What if There is More Than Death? | April 5, 2026

Before sunrise, a group of women walks through a city controlled by Roman power, carrying spices and cloth for a burial they expect will be painful and final. They’re not looking for a miracle. They’re looking for a body. That simple, human mission becomes the doorway to one of the most disruptive claims in Christian faith: the tomb is open, the grave is empty, and the world is no longer limited by death.

In this episode, we reflect on how expectation shapes everything we do, how grief follows scripts we think we can trust, and why the first reaction to the empty tomb is confusion and suspicion rather than instant belief. In a Jerusalem tense with politics, fear, and the memory of a crucifixion, even a stolen body seems more “reasonable” than resurrection. But Easter does not arrive as an idea; it arrives as a fact that demands interpretation, and the women are entrusted with a message that reframes the impossible: Jesus is risen, and risen as he promised. 

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

The Women’s Dangerous Dawn Journey

Expectation As A Human Habit

The Empty Tomb Shatters The Script

Resurrection Revealed And The Call Home

Recognizing The Risen Jesus

Resurrection For Us In The Church

Closing Poem And Sign Off

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma. It's a living Catholic. I'm Senior Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. This is Easter Sunday, and the Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. In the dark of the morning, the women made their way through the streets of Jerusalem. They were hurrying down the street toward the outside of the city walls. They could move quickly, since at that time of the day before sunrise, traffic was nill. Although they carried the mixtures and cloths necessary to prepare a decent burial, it was distributed among them and so did not weigh them down. And besides, they were used to carrying and hurrying. They were women, after all. Along the way there were numerous checkpoints and security stations they had to pass, most especially at the city gate. This was, after all, the entrance point to the entire urban area, and it was therefore the most strategic place along the walls. It was heavily defended and carefully watched. Jerusalem was at peace, but it was a Roman peace, which meant order lay heavily over the city at the point of Roman spears and along the sharpened blades of Roman swords. Both were known all over the world as being effective and deadly. But they were women. They were, by their own culture, and in the culture of the imperial occupiers, they were social non-entities. In the eyes of the guards, looking for subversives and smelling out rebellion and keeping an eye out for thieves, these were just women, invisible to the concerns the guards had. They had no trouble on their journey. Unlike men, they could take refuge in their number. Three men were a threat to every soldier in the city, especially after the animated crowds at the recent Passover, where all manner of things were said about God establishing the divine kingdom and the purported presence of the King of the Jews. And that was all settled in a very Roman way, with no more than a typical crucifixion, but the cohorts were still on alert. In this kind of place, almost anything could happen, and they knew it. But ten women were as nothing, a band of females out to do whatever women do in the morning, as the world was waking and the rhythms of life were sounding. The guards, they paid no attention. This was even though these women were resolute, to them, fell the work of a decent and respectable burial. They bore the burden of preparing a body to leave this life, with whatever decorum and decency there is for such a thing. The same as they did with the welcome of those who enter this world, accompanied by the presence of women. Their friend Jesus had been crucified on Friday afternoon, and his body taken down from the cross in the evening. His friends had seen to it that he'd be laid in a tomb nearby, but quickly so, because of the imposing presence of the sundown that marked the beginning of the Sabbath day. Everything had been done in a hurry by men, with none of the care and precision that marked a decent burial and an appropriate way to mourn. Moving through the dark, the women were coming to rescue all that had been merely prompt and expedient and rough. They knew what to do. It fell to the lot of women to care for the dead, and they'd been surrounded by these expectations their whole lives. To extend the care for the dead at the hands of the living was part of what was deeded to them. It was women's work, and they took to it as part of their lot. Washing and anointing Jesus' body and wrapping it appropriately in the burial binding cloths, that was their work. It was what they expected and what they were prepared for. They also came as a group because Jesus had been dead since Friday. It's a work that grows more burdensome and more hideous the longer it is delayed. With more of them, the work could be much more expeditious. And they knew what to expect. In every life, we move through our days with our own marks of expectancy and normalcy. We go about knowing the sun will rise, even if the morning's cloudy, and the car will start even if it's been a while since we checked the battery. Our anticipation is paid off in the currency of regularity. We know what's up ahead because our days are mostly alike. What happens is what we expect, and we brace our entrance to them with the habits