“When the women went to the tomb they met someone else and in the half light they thought it was Jesus himself. Answer: they would have noticed soon enough.”

“Jesus didn't really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.”

“We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle of the old one.”

“On the seventh day God rested in the darkness of the tomb;Having finished on the sixth day all his work of joy and doom.Now the Word had fallen silent, and the water had run dry,The bread had all been scattered, and the light had left the sky.The flock had lost its shepherd, and the seed was sadly sown,The courtiers had betrayed their king, and nailed him to his throne.O Sabbath rest by Calvary, O calm of tomb below,Where the grave-clothes and the spices cradle him we do not know!Rest you well, beloved Jesus, Caesar’s Lord and Israel’s King,In the brooding of the Spirit, in the darkness of the spring.”

“First, we break bread and drink wine together, telling the story of Jesus and his death, because Jesus knew that this set of actions would explain the meaning of his death in a way that nothing else--no theories, no clever ideas--could ever do.”

“Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world ... That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.”

“The whole of the Sermon [Matt 5-7] is framed within Jesus's announcement that what his fellow Jews had longed for over many generations was now at last coming to pass - but that new kingdom didn't look like they had thought it would. Indeed, in some ways it went in exactly the other direction. No violence, no hatred of enemies, no anxious protection of land and property against the pagan hordes. In short, no frantic intensification of the ancestral codes of life. Rather, a glad and unworried trust in the creator God, whose kingdom is now at last starting to arrive, leading to a glad and generous heart toward other people, even those who are technically "enemies." Faith, hope, and love: here they are again. They are the language of life, the sign in the present of green shoots growing through the concrete of this sad old world, the indication that the creator God is on the move, and that Jesus's hearers and followers can be part of what he's now doing.”