On the Third Day, Death had nothing

Editor’s note: With Easter Sunday just a few days away, Rev. Sharon Smith, Pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Imlay City, took the time to share an Easter message with our readers. Pastor Smith reflects on the Death of Jesus on the Cross and the story of His Resurrection in three days. We thank pastor Smith for sharing this victorious story.

In another county where I used to live, I fostered animals for Animal Control. They called one day and asked if I could foster a pregnant cat until the kittens were born and old enough to adopt out.

My kids, who especially loved fostering kittens, eagerly agreed. We picked up the cat and within a week the kittens were born.

In the past whenever we fostered kittens, it was lots of fun caring for and playing with the kittens.

However, this time the mother had been in very poor health, so when her six kittens were born, only three survived the birth. Then we learned that the mother cat had developed an infection and she and the surviving kittens had to go to the vet to be bottle fed every two hours.

Only one kitten made it. My kids were heartbroken. “Why do they keep dying?” they asked.

There is no easy answer, and death hits hard. And even though we’d only had those kittens a few days, death still hit hard. It felt final.

Just like the Cross.

On Good Friday, it seemed death had won. Christ breathed his last, and the sky went dark. His body was taken down and sealed in a tomb.

Day one. Day two. Silence. Waiting. Weeping. It looked like the end.

But death doesn’t get the last word.

On the third day, the stone was rolled away. Christ stood, living, scarred but victorious. God’s answer to death is not avoidance – it is resurrection.

The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann expressed in a single sentence the great span from Good Friday to Easter.

It is, in fact, a summary of human history, past, present, and future:

“God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him.”

That single sentence holds the arc from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

It’s the shape of history, and the shape of hope.

Easter is about death, but it is more about life.

God promises that nothing – not even death itself – can separate us from the love of God.

God is with us in life to ease our way – and in death, to bring us into eternal life.

On Easter morning, death no longer reigns in the land of the living. That final enemy is overcome.

The preacher Fred Craddock once told of a time he woke up to the phone ringing. It was early, the sun had yet to rise.

Come quickly, pastor, the voice said. It is time. Craddock knew what was happening.

Throughout his long years of ministry, he had done this many times.

He rose and dressed in the darkness and then drove to the hospital to wait for death.

The dying woman had done her best. She fought the good fight, chemo, radiation, and blood transfusions. She struggled and prayed and struggled some more, but the cancer was too strong.

A youthful woman of 50 would die that morning, and when Craddock entered the hospital room, the grief was overwhelming. It was not peaceful.

The daughter was weeping in the corner. Her son was at the window, staring blankly into the graying dawn. Her husband was at the bedside, clutching his wife’s hand.

All the evidence of impending death was there. The heart monitor slowly kept time. Beep, beep, beep, beep.

Suddenly, the husband jumped to his feet and began to rock her weak head. The son left the window and clutched her hand, while the daughter grabbed her other hand, and Craddock completed the circle around the bed.

Doctors and nurses poured into the room and joined the group. As they prayed and sang, they could hear death beating down upon them, out in the hallway, death was pounding on the door.

They kept praying and death kept pounding, they kept singing, and death kept coming, her heart struggled to beat, and death kept pushing and fighting and scraping against that door, and when she had breathed her last and death finally burst into the room . . . it had nothing!

This is what Easter means. Yes, death happens. But no – death has nothing.

God Almighty has made a decision for us. Christ keeps coming to us, we who cannot come to him. And Easter keeps happening.

It’s not just about death.

It’s about life.