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On the morning of December 17, 1903, the family of the Wright brothers received a telegram letting them know about their first successful 12-second flight and that they would be home for Christmas. Their sister rushed this telegram to the editor of the Dayton Journal about the historic first flight at Kitty Hawk. His headline? Wright Brothers Home for Christmas. He had the most earthshaking news in aviation history in his hands and completely missed the point. This Easter, it’s worth asking whether we do the same thing — showing up for the celebration, singing the songs, and quietly missing the most important announcement ever made.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Not symbolically. Not spiritually. Bodily, physically, irreversibly. And if that’s true — if that actually happened — then as one theologian put it, “If Christ did come up out of the grave, nothing else really matters. That changes everything.” In fact, everything hinges on it.

A story told before the story

About ten days before His own death and resurrection, Jesus performed what John’s Gospel calls his greatest miracle: raising His friend Lazarus from the dead. It reads like a preview — a preview of what was coming for the whole world.

When Jesus finally arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days. His sister Martha met Jesus on the road, grief and confusion written all over her words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” It’s an achingly familiar sentiment. Most of us have whispered something like it. Where were you, God? Why didn’t you show up when I needed you? But Jesus hadn’t stayed away because He didn’t care. He had deliberately waited — not out of indifference, but because He was preparing to do something so undeniable that no one present would have any excuse not to believe. The Lord’s delays, it turns out, are often for His displays. He told the disciples plainly: “This sickness is not to end in death, but for the glory of God.”

Standing before a grieving woman, just outside a sealed tomb, Jesus said something staggering: “I am the resurrection and the life.” Not “I will be.” Not “I can arrange that.” Present tense. Right now. He was claiming to be the source and the sustainer of life itself — the one who holds the keys to death. Martha had already expressed a respectable, theological belief in a future resurrection. “I know he will rise again on the last day,” she said. That’s solid doctrine.

Then he asked the most personal question imaginable: “Do you believe this?” But Jesus wasn’t speaking of the doctrine she believed. He was pointing her to something more immediate and more personal. He was asking her to believe in Him — the person standing directly in front of her.

What it actually means to believe

Easter attracts enormous crowds to churches every year. Many people genuinely want to honor the occasion. But there’s a distinction worth sitting with: you can hold every correct fact about Jesus — His divinity, His death, His resurrection — and still miss what He’s actually asking for.

The devil, according to James chapter 2, believes in God. The religious leaders who witnessed Lazarus walk out of that tomb didn’t dispute the miracle. They began immediately plotting how to manage the fallout. Correct information about Jesus is not the same thing as surrendering your life to Him.

What Martha offered in response to Jesus’ question was not a theological summary. It was a declaration of personal trust: “Yes, Lord. I have believed that you are the Christ, the Son of God.” She bowed not just her mind but her heart. That’s the difference. Belief in the biblical sense isn’t intellectual acknowledgment — it’s the kind of trust that reorients your whole life around a person.

A question that won’t go away

The Roman governor Pontius Pilate, for all his moral failures, asked one of the most important questions in history: “What then shall I do with Jesus who is called the Christ?” He meant it politically. But the question echoes down through every generation. It is, ultimately, the only question that determines your eternity. You can have your own way, or you can have Christ — and the life He offers is abundant and the promise He makes is eternal. He conquered death so that death would not have the final word over you. The tomb is empty. The Conqueror is alive.

Do you believe this?