connecting lines in order to say something much bigger than simply naming the hour of the day and the status of the earth’s rotation.

He is saying, “This is the first day of God’s new creation.”

Several things come to mind when one thinks of gardens: Nature. Life. Flourishing. Fruit. Vegetables. Pollinators. Beauty. Colors. Fragrances.

And in the Bible: New beginnings. In the opening pages of Genesis is a garden—within the newness of the entire earth, which is within the newness of the entire cosmos. In the final pages of Revelation is a garden—fed by a stream emanating from the throne of God, flowing out into the entire world, to which all who are thirsty may come and drink.

Are still disciples. It’s not only those who follow Jesus most openly, out in the daylight for all to see who are following him. Sometimes the faithful and devoted just keep it quieter.

Consider Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Joseph was only a disciple in secret. Nicodemus only came to Jesus at night so that he wouldn’t be spotted.

Yet it was these two who cared for Jesus’ body after the crucifixion, and at significant personal material cost. While they may have followed Jesus in the shadows while he was alive, in his death they took a risk by giving him a proper Jewish burial. While they may have previously been timid before others on the ruling council, they at least had strong enough stomachs to deal with such a brutalized body.

Is 20/20, as the saying goes. Which is often true in the Bible as well.

The creative way in which many of the New Testament writers utilize the Old Testament is often not so much a matter of what we would call “good hermeneutics,” at least by 21st century standards, (and depending on which branch of the Church you find yourself in), but I would call it “prophetic hermeneutics.” Not “prophetic” in a flat, telling-the-future way, but more like the past helping to make sense of the present.

And not only to make sense of the present, but to give language that allows one to talk about the present to others in a way that is compelling, eye-opening, and life-giving.

Or at least that’s what we know to be conventionally true.

Each of the Gospel writers give a lot of details in the account of Jesus’ arrest, torture, and execution. All of which helps to illustrate one basic important fact: Dead is dead. Roman soldiers were extremely good at their business. And their business was death. No one could survive all that the Empire had to dish out.

A final spear to the side served as confirmation.