Easter Sunday AD 2025

Jesus’ death filled the hearts of His followers with grief and bewilderment. Yes, He had foretold His death – He had also foretold His resurrection – but all this was something incomprehensible to them; something they could do nothing about or had forgotten in the whirlwind of events.

But what nothing could extinguish in their hearts was the love for the Lord – the same love that compelled the women who followed Jesus to rush to His tomb at the first opportunity to anoint Him and thus pay Him their last respects. They went to do what they could, because for them everything was over…

Everything was over, but in a completely different sense than the women and even the disciples of Jesus could imagine. The old world era had ended, the temple veil had been torn, and the old Law had been replaced by the new one. Jesus, the Son of God and Son of Man, the Messiah, had redeemed humanity by His death on the cross, and by rising from the dead, He had conquered the power of sin and death that had bound us since the fall of Adam and Eve.

The old was over, the new had already begun – but the women who came to the tomb did not yet understand this. They did not understand this either when they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, or when they didn’t find the Lord’s body when they entered the tomb. They did not even understand this when they saw two angels in shining garments who rebuked them for seeking the living among the dead. The women understood everything only when the angels reminded them of what Jesus had long ago foretold: “The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.“

This is what we believe: not that everything is over, but that everything has become new. We do not believe in an empty tomb, but in the risen Jesus. We believe in God, who loved us so much that He gave His Son for us, so that we might have eternal life in Him.