Easter Is a Jailbreak (And I Mean That Literally)
I want to be honest with you about something before we go any further.
Every year when Easter comes around, I feel a kind of holy tension. On one side, there is the genuine, overwhelming power of the resurrection story — the pre-dawn darkness at the tomb, the sound of Mary's breath catching in her throat when she sees the stone rolled away, the moment Jesus calls her name and everything changes. I feel that. It moves me every single time.
But on the other side, I know how easy it is to domesticate Easter. To drape it in nostalgia, to coat it in sentiment, to turn the most subversive moment in human history into something that goes down like candy. And I refuse to do that. Not this year. Not any year. Because if you look closely at the Easter story — really look at it — what you find isn't a touching reunion scene. What you find is a jailbreak.
The Question Nobody Asks at Easter
We spend a lot of time celebrating the fact of the resurrection. And we should. But I think we skip too quickly past one of the most important questions we could ask: Why did it have to happen this way?
Why did Jesus have to be crucified? Why did he have to descend to the place of the dead? Why the cross, the tomb, the three days of silence, and then the explosive return? What is all of that actually about?
To answer that, I don't want to start at the empty tomb. I want to start a few chapters earlier, at the tomb of a man named Lazarus. You know the story. Lazarus, the beloved friend of Jesus, gets sick and dies. His sisters, Mary and Martha, are devastated. By the time Jesus arrives in Bethany, Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. Four days. Martha meets Jesus on the road, and she does something I find deeply human and deeply faithful at the same time — she complains in confidence. She says, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21). She is grieving and she is angry and she is still, somehow, holding on. Jesus tells her: "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live" (John 11:25). And then he weeps.
I want to stay with that for a second. Jesus, who already knows what he's about to do, who has told Martha point-blank that her brother will rise again — he still weeps. The text says he was greatly disturbed. Agitated. And I think that tells us everything about how God feels about death. Not resigned to it. Not comfortable with it. Disturbed by it, the way we are disturbed by something that was never supposed to be.
The Fear That Runs Everything
"All the ways that we seek to shore up our identities, to make ourselves immortal, to preserve our legacies, to make a name for ourselves — these are a response to our death anxiety."
Here is where I want to bring in a perspective that doesn't get nearly enough airtime in Western Christianity.
In many Western theological traditions, we tend to frame the core human problem as sin. The wages of sin is death, and so the story of salvation is primarily about getting our sin dealt with. That's real and I don't want to dismiss it. But in Eastern Christian traditions — think the Orthodox churches — the primary predicament isn't sin. It's death. More specifically, it's our fear of death. The writer of Hebrews puts it plainly: Jesus shared in our humanity "so that by his death, he might break the power of him who holds the power of death — that is, the devil — and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death" (Hebrews 2:14-15).
Held in slavery by the fear of death. Think about what that actually means.
When we are afraid of being forgotten, we grasp for legacy — sometimes at other people's expense. When we are afraid of losing power, we hoard it. When we are afraid of losing our identity, our place in the world, our sense of who we are — we look for someone to blame. Someone whose loss becomes our gain. Someone whose bottom becomes our top.
This is what the Eastern Christian tradition illuminates so beautifully: it isn't just that we sin and therefore die. It's that death has entered the world, and our terror of it is the engine behind so much of our sin. We are afraid. And afraid people do terrible things.
The Oldest Political Trick in the Book
Which brings me to Caiaphas.
After Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead — which is, by the way, the direct trigger for the events that lead to the crucifixion — the chief priests and Pharisees call an emergency council meeting. Their concern is explicitly political: "If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation" (John 11:48).
And then Caiaphas, the high priest, cuts through the debate with the kind of brutal political clarity that sounds disturbingly modern: "You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed" (John 11:50).
One person sacrificed. For the stability of everyone else. This is the logic that has organized human civilization since its beginning.
"We choose a group of people to blame for the problems of society, and then we justify our dismissal and disposal of them."
It is the logic of the scapegoat — a concept that theologian René Girard spent his entire career mapping. You create unity by locating a common enemy. You achieve peace by sacrificing someone.
And the genius of the system is that it works, at least for a while, and so we keep doing it. On the right, the scapegoats are immigrants, queer people, anyone who threatens the imagined original order. On the left, the scapegoats might be Christian nationalists or political enemies within our own movements. None of us are innocent here. We have all participated in the logic of Caiaphas.
And so what does Jesus do? He enters that system. He becomes the scapegoat — the one innocent person sacrificed to keep the peace. But then, on the third day, he does something the system has no category for: he comes back. And crucially, as the Apostle Paul tells us, he comes back speaking peace — not vengeance, not I-told-you-so, not retribution. Peace.
In doing so, he exposes the lie at the heart of scapegoating. The sacrifice didn't actually solve anything. The peace it produced was a mirage. And the one who was sacrificed is alive, which means the system's power to silence and erase is not the final word.
Unbind Him and Let Him Go
"Jesus doesn't just perform resurrection. Jesus is resurrection." Back at the tomb of Lazarus, after Jesus calls him out of the grave, he says something that has stayed with me: "Unbind him and let him go" (John 11:44).
Lazarus walks out of the tomb, but he is still wrapped in grave clothes. He is alive but not yet free. And Jesus turns to the people standing there — the community, the witnesses — and gives them an assignment. You unbind him.
I find that so honest and so hopeful at the same time. Because that is often what coming back to life feels like, isn't it? You are moving, you are breathing, something has shifted — but the grave clothes are still on. The old patterns, the old fears, the old narratives about who you are and what you deserve and whether you are too much or not enough — they don't fall away all at once. Liberation is real, and it is also a process.
But here's what Jesus is saying, underneath all of it: Death doesn't get the last word. Not your fear of being forgotten. Not the systems that needed you on the bottom. Not the lie that you are too flamboyant or too angry or too curious or too queer or too disabled or too anything to belong. Not even the very real experience of grief and loss and the sting of a phone call you weren't prepared to receive.
When Jesus stands at his own empty tomb, he has walked through all of that and come out the other side. He has entered our slavery to death and exploded it from the inside. And the invitation of Easter — every Easter — is to hear him calling your name at the entrance of whatever tomb you've been living in.
Two Questions That Matter More Than Any Answer
I want to leave you with two questions. They come directly from the resurrection stories in John's gospel, and I think they are, in many ways, the two most important questions we can sit with. The first is what Jesus asks Martha, standing outside the tomb of her brother: "Do you believe this?" Not do you understand this, not can you explain this, not can you defend this intellectually. Do you believe it? Is there any part of you willing to trust that something genuinely new is possible?
The second is what the risen Jesus asks Mary, who is weeping outside the empty tomb, still looking for a body: "Who is it that you are looking for?"
That question is worth returning to, again and again. Who — or what — are you actually looking for? What kind of God, what kind of life, what kind of liberation? Because the one who asks the question has already walked out of the tomb. And the door, it turns out, is open.
