Sealing the stone

Matthew 27:57-66

27:57 When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus.

27:58 He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him.

27:59 So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth

27:60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He
then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away.

27:61 Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb.

27:62 The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate

27:63 and said, "Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, 'After three days I will rise again.'

27:64 Therefore command the tomb to be made secure until the third day;
otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people,
'He has been raised from the dead,' and the last deception would be
worse than the first."

27:65 Pilate said to them, "You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can."

27:66 So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.

Thanks to Maggie's Farm

He is risen. Be not afraid.

George Weigel writes that we humans have an innate, physical resistance to death.

You’ve noticed it if you’ve kept a death-watch by the bedside of a loved one; emergency medics, physicians, and clergy see it all the time, even on the battlefield: the human body fights against death, resisting the inevitable to the end. Viewed through the lens of biblical faith, this innate, physical resistance to death is a trace of what theologians call “original innocence,” the condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall: before sin and death entered the story. Death is unnatural, in the sense that the Creator did not intend it “in the beginning.” Because “he is not God of the dead but of the living; for all live to him” [Luke 20.38].

...the Resurrection wrought a great change in the order of nature as well as in the order of history — a great change in the structure of reality itself, as well as in the trajectory of the human drama.

...Keeping in mind the magnitude of the change wrought by the Resurrection — a divine action in history and nature that changed history and nature in a radical way, opening new possibilities of life beyond the reach of death — we can get a deeper insight into those readings from the four Gospels that the Church uses on Easter Sunday and throughout Easter Week — readings in which the disciples don’t get it, time after time after time, in their encounters with the Risen One.

Take, for example, one of the literary gems of the New Testament: the account, in Luke 24.13–44, of the two disciples who meet the Risen Lord on Easter on the road to Emmaus, fail to recognize him at first, then come to know him in the breaking of bread. The two then rush back to Jerusalem where they share their experience with other friends of Jesus. Both the Emmaus disciples and the disciples in Jerusalem (who have found the empty tomb and have heard the angel’s proclamation of the Resurrection) believe that Jesus has been raised; they accept the testimony of their own eyes, and of witnesses. But they still cannot grasp what this “being raised” means. So when the Risen One appears among them, their first reaction is to think that this is a “spirit,” a ghost.

Read more here.

Pope beats pot pushers crowd

Wow! What do you know? The Pope had an even bigger and much more well-behaved crowd on Easter than did the marijuana pushers in Denver!