Living
Hope

In 31 AD, a political assassination shook the Roman Empire.

Tiberius Caesar had grown disillusioned with power but kept its privileges, retreating to the island of Capri and handing the daily rule of the empire to a man named Sejanus. For years Sejanus consolidated influence and collected the loyalty of the elite—until Tiberius decided he had collected too much.

Sejanus arrived at the Senate expecting to be named co-emperor. Instead, charges were read aloud before the entire chamber. He was executed before the day was out.

Was he guilty? Was Tiberius the real danger? Historians still argue. The people living through it had no way to know what was actually true. The official story and the real story were not always the same thing.

The fallout was immediate. The political class fractured. Riots broke out. Purges followed. Nobody was sure who to trust.

Then, in 33 AD—the very year of Jesus’ death and resurrection—an old lending law, ignored for years, was suddenly enforced. Debts were called in. Accounts differ on how severe it was, but one thing is certain: ordinary people paid for it. Land lost. Freedom lost. While the powerful debated the scope of the damage, real families absorbed it.

Underneath all of it, tension was building in the provinces—the conquered territories at the edges of the empire, historically restless, now more combustible than ever.

None more so than Judea. Occupied. Volatile. A population that had waited generations for liberation, governed by a man named Pontius Pilate who knew that the wrong arrest, the wrong execution, could ignite the whole region. This is the world Pilate was navigating two days before our story begins.

This is not an ancient history lesson. It is an introduction to the neighborhood.

Political chaos. Economic wreckage. A culture that cannot agree on what is true. A world coming apart at the seams—while everyone can feel the pressure building, and no one knows when or how it will break. That is the world the resurrection is born into. Not so different from ours.

And here is what is worth seeing: while that world was unraveling, something was quietly being put back together. Not in a palace. Not in the Senate. Not in any of the rooms where the chaos was being managed and mismanaged.

The world did not become stable before Jesus rose. He rose in the middle of it.

And the first person to encounter it was not a general, a senator, or an emperor. It was a woman named Mary—showing up in the dark, heartbroken, to finish a funeral. She had no idea she was about to walk into the most important moment in human history.

It starts as a funeral.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb. The Easter story does not start as a triumph. It begins in grief.

She cannot wait for sunrise. Grief does not wait. The Sabbath came fast after Jesus died—no time for the spices, the oils, or the full mourning rites. Mary comes back the first moment she possibly can. She has come to finish a funeral.

This loss is larger than losing someone she loved. Jesus had delivered her from a darkness no human hands could reach. She had reordered her entire life around the conviction that God’s future had arrived in him. His death is the loss of hope on a crushing scale.

The stone is already moved.

Mary does not assume resurrection. Her mind goes to the next worst possibility: someone has taken the body. She runs for Peter and John. They look inside, find the linen cloths, and leave bewildered.

Mary stays. She is left outside the tomb with the questions they cannot answer and the grief they cannot carry for her.

The story begins again in a garden.

The Bible begins with a garden, where God breathes life into dust and rests on the seventh day. Now, on the first day of a new week, in another garden, creation begins again. Mary is standing at the hinge of history, but she cannot see it yet.

Then he speaks her name.

She turns and sees a man she takes for the gardener. “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” She asks him where the body has been taken.

Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

Our name is the sweetest sound to our own ears. She can see Jesus and not recognize him until he speaks hers. Hope is not wishful thinking here. Hope has flesh and blood and is standing in front of her.

Jesus does not shame Mary for failing to understand. He meets her inside the grief and turns her toward a future she could not have imagined. Then he gives her something to do: go, and tell them.

As early as the third century, the church called Mary the “Apostle to the Apostles”—the one sent to announce the resurrection to those who would carry the news into the world. A woman once discarded becomes the first witness and the first messenger.

Locked doors.

That evening, the disciples were together with the doors locked, afraid. Jesus came and stood among them. “Peace be with you.”

He was not trying to be strange or paranormal, and the Gospel writer is not trying to make it more believable than it was. People do not walk through locked doors. If you witnessed something like this and wanted your account taken seriously, you would not invent it—you would only write down what happened, because you would not dare embellish something with the kind of power to bypass space and time. That could only be one person: the one who made them.

Jesus does this twice—because this story is a setup for someone who was not in the room.

