The Unlocked Door

On December 14, 2010, miners trapped in the Copiapó mine in Chile spent sixty-nine days underground, surviving on two spoonfuls of tuna every forty-eight hours. When rescue capsule "Fénix 2" finally broke through the rock, the first man to ascend — Florencio Ávalos — stepped into blinding sunlight and fell into his wife's arms without saying a word. Reporters noted that several of the rescued miners, upon reaching the surface, stood completely still. They trembled. Some could not speak for minutes. Not because they doubted their rescue, but because the sheer overwhelming reality of deliverance had outpaced their ability to process it.

That is the scene at the empty tomb. The women came expecting a sealed stone and a dead body. They brought spices for burial — the final, tender act of grief. Instead they found the stone rolled away, a messenger in white, and the most staggering sentence in human history: "He has risen; He is not here."

And they fled. Trembling and astonished, they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Their silence was not disbelief. It was the silence of people standing at the edge of something so enormous that language had not yet caught up with reality. The Almighty had done what no one dared imagine. The door they expected to find sealed shut was standing wide open — and the emptiness inside was the fullest thing they had ever encountered.