and behaviors that form in us. On their way to the tomb, each of the women reviewed in her own mind all that was necessary and appropriate for their work. Jesus' proper burial was their first concern. They also wanted to say goodbye to the friend he had become. His preaching and miracles were directed at them as much as to anyone else. These women were close to him. Some had followed him from Galilee. Others had become of his following when he arrived in Jerusalem. All of them were committed to doing their part to see that his body was treated with the love and respect it deserved. After crucifixion, there was nothing else they could do. The men stayed away sensibly. Jesus had been crucified as a terrorist, a revolutionary, who bore the marks of nothing good to those who kept their fingers on the pulse of society. By the careful staging of the events of the great holy days and the fine-tuning of the passions of the people, the leaders of the Romans, as well as those of the Jews, had conspired to see Jesus hanging from the cross. And it was clear to all the city that these senior people would have no trouble casting their nets wider in order to scoop up all those who bore any of the same hints of Jesus' position or point of view. He was as dangerous as radioactivity, and the leaders in Jerusalem would be happy to snip off his followers as if they were no more than buds in the springtime. So it was prudent the men stay hidden away, out of sight, away from what bothered the powerful and the menacing. And all went as expected. Through the morning mists the women came, the men stayed behind, worrying their way into a new day. All was as expected on this, the first day of the week, when everyone went back to the normal and to the expected. It was the first day after the Sabbath following the great Passover. For the first time in a week, the town was back to normal. The cycle of life and commerce and prayer slotted itself into the regular and to the anticipated. The imperial powers of violence and intimidation had exercised themselves over the lives of the people most affected by them. With relief, they picked up the pieces of their lives and carried on as expected. This was true of the women arriving at the tomb, as well as the men they left secreted in the upper room. But the day was about to become new. The normal and the expected were to be interrupted by the impossible. Because when the women arrived at the tomb, they found the tomb already opened and the grave empty. Where Jesus had been laid was not a place of death and corruption, it was a place of potential and possibility. And they had been led to anticipate through all the cycles of their lives, all that they had and learned to participate to anticipate was pushed away as they got to the place where Jesus had been placed. They were expecting the smell of putrefaction and the cold feel of decomposition, but what they found was that the tomb was empty. The power of expectation had been thwarted. They still responded with what was the most expected and the most natural. With all the world having become a stage for the political and the revolutionary, they figured somebody had stolen Jesus' body. Somebody had moved the whole city, someone who had moved the whole city to the expectation of revolution and had stirred the powers that be to dissimulation. He had become the polar star of resistance and revolution. His body, therefore, carried with it the potential for almost anything the world could thrust upon it. Robbing the grave would carry on the murmuring of the people for who knows how long. Jesus was not just a man, he was a symbol. And the symbol of his body, especially in the powerful notions of the time, was as potent as his words. It made perfect sense to imagine his corp his corpse might yet be conscripted into the service of those who wanted to see the spectacle of revolt. The women only wanted to pay their respects. Others wanted to pad their insurgency. All who arrived there expected the body to be available to them. But the tomb was empty. Their expectations were as vacated as the sepulchres. A quick evaluation of the scene demonstrated that it was not a robbed grave, something else had happened. Whether through the power of heaven that opened the tomb from outside, or the power of Christ that had burst the tomb from the inside, Jesus was no longer present there. The women arrived, they looked, they evaluated, and they concluded. Something had happened, and their mission was abandoned. There was nothing else for them to do in the face of what they experienced. We who hear this story over and over can be excused for not appreciating how displaced the women were. It was not just because they arrived expecting one thing and then found another. That's the second oldest human experience, as old as Adam and Eve. No, it was because they had already placed in their minds and among the expectations the oldest human story of all, that those who are overcome by death are consigned to the grave, with all of the promises and the hopes that they carried buried with them, never to be heard again. When Jesus was overcome by death on Good Friday afternoon, he embodied the human destincy, destin the human destiny consigned to all men. Their lives come to an end in the bitterness of limitation and the cruelty of time passing. And when was he when he was laid in the tomb by his friends, everyone's eyes were turned to the next promise, the next possibility of the next person who might live out the goodness of God in their midst. Endings are final. Time consumes us all, and