Everything in our natural experience works against resurrection hope.  Our ordinary lives teach us to believe Monty Python’s line:  “Life is quite absurd and death’s the final word.”  Life leads to death.  That’s the trajectory of this world and of Adam its original head.  Life and then death.

But Jesus came to reverse the way of Adam.  He came to turn the world right-side-up.  And therefore it strikes the children of Adam as utterly new and strange.  On that first Easter Sunday, the women came to the tomb expecting to pay their last respects to a departed friend.  They came to mark an ending.  Instead they were witnesses to the one great beginning.

He is risen – and one day, we too will be raised. What grace.