The Checkpoint No One Dared to Cross

On the night of November 9, 1989, East German border guards received confused orders: the crossings were open. Thousands gathered at the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint in Berlin, yet for long minutes, no one moved. Petra Bender, a schoolteacher from Prenzlauer Berg, later described standing at the barrier with tears streaming down her face, legs shaking so violently she could not take a single step. She had watched her uncle shot dead trying to cross that same wall twenty years earlier. The wall had defined every boundary of her existence. And now a guard was waving her through.

"I was terrified," she told a reporter. "Not of the guards. I was terrified it was real."

The women who arrived at the tomb that first Easter morning carried spices for a dead man. They had watched Him die. They had seen the stone sealed shut. When they found it rolled away and heard the unthinkable news — "He is risen; He is not here" — Mark tells us they fled in trembling and astonishment. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Not afraid of danger. Afraid of hope. Afraid that the worst boundary of human existence — death itself — had been shattered while they weren't looking.

Some news is so vast it makes your knees buckle before it makes you sing. The empty tomb was that kind of news.