the savagery of men is everywhere. This is lodged in our minds as certainly as the sunrise. But when they saw the open tomb, they knew the old story was not true. There was another chapter, another whole book to be read. But it was unclear what the plot of the story would be. The empty tomb was only the fact that stared at them in the face. What it meant was not self-explanatory. They were ill informed and unready to know what it could mean. Thus, they had their speculations about grave robbing and subversion at hand, and this is the first moment in which our experience of Easter matches theirs. We can't slip through the darkened streets. It's not ours to reason with the soldiers and their mission. We are not tasked with the careful disposition of the dead. But we come to the empty tomb just as they did. The fact that Jesus was no longer present where all was expected, nor was he constrained by all the forces that sought to hold him. That is as true for us as it was for these women. It's the first fact of the faith. Jesus died, but death could not hold him. Their encounter with the empty tomb is ours as well. We are them. And just like us, they could not go forward until they had an explanation. The bare fact of the empty tomb was no solid information. It was puzzling and, well, empty. But within their encounter, they also found an explanation. Immediately upon their questioning, they encountered someone who could provide a meaning and a future for them. Upon hearing, they not only knew what had happened, they knew what they had to do. Along with the surprise on Easter morning, there was also someone there to let them know what they were seeing. The message to them was clear. Jesus was risen. But more than that, he was risen as he had promised. They'd been entrusted with the certainty of Jesus' mission, but they had fumbled this part of it, just as they misunderstood so much of the rest of it. Over and over, Jesus had assured his disciples that he would be condemned, crucified, and then rise. But they had not understood. When they arrived, they had no idea they could expect anything except the most common truth. In a moment of revelation, they found out the extraordinary truth of what Jesus had been telling them during his entire time among them. He had promised that his life and his message were larger than the boundaries of their imagination or their expect or their expectation. Now they were assured that it was larger than even death itself. Whether they heard it from an angel or from a young man dressed in white, they did hear it. Jesus was raised from the dead. Now pause and think of this for a moment. Imagine you had arrived in the dark of the morning, at a place you take for granted, in which every expectation and common notion is acted out. And then, upon arriving, you find that it has become the gateway to which you to which you could never have thought. You'd be more than amazed. You'd begin to wonder what else might be true and what else might happen in the world. After all, our view of the world is held together by a thread of expectations and common understandings that makes things work, for example. But if we found out, for example, our close neighbors were really, say, paid actors, pressed into their roles so that we would be fooled, not only would we look at them differently, we would also begin to wonder what else was not as it appears. If we found out that all of the financial instruments in the world, from the local bank to Wall Street, were no more than an elaborate hoax put in place simply to keep everyone distracted from what's really going on, we legitimately begin to wonder if the world was real at all. When the promise of the empty tomb turned out to be the victory over death, those women who saw it first, they knew everything was different. The world turned out to be a place transformed. Part of the message they received is that they were to go to Galilee, where they would find Jesus. This had been included in what he taught them, and it had also been swallowed up in their forgetfulness. Their inattention is excusable, after all. What Jesus had done in his miracles and preaching had brought him and them to the heart of the Jewish world, to Jerusalem and its place of sacrifice and holiness, the temple. Following Jesus had led them away from Galilee. Now they were asked to remember the message of returning to where they had begun in order to fulfill the purpose of their leaving. They were to go back home. The contrast is startling. Rather than a whole new place, which is what they were finding as their imaginations were exploded by the resurrection, they were told to go back to what was familiar and certain. Amid the normal and the expected, they would find Jesus risen from the tomb. We who stand at this great remove from Easter morning should also remember this part of the message. According to the angels, the place to find the truth of the resurrected Christ is not on foreign mission or in exotic retreats or among strangers. Its first message is to return home to the place we came from. There is where the promise of Christ shouts in its loudest voice. Home is the place where the resurrected Christ will be the most meaningful. Amid their wonder, as they stood at the tomb, looking at its imposing emptiness, in all of the stories that we have, they encountered Jesus resurrected. As they stood marveling at the message they received, they then saw Jesus. In almost all the stories, they're puzzled by what they see. They who were soberly prepared to handle his dead body, deformed by the