The Stone Was Already Moved

The last thing the women did before the Sabbath came down was to sit in the garden across from the tomb and watch. They saw the two men lift him in. They saw where he was laid, and how, and they saw the great round stone rolled across the doorway. Then they went home in the last of the light, and everything stopped, because that was the command. The day after they buried him was the Sabbath. Nobody worked and nobody traveled and the whole city was still. But the chief priests and the Pharisees did not rest that day. They went across Jerusalem to Pilate. “Sir, we have remembered something. While that liar was still alive he said, ‘After three days I will be raised.’ So give the order for the grave to be made safe until the third day. His followers could come in the night and steal him away and tell everybody he has been raised from the dead — and that last lie would be worse than the first one.” “You have a guard,” said Pilate. “Go and make it as safe as you know how.” So they went out to the garden. They rolled the stone tight into its groove and put a seal across the join — a cord and a stamp pressed into soft clay, so that anybody who moved that stone would break the mark, and everybody would know it had been broken. Then they set soldiers in front of it. A sealed stone, and armed men sitting in the dark watching it, all night long.

The women who had come up from Galilee with him kept the Sabbath, the way the command said, and it must have been the longest day of their lives. The moment it was over, when the sun went down on Saturday, they went out and bought spices. They spent the evening getting them ready, grinding and mixing, with the little jars set out in a row on the table. Then, while it was still dark on the first day of the week, they went out. Mary from Magdala, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, and Joanna, and other women with them, walking through the empty streets and out of the gate with the jars in their arms. Their teacher had been buried in a hurry, with a Sabbath coming down on top of them, and there was one last thing that could still be done for him properly, and they were going to do it. The sky was just going gray when they came near the garden. And as they walked they said out loud the thing that had been bothering all of them since they set out: “Who is going to roll the stone away for us? It is far too big for us.”

They did not know about the seal. They did not know about the soldiers. And they did not know what had already happened there while they were walking. The ground had shaken — a hard, rolling shake, like the one three days before at three in the afternoon. And the seal with its cord and its clay had broken like a piece of thread, because a messenger of the Lord had come down and rolled the great stone back out of the doorway and sat down on top of it. His face was like lightning and his clothes were white as snow, and the men who had been set there to keep watch shook with fear and went down in front of him like dead men.

So when the women looked up, the stone was already moved. They went in through the low doorway, into the cold cut rock, and the place where he had been laid was empty. The strips of linen were there. He was not. They stood in that little room with their jars in their hands and could not think what to think. And then there were two men standing beside them, in clothes that flashed like lightning, and the women were frightened and put their faces down toward the ground. “Do not be afraid. I know who you are looking for. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, the one who was crucified. Why are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here — he has been raised, just as he said he would be. Come and see the place where he was lying. Remember what he told you while he was still up in Galilee: that the Son of Man had to be handed over into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and rise again on the third day.” And they remembered. Standing inside the empty tomb with the spices still in their arms, every one of them remembered him saying it. “Now go, quickly. Tell his followers — and tell Peter — that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.”

They came out of that garden running. They were shaking, and they were more full of joy than they had ever been in their lives, and both things at once, and they said nothing at all to anybody they passed on the road. They found the eleven, and the others with them, and poured it all out — the stone, the empty place, the two men, the words. The men listened to them and thought it was nonsense. Not one of them believed a word of it.

But Mary from Magdala had run ahead of the rest, straight to Simon Peter and to the follower Jesus loved, and she was already at their door. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have put him!”

The two men went out of the house at a run. They ran together for a while and then the younger one pulled ahead, and it was he who got to the tomb first. He stopped at the doorway and stooped down and looked in, and saw the strips of linen lying there — and did not go in. Peter came up behind him, out of breath, and did not stop at all. He went straight inside. The last time Peter had said anything out loud about this man, he had been standing at a fire in a courtyard telling a servant girl he had never met him. The strips of linen were lying there. And the cloth that had been wrapped around his head was not lying with them. It was rolled up and folded, by itself, in a place of its own. Then the other one came in too, the one who had got there first. He looked at the linen, and at the folded cloth, and something in him gave way, and he trusted. They still did not understand the old writings that said he had to rise from the dead. They went back to where they were staying and hardly said anything to each other on the way.

Mary had come back behind them, and when they left she stayed. She stood outside the tomb in the early light and cried. After a while she bent down and looked into the tomb herself. And there were two messengers in white, sitting where he had been — one at the head and one at the feet. “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have put him.” She straightened up and turned around, and there was a man standing there in the garden. She looked right at him and did not know him. “Woman, why are you crying? Who are you looking for?” The gardener, she thought — who else would be out this early among the trees? Perhaps he had moved the body himself. “Sir, if you carried him off, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him.” He said one word. “Mary.” And she knew. She spun around and said the name she had always called him, in her own language: “Rabbouni!” — which means Teacher. And she took hold of him and would not let go. “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet gone up to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them this: I am going up to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” So the first person to carry that news anywhere was Mary from Magdala, running back into the city to a roomful of grown men who had already decided the women were talking nonsense. “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them every word he had said to her.

The other women met him too, that same morning. They were hurrying along the road with the message when he was suddenly there in front of them on the path. “Greetings.” And they came and took hold of his feet and bowed down in the road. “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to start out for Galilee. They will see me there.”

While the women were going one way with that, some of the guard were going the other way with something else. They came into the city and reported to the chief priests exactly what had happened — the shaking, the stone, all of it. The chief priests called the elders together, and the meeting did not take long, and what came out of it was money. They counted out a good deal of silver into the soldiers’ hands. “Say this: ‘His followers came in the night and stole him while we were asleep.’ And if the governor hears about it, we will talk him round and keep you out of trouble.” It was not a hard thing to ask of them, and it was a dangerous one. A Roman soldier who fell asleep on watch could be put to death for it — and here were the priests promising to square it with the governor if it ever came to that. So the soldiers took the silver and said what they had been paid to say. And that story went round Jerusalem, and people were still telling it years and years afterward.

So there were two accounts of that morning going about the city before noon. One of them had been bought and paid for. The other one was being told by women who had gone out at dawn to look after a dead body and had not found one. And in the houses where his followers were sitting, one sentence kept coming back around the room, from the women, from Mary, from anybody who had been there: he is going ahead of you into Galilee. Some of them were saying it because they had heard it from a messenger in a shining white robe. Some were saying it because they had heard it from Mary, who had heard it from him. And some were saying it the way you say a thing you have not decided about yet, turning it over, watching the door. The sun was not even overhead yet. The day was nowhere near over.