The day before the first Easter was a day before there were any Christians. It was a day before churches. The Bible didn't exist yet. There was no reason to celebrate that first Easter Sunday, which is worth discussing today.
In the afternoon after Jesus's crucifixion, two men go to Pontius Pilate and ask permission to remove his body from the cross. After retrieving Jesus's body, they prepare it for burial according to Jewish custom. Then they placed him in a cave and sealed it with a stone. Both these men, along with many others, had hoped Jesus was who he had been claiming to be. At this moment before Easter, they concluded clearly Jesus was not.
There were no Jesus followers anymore. Nobody believed that Jesus was the Son of God. He wasn't the Savior. He couldn't even save himself...
Not only had Jesus died, but so did his movement. Nobody was planning on keeping the movement moving. Why bother? Jesus wasn't who he claimed to be, which was the whole point of the movement. His followers gave up immediately. They didn't even try to keep the movement going.
Jesus's message and his ministry centered on him. This is what drove the religious leaders absolutely crazy. It's what led to Jesus's death. It wasn't just his stories, his parables, and his teachings, but it was who Jesus claimed to be. He said, "I Am." He equated himself with God and claimed the authority to forgive sins.
And on that first Easter, they were wrong because Jesus was dead. Everyone watched Jesus die. At that moment, they didn't just watch him die. They watched his movement die. His followers didn't expect them to die, but once Jesus died, everyone expected him to stay dead.
There is more to the story... Early on that first Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been moved. She runs back to Peter and John and says something to the effect of, "They have taken our Lord from the tomb, and I don't know where they've put him. They've stolen him."
Nobody in the story assumes there's a miracle, even though Jesus predicted several times that this would happen. They all concluded that dead people stay dead as you and I would. This is recorded in Luke 24:11 "The story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn't believe it."
Jesus would later appear to them. It was after seeing the resurrection that th
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