tortures he had endured, were nonplussed at seeing him resurrected. They were so overcome by surprise and incomprehension, they didn't know who he was. In each of these stories about encountering the resurrection, there had to be some prompt, some extra aspect of encountering that opened their eyes to him. He was something more than the old Jesus they had known. He was more than him simply the old Jesus up now and breathing again after what had happened on Good Friday. Jesus' appearance was changed enough that they wondered who it was they were actually seeing, who it might be who was actually talking to them. Resurrection means something more than getting up from a three-day interval. Resurrection means transformation. And yet when the prompt was given, they did recognize him. In one story of his appearance, it was when he broke bread with them. As he did, those around the table finally saw him. In another case, it was the sound of his voice. In another, the eyes of all of them were opened when he waved them over toward where he was. Beforehand, they saw only a solitary stranger who could have been anyone. When they finally were able to see, they understood it was he. And when they saw, they were joyous to know it was the same Jesus they had seen crucified. Yet there was something bracing, something extraordinary about him that transcended any of the loss and sadness they had. It seems to have been more than relief at knowing he was no longer dead, more than justification of what he had told them, and more than simply having their teacher and friend back among them. They saw something else in him. In fact, all through their lives, as they contemplated what they had seen of the resurrection, they were ready to abandon everything else to share in what they had come to know of Jesus. All of the disciples except one was martyred, after all. The one who was not was put into a penal camp. Jesus' followers went on to endure privation and prison and martyrdom based on what they had come to know of Christ. Resurrection was the most attractive, the most transformative presence they had ever known or could have come to know. Encountering life beyond the boundaries of living inscribed a promise in them they longed for with all their being. Their joy and their response went beyond the boundaries of religious promises or the commitments of dedicated followers. When they saw Jesus standing before them and knew who it was, they saw in him a freedom they immediately understood and wanted for themselves. A century later, Saint Irenaeus wrote that the glory of God is man fully alive. Those who saw Jesus raised from the dead saw the glory of God in front of them, and they understood it was a glory they could share in. On Resurrection Day, it was not only Jesus who was transformed, but the disciples as well. But there was nothing these disciples encountered that we ourselves are absented from. We often imagine that if we were there, if only we could have been present on Easter Sunday at the tomb, we could have shared in the same excitement, in the same convictions as these disciples who went out to change the world. Reading the stories of the encounter, though, we're left to conclude that there was nothing in their experiences not available to us. Think a moment on what they did not see. They didn't see the resurrection. They only saw the empty tomb. They didn't reach into their secret understanding of Jesus' mission in order to make sense of all they had experienced. They had to be told by somebody else what they were actually going to experience even as they were experiencing it. They didn't see Jesus descend from heaven or even a heavenly version of Jesus. They saw instead a man walking among them. They didn't hear a thundering voice telling them to pay attention. They only got further instruction from Jesus about what to do next. They also didn't have only a private experience of him, as if as if his appearance was a vision or a revelation. Their most notable encounters with him was when they were gathered together as the community he founded. All they experienced is available to us. In fact, it was in the first generation of the disciples that they began to understand the body of Christ was to be the church, to be all of us, all of them together. The Christ they knew, the Jesus who had called them and formed them, was among them, and among them resurrected and present to them. They found him and were offering their own gift of anticipating the resurrection by fulfilling the command received at the Last Supper. That was to gather and to do What Jesus had done. We are the disciples who come to the tomb on Easter Sunday. The gift of resurrection didn't stop after the first shock wore off. Resurrection is the promise of life still given to all who seek to find where the body of Jesus was put and what had happened to him. Resurrection still invites us to know the promises of life beyond the boundaries of life. And like those disciples in the early morning, it's right there in front of us. All we have to do is open our eyes and be willing to see it. Back in just a moment. Oh, we can see we're not plunged into midnight, but our twilight falls. Even though the misplaced evening comes as we look heavenward, the sun still shines above the fluffy nimbus, bright and piercing, to tease our darkened days, all there truly above us. So when the shadows are deepest and are deepening even more, we should look beyond darkness and its absence, to trust the shining truth there racing across the sky, lifted from us. That's when the clouds gather.org.