Easter Sunday

By Alex Florez

Scripture Reading: Luke 24:1-49, Psalm 16:9-11

In all the years I’ve been a follower of Jesus, I’ve read the resurrection accounts through the eyes of the disciples who experienced it firsthand. But today, as I reflect on Luke 24:6, I’m seeing something that is completely new to me. When Luke writes, “He is not here, but he has risen!,” he is primarily offering a narrative account of the actual events. However, the Holy Spirit gave me a gift in today’s reading—it is the reassurance of Jesus’s continued presence, even to the present age.

I think I’ve tended to read the resurrection accounts as a glimpse into history, which the passage of time has sealed off from the present. Jesus was buried, but then He rose from the dead. Hallelujah! But in all four Gospels we read that Jesus later ascends to heaven, in a sense removing Him once again from the presence of His friends and followers. I recognize the functional necessity of Jesus’s ascension, both on a theological and practical level, but, reading about it 2,000 years later, it still feels somewhat final to have Jesus whisked off to heaven.

Because the Holy Spirit has been so central to my journey of faith, I have always been confident of God’s actual presence in my life. But, it seems to me, in light of what God has shown me today, that I’ve tacitly understood the resurrection of Jesus Christ as something that happened once a very long time ago. Jesus may not be here to break bread with me or to deliver a sermon on some picturesque Tennessee hillside. Nonetheless, in a very real sense, He is risen. He does not lay inert in a tomb; He is on the move. Nor is He perched upon some distant cloud watching me clumsily plod through my life; He is alive and well, even now.

This Easter, let’s remember that the resurrection of Jesus is not a static historical event experienced only by firsthand witnesses. Read Luke 24:6 again and be mightily encouraged: sure, Jesus may not be here among us today as He had been with His cohort in first-century Judea. But the coda of this verse is as true now as it was then, and we must cling to it for dear life. Jesus is risen, He lives. And we have the Holy Spirit, who is limitlessly accessible and boundlessly committed to accompany us from here to eternity.

Jesus is risen, indeed, so let us walk today in the newness of life that His resurrection has rendered possible.

Written by Alex Florez

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