The Beekeeper's Lesson

Marcus Chen was seven the summer his grandfather kept bees in the backyard of their home in Asheville, North Carolina. One August afternoon, a honeybee landed on Marcus's forearm, and the boy froze, eyes wide, lip trembling. His grandfather knelt beside him, steady as a stone wall.

"Watch," the old man whispered. He pointed to the bee's abdomen. The stinger was gone — torn away in some earlier encounter. The bee crawled across Marcus's skin, utterly harmless. "She already spent her sting, son. She's got nothing left to hurt you with."

Marcus exhaled. The terror drained from his small body as quickly as it had come.

Forty years later, Marcus stood in that same backyard, weeks after burying his grandfather. The hives were long gone, but the memory was sharp as yesterday. He finally understood what his grandfather had been teaching him all along — not just about bees, but about the grave itself.

When Christ walked out of that borrowed tomb on the third morning, death spent its only stinger. It crawled across the surface of human history, still frightening to look at, but emptied of its venom forever. Paul knew this when he wrote his taunt: "Where, O death, is your sting?" He was not asking a question. He was declaring a victory. The Almighty had already answered it at Golgotha, and the empty tomb was the proof. Thanks be to God — the sting is spent.