The Grave That Could Not Hold the Word

On October 6, 1536, William Tyndale was led to a stake outside Brussels. His crime: translating the Bible into English so that common plowboys could read it. As the executioner tightened the chain, Tyndale cried out his final prayer: "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Then he was strangled and burned.

His enemies believed they had buried the English Bible with him. The stone, they thought, was permanently sealed.

But less than a year later, King Henry VIII authorized the Matthew Bible — assembled largely from Tyndale's own translation — to be placed in every parish church in England. The very words his executioners tried to destroy were now read aloud in thousands of churches across the realm. What his persecutors meant to silence, God multiplied beyond anything Tyndale himself could have imagined.

The women who walked to the tomb that first Easter morning carried the same heavy certainty Tyndale's friends must have felt — that death had spoken the final word. They came with spices for a corpse. Instead, they found an empty tomb and an angel who said, "He is not here; He has risen."

Matthew tells us they left with "fear and great joy." That is always the shape of resurrection — the breathless collision of what we feared was finished and the discovery that God was only beginning.