Steven LaChance Blog

He is risen.

That is the line that survives. Clean. Direct. Easy to hold onto. But it is not where the story ends. It is where things become harder to understand.

Just days before, the people of Jerusalem thought they knew who Jesus was. They welcomed him with an understanding of a version of him that made sense in their world. By Thursday, that understanding had begun to come apart. By Friday, it was gone, replaced by something else entirely.

And now…

the tomb is empty.

His resurrection should have settled everything. It should have been the moment where belief locked into place and the story became clear. But it didn’t happen that way. The earliest accounts do not read like answers. They read like confusion. People who did not recognize him. People who doubted what they were seeing. People trying to make sense of something that did not fit into anything they had known before.

The resurrection did not arrive as some sort of clarity. It arrived as disruption.

And that part tends to get smoothed out over time.

Because the story does not actually end at the empty tomb. In older traditions, including those preserved in Ethiopia, there are texts that describe Jesus continuing to teach after the resurrection. And what is preserved there does not become easier. It moves in the same direction. Toward power. Toward belief. Toward the space between people and what they are told to accept. The idea that salvation could be found within, and that organized structures should be approached with caution.

None of this was new. He had been saying it all along. But after the resurrection, it lands differently. Now it is not just a teacher speaking. It is someone who has passed through death and returned, continuing the same message without adjusting it to make it easier to hear.

And that is where the tension still lives.

Because over time, the story was simplified. The confusion was softened. The harder edges were set aside. Not erased, just… quieted. What remains is something easier to sit with, something that settles more quickly.

But if you stay with it, the questions are still there.

The resurrection was not just a moment to celebrate. It was a moment that did not fit inside what people expected it to be. A moment that refused to close things off neatly.

So maybe Easter is not just about saying He is risen and leaving it there. Maybe it is about sitting with what that actually means. About recognizing that even the people closest to him struggled to understand what they were seeing.

Maybe that is the part we move past too quickly.

Because this was not just a moment of belief. It was a moment that asked people to step into something they could not explain. To accept that what they were seeing did not fit into the world they understood.

The resurrection requires something of you.

Not just belief.

“They were startled and frightened, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.
And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?”