The Miners Who Came Back

On October 13, 2010, a billion people worldwide watched their television screens as a narrow rescue capsule broke the surface at the San José mine in Chile's Atacama Desert. For sixty-nine days, thirty-three miners had been trapped half a mile underground beneath 700,000 tons of rock. Engineers said the collapse was catastrophic. Early reports assumed no survivors. The Chilean government even prepared families for the worst.

But then came the note. Scrawled in red marker on a scrap of paper sent up through a tiny bore hole, it read: "Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33." We are fine in the shelter, all 33 of us.

When the first miner, Florencio Ávalos, stepped out of that capsule into the desert night air, his young son ran to him weeping. No one had to argue that the miners were alive. No one needed a philosophical debate. The witnesses were right there — embracing, sobbing, laughing — and the cameras captured every frame.

Peter stood before that Pentecost crowd and made a staggeringly simple claim: "God raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it." He wasn't offering a theory. He wasn't constructing an argument. He was pointing to what he and hundreds of others had seen with their own eyes — the One whom death tried to bury permanently had walked out of the grave. And just as no amount of rock could hold those Chilean miners forever, the pangs of death could not hold the Holy One of God. The tomb was never a final destination. It was always only a passage.