Thomas, one of the Twelve, missed it. When the others told him, “We have seen the Lord,” he said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

This is where the phrase “a doubting Thomas” comes from. He gets a bad reputation for it. But there is something deeper going on than skepticism.

Wounds.

Thomas was not short on evidence. He had watched Jesus feed a crowd with a boy’s lunch. He had seen dead men walk out of tombs, leprosy healed, the paralyzed stand. He had bet his entire life on who Jesus said he was—it was Thomas who once said, “Let us go to Jerusalem, so that we may also die with him.”

But there was one thing that was not supposed to happen. The Messiah was not supposed to die. Thomas—like the others—had quietly still been hoping for a warrior-king, an army, an end to Rome’s occupation. Jesus told them again and again it would not go that way. They did not want to hear it.

So when the pressure came, everything Thomas had staked his life on seemed to be sealed in a tomb. And while everyone around him kept saying Jesus was alive, Thomas had somehow missed every single encounter. Everyone else got a visit. Not him.

His doubt was not really about evidence. It was disappointment. Hurt. A heart that had gone numb to protect itself.

A week later, the disciples were together again, and Thomas was with them. He had not walked away—even without believing, he stayed close to the ones who did. Maybe some part of him was still holding on.

Maybe some part of you is too. Life did not go the way you were promised. You did what you were supposed to do, and it did not work out the way you hoped. Everyone around you seems to have an experience you cannot access.

Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them. “Peace be with you.” Not, “You should have believed sooner.” Just: peace.

Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

The emphasis is on the wounds. Thomas’ wounds were unseen. Jesus’ were right there—and became the doorway to Thomas’ healing.

This is what the resurrection means for us: what is true of Jesus will one day be true of us, and of everything broken. The early church called this “firstfruits”—the first sign of a harvest still to come.

Because Jesus knows our doubts rarely need better arguments. They need a body that has been through death and come out the other side, with the power to heal even the hurts we have hidden from everyone, including ourselves.

The charcoal fire.

John’s gospel seems to end after the Thomas story. Then, as if one more thing needed saying, he adds a final chapter—centered on Peter.

We do not hear much about what Peter has been doing since the tomb. But we remember where we last saw him clearly: at his lowest moment.

Jesus was on trial in the dark. Peter had vowed he would never abandon him—that he would die before denying him. But when the pressure came, he could not hold it together. He lingered at the edges of the trial, warming himself at a charcoal fire, and when a servant girl identified him as one of Jesus’ followers, he denied it three times. Then, across the courtyard, Jesus turned and looked straight at him. The rooster crowed. It was the worst moment of Peter’s life, and the smell of that fire never left him.

Now, in John 21, we find him back on the Sea of Galilee. Back to fishing. Back to his old name—Simon, not Peter, “the Rock.” He must have felt like anything but a foundation.

Some of us know this place. Failure. Promises made and broken. The habit we fell back into. The thing we swore we would never do again—and did.

Then a familiar scene unfolds. A man on the shore tells them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat—the same words spoken the day Jesus first called Peter, Andrew, James, and John away from these waters. And it happens again: nets breaking with fish. Peter’s memory floods back. “It is the Lord!” He does not wait for the boat. He swims.

When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there, with fish and bread on it.

There are only two places in John’s gospel where this exact phrase appears—a fire of burning coals. Once, at the moment of Peter’s greatest failure. Now, here, at this moment. Jesus meets him again, by the same kind of fire.

Some smells pull you back to a place instantly. Jesus sets this scene on purpose—a meal that echoes the day they first met, and carries the scent of the night Peter failed him most.

Do you love me?

Jesus asks Peter three questions. One for every denial.

“Do you love me?” Jesus uses the word agape—love without condition, the strongest word available.

“Lord, you know I love you,” Peter answers—but he uses phileo, brotherly affection. He cannot bring himself to claim more than that. The smell of his failure is still in the air.

There is an honesty in that worth noticing. The bravado is gone—“I will die before I deny you” has met reality. What is left is simpler: Jesus, this is all I’ve got.

And Jesus says: that will be enough.

For his three denials, Peter receives not three corrections, but three commissionings.

“Feed my lambs.” “Take care of my sheep.” “Feed my sheep.”

And finally: “Follow me!”

In other words: I called you away from these boats once before. I renamed you—not for who you were, but for who I would make you. I knew you would fail. I told you that you would. And I have forgiven you, and I am still calling you.

So get up. Come, follow me.