First thing in the morning

For the benefit of those who don't know me very well, I am not a morning person. This is a little unfortunate because I am not a night person either, but if you have ever had the misfortune to catch me pre-coffee, I offer my most sincere and humble apologies.

For this reason, I find Easter a little difficult to cope with. It comes at about the same time of year as Daylight Savings, which just makes things worse; and because the women in the Easter story went to the tomb at the crack of dawn, I�m expected to be up at the crack of dawn and joyfully proclaim not only that Christ is risen, but that Christ is risen indeed, hallelujah. Which is all the more peculiar because at the time the women were in no particular mood to joyfully proclaim the news. Actually, they were terrified.

I suppose it would be irreverent of me to picture Jesus stumbling out of the tomb, trying to rub the sleep out of his eyes and vaguely wondering if he should shave first and then wash the bits of his face still remaining intact (which would have been my state at that time of day), although I am curious to know what he was like first thing in the morning. I don't think for a moment that the resurrection was like waking up after a long night out.

But the women at the tomb… now, they'd probably not had any sleep at all for a couple of nights. As soon as they could, they hurried to the tomb to find Jesus' body gone. It seems to me that a far more fitting way of celebrating this event is not to greet people with "Christ is risen", but to hammer on their doors and shriek at the tops of our voices, "It's gone! It's gone! The body's gone!"

And all this first thing in the morning. A very inauspicious start to a new era: a bunch of scared and (if I'd been among them) short-tempered weirdoes, wild-eyed and incoherent, running through the streets of Jerusalem babbling about missing bodies.