For as many times as we’ve heard the Easter story, the whole event still feels, well, kind of farfetched. Perhaps in your head you hold as fact that the lifeless body of Jesus rose from the grave, but during those dark nights of the soul, your heart nonetheless wonders: Can you trust resurrection?
That’s why an angel, I tend to believe, tells the terrified women at the tomb to fear not: He’s here, he’s here! Alive and well! Death is vanquished! Thus, says the angel, “Do not be afraid” – just as Jesus himself has said time and time again, just as God has said more than any other phrase in the whole of the Bible.
In the clarion call of the angel, maybe Mary and the women now know more fully that their Jesus – the One whose feet they washed, the One for whom they had cooked meals, the One with whom they laughed and joked – really is Emmanuel, really is God with us. And all has been reconciled – all has been made right and well – in a broken and fearful world!
And maybe the angel echoes Jesus’s pleas to “fear not,” because the people who scorned Jesus and told him to save himself are still lurking around, too. The soldiers who mocked him with vinegar, who taunted him to call down Elijah and save himself, are here, too. And the strongman Pontius Pilate still reigns. How, then, do you trust resurrection in your heart when death in its many forms still sits on the throne of your world?
You trust – even with faith the size of a tiny seed – because the Good News of new life rising from rotting death is greater than any tyrant, greater than any time of trial that evil throws in your path. The Good News of God is more alive than absolutely anything that tries to kill God, more vibrant than anything that tries to kill the image of God in you, more robust than anything that conspires to separate you from God and from friend, neighbor, and stranger.
Yet you and I still tremble before the powers of evil that stoke the fires of sin and brokenness, separation and division. And God shakes the earth with power and might so tender and so fresh that they make a stone-cold tomb bloom with new life. And that has powerful implications not just in our relationship with God but also in our relationships with one another. Here then is just one such story of resurrection, reconciliation, and restoration.
Can you trust resurrection? Absolutely! Because death cannot stop the Good News of reconciliation. The Good News of resurrection and reconciliation is alive, unbound, and loosed in the world. The very idea that even the most broken of relationships on heaven and earth can and will be repaired really isn’t so farfetched. So fear not, and let us pray – Loving God, you have reconciled us in Christ Jesus and have given us the ministry of reconciliation. Thus we pray for all those from whom we are estranged for whatever reason. Bring healing to strained or broken relationships. Forgive the times we have wronged others – by ignorance, neglect, or intention. Grant us the grace to seek forgiveness and the courage of your Holy Spirit that opens hearts and minds to making amends. Where others have wronged us, grant us a gracious spirit, that we might forgive even as we have been forgiven in Jesus Christ, by whose stripes we all have been healed. Amen, and amen.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Lizzie McManus-Dail informs the message.