A Breath

Imagine something with me.

You’re in a cave, dark (pitch-black), cool, and eerie. You know it’s a tomb, you know it contains a body; you know it contains what remains of the physical body of Jesus.

You saw him just a few days ago, hanging from a cross, looking more like a hunk of meat than a man. You heard him give up his spirit; you saw the spear go in and out of his side. You know he’s dead.

The silence of the tomb is overwhelming. So quiet it hurts your ears, so still, so full of death.

Then it happens. So small, yet so profound against the prevailing silence, a breath was just taken! There is life in that ‘dead body.’ Soft and steady breathing.

Jesus’ death was loud, it was violent, and it was gruesome and bloody and seen by many. The Curtain was torn in two, an earthquake happened; there was darkness at noontime. Shouts and hate and the final words of Christ, “It is finished,” the proclamation of proclamations.

Jesus’ resurrection was quiet, a breath in the dark. But what it accomplished is more resounding than the darkness or the earthquake or the shouts, “Jesus took in that breath and shattered all death with his life.”

Imagining forth to the peace we have in him, his breathing alone in the tomb secures our hope.

Jesus’ first breath in the dark of the tomb will resound for all eternity.