The women at the tomb were surprised by Easter. Amazed and filled with wonder at Jesus' Easter eucatastrophe. And so are we.
This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.

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The Lord has a special place in his heart for those whom the world forgets. For the anonymous. For the rejected.
Surely everyone reading at one time or another in their lives has heard the popular phrase I’m writing about today.
Whether we are overcome by happiness on the mountaintop or overwhelmed by sorrow in the valley, our vision can be our greatest handicap.
As with so many things, regret can begin as something natural, even beneficial, as you struggle to recover from a wound in your past. But over time, regret can devolve from a sadness to a sickness.
So what's the back side? What's the promise? We shall not have other gods, but we do have the one, true God—the promise of a God for us.
A star appears in the East. A spotlight over its Creator. A single constellation bows over that Light of Light from whom darkness flees.
The manna God provides is never tasty enough. God never lives up to your expectations. So silently or audibly you wish for an easier way.
There are so many paradoxes that we can appreciate as we seek to grasp more of the meaning of the miracle of Christmas.
The mother of this prophet is visited by the Mother of God. In the coming together of these two pregnant women, we see the coming together of the old and the new.
As I remember these stories of the other side of Christmas—where it’s not a wonderful life, where there’s no joy to the world, where silent nights are interrupted by screams and sobs and cursing and gunshots—I remember that this other side of Christmas is precisely why there is a Christmas in the first place.
As C. S. Lewis, in "The Magician’s Nephew", has Aslan sing the world and all its beautiful intricacies into existence, so the Lion of the tribe of Judah, our Lord Jesus, hymns the heavens and earth into being.
Jesus simply can’t help himself. Over and over in the Gospels we find Jesus leaving a wake of physical restoration.