On Easter Sunday so long ago,
Something happened, as the story is told.
A failed Messiah, bruised and stricken dead.
Hailed as a liar, as all disciples fled.
Lying still in a grave over Sabbath’s rest,
Those who once hoped in him are now hopeless.
“How could they kill one who came to save?
How could our King be conquered by the grave?
Death, that great enemy, still reigns supreme.
Life, or so we thought, gone to the world beyond dreams.”
Can God make a stone so big he can’t lift it?
So the philosophers ask, their meaning implicit.
God himself weighed in on the question that day,
Absurd it may seem, but the answer’s yes, in a way.
For the one sealed in the stone tomb was himself stone maker,
And the dead one wrote life for every life taker.
You see, it wasn’t just a man as criminal they buried,
And it wasn’t for his own sins that cross he carried.
The great cup of God’s wrath, under which humanity sank,
He took upon his own lips, and all of it he drank.
The powers that ruled put him down out of fear
That he was the one, that their time had drawn near.
But the very evil they planned, God planned for good.
Because that day, this day, in the place where death stood,
The stone God made, so heavy it will never be moved,
Rose from the grave and kicked the rock from the tomb.
This stone, in fact, sits as a firm foundation,
The cornerstone, indeed, of God’s new creation.
Death’s finest hour was its last hurrah
And Easter Sunday brought a new hallelujah.
The Lamb who was slain, conquered sin and death as a Lion,
Inviting all who desire to be named in the new Zion,
To come and drink from the cup of God’s wrath now poured,
Now filled with the new wine of salvation assured.
For the one who walked alive out of the stone cold grave,
Promises the same life to those who follow him that way.
If we walk with him, we too may pass through death,
But the promise of Easter is that we too will have new breath.
So come to the table all who hunger and thirst,
And feast with the joy that has been prepared from the first.
stone