Philip Yancey went to school here and tells the story about being a kid and learning early about fear and things that can't be reversed...
I could not have articulated it at the time, but what I learned that Easter under the noonday sun was the ugly word irreversible. All afternoon I prayed for a miracle. No! It can't be! Tell me it's not true! Maybe Boots wouldn't really die. Or maybe she would die but come back—hadn't the Sunday-school teacher told such a story about Jesus?...
There followed a whole succession of scenes I likewise wished to reverse: fights with bullies, broken arms, foolish comments in class, unexpected pop quizzes, the inevitable first automobile accident, and all the other minor jolts of growing up, each one underscoring the dreadful word irreversible...
As a five-year-old on Easter Sunday I had learned the harsh lesson of irreversibility. Ironically, now as an adult I saw that Easter actually offered an awesome promise of reversibility. Nothing—no act of childhood cruelty, no experience of shame or remorse, and, no, not even death—was final. Even that could be reversed...
On Friday Jesus' closest friends had let the relentless crush of history snuff out all their dreams. Two days later, when the crazy rumors about Jesus' missing body shot through Jerusalem, they couldn't dare to believe. They were too conditioned to the irreversible. Only personal appearances by Jesus convinced them that something new, absolutely new, had broken out on earth. When that sank in, those same men who had slunk away in fear at Calvary were soon preaching to large crowds in the streets of Jerusalem...
...(Jesus' disciples) had grieved for three days. But on Sunday they caught a glimpse of something else, a startling clue to the riddle of the universe. Easter hits a new note, a note of hope and faith that what God did once in a graveyard in Jerusalem, he can and will repeat on a grand scale, for the world...For us. Against all odds, the irreversible can be reversed.
