Love Wins: Remembering What We Already Know

Love Wins: Remembering What We Already Know

The Easter story isn't new information. The tomb is empty. Christ is risen. Love wins.

We've known this truth since childhood, heard it proclaimed countless times, celebrated it year after year. Yet knowing something and being able to find it when we need it most are two entirely different things.

The Problem Isn't Ignorance—It's Forgetting

We don't lose the Easter story all at once. We lose it gradually, incrementally, one distraction at a time. The pace of modern life, the noise of our culture, the relentless demands of work and family—all of it conspires to make the urgent feel more real than the truth.

The notifications that pull us from conversation. The deadlines that crowd out prayer. The crisis of the moment that causes us to swallow convictions we've held for a lifetime. We're not bad people for forgetting. We're just human beings with finite attention spans living in a time that asks more of us than we can give.

The empire doesn't need to defeat the Easter story directly. It just needs to keep us busy enough that we stop reaching for it. It needs the noise to stay loud enough that the still small voice becomes harder to hear. It needs us to keep our eyes down long enough that we forget to look up.

This isn't a new problem. It's the oldest problem, the fundamental human condition.

Mary's Song: The Thesis of Reversal

Long before the resurrection, a young woman in a small Galilean town opened her mouth and sang. Mary had no power, no standing, no platform by the world's standards. Yet what emerged wasn't a timid prayer of resignation—it was a proclamation sung in the past tense, as though what she described had already happened:

"He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly."

Mary wasn't describing something completed. She was describing something so certain that she sang it as if it were already done. Her song became the theological thesis for the entire gospel narrative—a pattern repeated over and over.

The shepherds in their fields. The tax collector. The woman who lost her coin. The father who runs down the road. The thief on the cross. The Samaritan who stops. Again and again, the lowly are lifted, the hungry are filled, the powerful don't get the last word.

Mary knew it before any of it began.

The First Easter Morning

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, women came to the tomb carrying spices. Love doesn't abandon what it loves, even after death. They found the stone rolled away, and two men in dazzling clothes standing there.

Terrified, the women bowed their faces to the ground.

And the angels said something remarkable—not something new, but something old: "Remember. Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee."

Everything they needed was already in them. They had been given the truth. They just needed someone to help them find it again.

And they remembered.

That remembering changed everything.

When Truth Sounds Like Nonsense

The women rushed to tell the disciples what they had seen. But when they arrived with the most important news in human history, the men around the table reached for a specific Greek word: leros.

Our English translations say "idle tale," but leros means something more dismissive. It's delirium—the incoherent babbling of someone whose fever has broken their hold on reality. The first Easter proclamation was delivered by women who had encountered the risen Christ, and the men called it a fever dream.

The world has always called love's proclamation nonsense.

Every time someone says the hungry should be fed, the unhoused deserve dignity, the vulnerable are worth protecting, that love is stronger than fear—there's a voice somewhere reaching for dismissal. The world says divine love is naive, sentimental, delusional. It insists that those who proclaim it don't understand how the world actually works.

The tomb remains empty anyway.

Peter's In-Between Space

Peter couldn't quite write it off. He couldn't stay at the table. Something in him wouldn't let him stop reaching toward what he already knew somewhere deep down.

So he got up and ran to the tomb. He stooped in, looked inside, and saw the linen cloths lying there by themselves. Scripture tells us Peter went home "amazed"—not believing yet fully, not preaching the resurrection, not running to tell anyone. Just amazed, turning something over in his mind that he didn't yet have words for.

Something had shifted, and he couldn't name it yet. But he couldn't unfeel it either.

Many of us are more like Peter than like the women. We're not ready to call the resurrection story a fever dream, but we're not quite ready to go tell anyone either. We're somewhere in between—running toward the tomb because something in us won't stay seated, leaving amazed because what we found is more than we expected, even though we can't yet say what we believe.

The Good News for the In-Between

Here's the liberating truth: the resurrection doesn't wait for you to have your confession fully formed. It doesn't wait for your certainty to catch up with your longing.

It's already happened.

The tomb is already empty. The story has already turned. The invitation isn't to perform a belief you don't feel—it's simply to let what is true be true. To let the thing you already know come back to the surface.

Everything love risked turned out to be right. Good Friday was real. The grief was real. The cross was everything the empire wanted it to be. And the empire's logic turned out to be hollow anyway.

Death told the world it was the final authority. On Easter morning, the resurrection proved it was lying.

Mary's song was reaffirmed. The powerful were brought down from their thrones. The lowly were lifted up. She sang it before it happened, and it proved true.

Love Wins

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, before anyone was ready, before the disciples could move toward belief, before the women's proclamation could be believed—before any of it—the tomb was already empty.

Love wins.

The truest, hardest, most necessary thing any of us will ever say is simply this: love wins.

We're not here to learn it for the first time. We're simply here to remember it. To find again what was never actually lost, only misplaced beneath the clutter and noise of ordinary life.

The Easter story is waiting to be remembered.