The News No One Could Carry

On April 15, 1945, British soldiers rolled open the gates of Bergen-Belsen. Sixty thousand prisoners stood on the other side. The soldiers expected cheering, embraces, a rush toward freedom. Instead, they found silence. Thousands of gaunt faces stared back, unmoving. The liberators shouted that the war was nearly over, that they were free, but many prisoners simply sat down where they stood, trembling. Some wept without sound. Others turned away and walked back toward their barracks.

Derrick Sington, the British officer who led the convoy through those gates, later wrote that the prisoners' faces held something he had never seen before — not joy, not relief, but a kind of holy terror. The news was too large for the container of their suffering. Freedom, after years of death, did not compute. Their bodies knew captivity; liberation was a language they had forgotten.

Mark tells us the women at the tomb "went out and fled, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." We sanitize Easter into pastel ribbons, but the first witnesses responded exactly like those prisoners at Bergen-Belsen — shaking, speechless, overwhelmed. The Resurrection was not a comfortable surprise. It was the most staggering event in human history breaking into a morning that expected only death. Some news is so immense that the only honest first response is trembling silence before the Almighty.