The story of Easter begins with the followers of Jesus huddled together and trying to lie low. 

When the women venture out to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body, we’re told that they go while it was still dark, which is earlier than would have been customary. 

But they’ve been sitting around in that same room since Friday night. Now they’re anxious to get started.

There is also a practical reason to be out before sunrise: the waning darkness offers them a little bit more time in the shadows.

Under the circumstances, the shadows are safer.

There are Roman soldiers and Temple guards and willing collaborators everywhere.

That may be hard for us to conjure now. 

Our Easters are made of light and beauty—serious flowers, a soaring organ, maybe a new outfit to signal a new you – and it’s been our way of marking this day for so long that we might forget that there have been other ways. 

But there were. 

Beyond that very first Easter, the early church would also have known the shadows, and largely for the same reasons. 

For nearly its first four hundred years, the church in many places gravitated to the shadows and made its home there.

In fact, some vestiges of that time remain.   

In Rome, there are extensive catacombs that go back to the third century – it’s a whole underground world where people gathered and worshiped, as well as buried their own, a place where the living and the dead; believers, confessors, and martyrs were close together.

It is easy to imagine those early Christians in the shadows of the ancient city, traveling back and forth between dusk and dawn.

By day, they would have been hiding in plain sight, but wherever they were and whatever the time, they knew they were pledged to a different lord than Caesar and dreamed of a very different world.

Despite the magnificent monuments all around them, each of which was making its own bid for eternity, the early Christians in Rome were brave enough to build their own space and to leave eternity to God alone. 

This rendered them suspect. 

Rome didn’t much care about other gods, per se. 

People deciding to get organized was another matter. 

That needed to be watched closely and nipped in the bud.

So no wonder the early church gravitated to the shadows and stayed long enough to build a world there.    

With this in mind, the walls of the Roman catacombs seem to preach in ways that are surprising. 

Obviously, the possibility of suffering and death were close at hand for anyone who would have been down there.

Accordingly, you might expect to find a lot of images of Jesus’ own suffering and death. 

But not so. 

From what we can tell, there are no depictions of the cross or of the crucifixion until about 100 years after the catacombs were first constructed. 

Instead, before that, space after space was covered in images from the Bible that tell stories of God’s deliverance: tales “of the powerlessness of death and the certainty of the resurrection.”

On the walls of the catacombs, “God delivers his people from the consequences of death situations and gives them life instead. The Old Testament stories of Daniel, the Hebrew young men in the fiery furnace, Abraham and Isaac, Noah, and Jonah were painted hundreds of times.”[1]

Hundreds of times.

So as we listen to the Gospel of Luke describing that first Easter, we need to imagine those first women, venturing out on the dark streets of the pre-dawn city to go to the place where Jesus lay, heading to what we ought to remember as the church’s very first catacomb.

Its particular walls were almost certainly bare. 

And yet, those walls also bore witness to the God who delivers his people from death and gives them life instead.

As dawn arrives, that’s not what the women see—at least, not at first. 

Instead, what gets their attention are the rolled back stone and the absent body, which fill them with horror. 

But soon, it becomes clear that the God who “delivers his people from the consequences of death and gives them life” has acted again—this time, the story becomes one of resurrection.

But it’s important to understand that this means more than just undoing the mechanics of mortality. 

Luke’s gospel signals this right away.

The women are standing there, trying to take in what has happened, and one of the angels suddenly beside them at the door of the tomb asks them a deceptively simple question: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”

At first, this seems like a roundabout way of announcing that Jesus is alive, that tombs are for dead people and so, of course, he will not be found there. 

Certainly, the message works at that level.

But if you don’t fall for the question’s deceptive simplicity or try to answer it too quickly, it’s a question that grows wings.

It suggests some of what the Christians were able to affirm in places like the catacombs.

Because the story of Jesus is the culmination of that story of deliverance for God’s people.

It’s not only that Christ is risen, but that in him, new life is possible for us, and not just later, but now.

Resurrection doesn’t mean more life later – it means new life, starting now. 

Resurrection means that we have been delivered into the life of God and find our lives in Him.

That’s why we describe it as liberation in its many forms, and as an experience of being “born again,” a term we need to reclaim from those who seem to have forgotten the fullness of its meaning. 

Resurrection, new life in God, liberation, being born again — all mean living as He taught us, challenging ourselves to remain open as He was, risking vulnerability in the name of spiritual strength as He did, resisting humanity’s great talents for hatred and creative cruelty as He insisted that we must.

These are just a few among the many ways that we might rise, and not only to heaven one day, but long before that, as we rise to any occasion or challenge, and invite Him into it. 

This is all part of resurrection…liberation…being born again.

And this means that the angel’s question becomes a much more pointed question—and it’s pointed at us. 

Because where is it that we search for signs of life?

A church that took refuge in a catacomb had clearly moved beyond simplistic answers, but the question renews with each generation and for each of us. 

Where will we take refuge? And in what ways?

So much that claims to be life-giving proves not to be. 

So many attractive roads grow narrow and become dead ends.

At a certain point, the question comes up for us: “Why do you search for the living among the dead?”

It’s God’s invitation to let go of simplistic, dead-end answers and to begin finding our lives within the great complexity, the abundant joy and the overflowing wonder of God’s own life—to see as God sees, serve as God serves, and love as God loves. 

It’s how we begin to claim God’s deliverance for ourselves and know the power of His resurrection. 

This is the promise of Easter.

In the face of emptiness, there is God’s fullness. 

In the face of death, there is the new life in God.     

As we celebrate now in light, in beauty, and in all the outward trappings of a new you and me, may we still find ways to write that promise on our walls and in our hearts.   

Amen.

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[1] Gregory S. Athnos, The Art of the Roman Catacombs: Themes of Deliverance in the Age of Persecution (2023), xiv.