Miscellaneous

Thomas Merton, He is Risen (1967) (Source: Thomas Merton Essential Writings (Christine M. Bochen, ed., Orbis Books 2000):

We often forget that in all accounts of the Resurrection, the witnesses started out with the unshakable conviction that Christ was dead. The women going to the tomb thought of Jesus as dead and gone.

They had only one thing in mind: to embalm his body. But there was a problem. The tomb was sealed with a stone too heavy for them to move. They did not know how they would find someone who would roll away the stone for them so they could come to his dead body.

Now this is a kind of psychological pattern for the way we too often act in our Christian lives. Though we may still ?say? with our lips that Christ is risen, we secretly believe him, in practice, to be dead. And we believe that there is a massive stone blocking the way and keeping us from getting to his dead body. Our Christian religion too often becomes simply the cult of the dead body of Christ compounded with anguish and desperation over the problem of moving the immovable stone that keeps us from reaching him.
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When the holy women arrived at the tomb, they found the stone was rolled away. But the fact that the stone was rolled  away made little diffference, since the body of Jesus was not there anyway. The Lord had risen. So too with us. We create obscure religious problems for ourselves, trying desperately to break through to a dead Christ behind a tombstone. Such problems are absurd. Even if we could roll away the stone, we would not find his body because he is not dead.

He is not an inert object, not a lifeless thing, not a piece of property, not a super-relgious heirloom: HE IS NOT THERE. HE IS RISEN.