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Devotional, Holy Week Series, Lent, Series

ALTAR AUDIT, Part 20: The Altar of Resurrection (Easter Sunday)

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By Rev. Todd R. Lattig[i]

Read Mark 16:1–8

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“I will not die; instead, I will live to tell what the LORD has done.” (Psalm 118:17 NLT)

Altars reveal what we worship. Some are obvious—raised platforms of stone and flame. Others are quieter, constructed in systems, reputations, loyalties, and assumptions. Lent is a season of holy examination. It calls us to look closely at what we have built, what we defend, and what we trust. In this series, we conduct an audit—not of budgets or buildings, but of allegiances. Lent strips away every false altar until only Christ remains.

A large rectangular stone altar sits centered in a modern open-air structure, visibly cracked down the middle. The surface is bare, with no cloth or objects. In the distance, a muted city skyline rises under an overcast sky. The atmosphere is subdued, emphasizing fracture, exposure, and the instability of what once appeared solid.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Altar of Resurrection” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

It begins in the quiet aftermath of certainty. The stone has been set. The tomb has been sealed. The system has done its work, and everything appears exactly as it should be. Death has the final word—or so it seems.

Some women come to the tomb carrying spices, not expectation. They are not looking for resurrection, but preparing for burial. Even now, they are moving within the logic of what has already been decided.

And then everything breaks.

The stone is already rolled away. The body is not where it should be. A message is given—clear, direct, impossible to misunderstand. He is not here. He has been raised. And yet, the response is not triumph. It is fear.

They said nothing… because they were afraid.

This is where Mark ends. No appearances. No resolution. No restored certainty. Just an empty tomb, a message that disrupts everything, and witnesses who cannot yet bring themselves to speak.

Because resurrection does not arrive as comfort. It arrives as disruption.

It breaks the certainty that death had secured. It refuses the finality that systems had enforced. It does not fit within expectation, control, or explanation. It does not settle neatly into belief. It unsettles it.

The altar was set. The stone was sealed. And still… it did not hold.

This is the reversal of everything that came before. On Friday, violence was justified through process. On Saturday, certainty settled through silence. And on Sunday, both are undone—not through force, not through argument, but through something no system could anticipate or contain.

Life where death had been declared final. And yet, even here, the story does not resolve cleanly.

Because the first witnesses do not proclaim it. They do not run forward with clarity and conviction. They run in fear, carrying the weight of something they do not yet understand. The truth has been revealed, but it has not yet been integrated.

And if we are honest, we recognize this too.

We want resurrection to feel like certainty restored. We want clarity, assurance, and resolution. We want something we can name, explain, and hold onto without tension.

But that is not how Mark tells it.

Resurrection does not erase mystery. It deepens it. It does not give control back. It removes it. It does not answer every question. It creates new ones.

And it asks something of us.

Not immediate understanding. Not perfect belief. Not even certainty.

Presence.

Because the question Easter leaves us with is not simply whether Christ is risen. It is what we will do in response to a truth that disrupts everything we thought was final.

The women ran. They said nothing, because they were afraid. And the story does not tell us what happens next.

Which means the silence is not the end. It is the space where we are now standing.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Resurrection does not restore certainty—it disrupts it.

PRAYER
God, meet us in the places where resurrection unsettles more than it comforts. When we are faced with what we do not understand, give us courage to remain present. When fear holds our voice, stay with us in the silence. And when new life breaks through what we thought was final, lead us forward—not with certainty, but with trust. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional

God’s People, part 152: Mysterious Son.

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Read Mark 8:27-38

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“When the Roman officer who stood facing him saw how he had died, he exclaimed, ‘This man truly was the Son of God!’” (Mark 15:39, NLT)

When we think of God’s people, we tend to think one of two things. We might think of the Israelites who were God’s “chosen people”, or we might think of specific characters in the Bible. Either way, we tend to idealize the people we are thinking about. For instance, we may think that God’s people are super faithful, holy, perform miracles and live wholly devout and righteous lives. Unfortunately, this idealism enables us to distance ourselves from being God’s people, because we feel that we fall short of those ideals. As such, I have decided to write a devotion series on specific characters in the Bible in order to show you how much these Biblical people are truly like us, and how much we are truly called to be God’s people.

jesusrebukespeterPart 152: Mysterious Son. Thus far, we’ve explored the birth of Jesus, we’ve witnessed his baptism, we’ve journeyed with him through the wilderness, and we’ve seen the people surrounding him during those times. Now I would like to take a look at Jesus as presented in each of the Gospels, starting with the earliest of the Gospels to have been written: Mark.

In Mark, perhaps, Jesus displays the most wide-range of human emotion. At any given point, he is happy, hopeful, tired, exhausted, sad, in despair, afraid, confused, and extremely convicted. The other Gospels show Jesus experiencing emotion too; however, Mark’s Jesus is the most down-to-earth. With that said, it would be the wrong to read any sort of Christological categorization into that. Some scholars who take the Historical Criticism approach to understanding the Bible see Jesus’ humility in Mark to be signs of a lack of initial divinity.

What does that mean? That means that some scholars attempt to see Jesus merely as a man who, through his baptism and subsequent death on the cross, was adopted as the Son of God.  This, of course, is heterodoxy or a deviation from the acknowledged standard of Christian interpretation. If we read mark closely, we see that Jesus is acknowledged as the Son of God right off the bat and he knows he is all throughout. There is simply no evidence for “adoption” in Mark’s Gospel at all! In the very first verse Mark writes, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”  (Mark 1:1, KJV). The rest of the Gospel pursues the mystery of Jesus’ identity in God and the climax of just how that mystery unfolds and is finally realized.

Jesus starts off his ministry pretty well. His first miraculous act was the casting out of a demon. He picked out 12 disciples out of the crowd that followed him and he taught them the inner secrets of what he was doing. He healed people, proclaimed the Kingdom of God, and started off his ministry on the right foot. Yet, by chapter 3, following choosing his disciples, we see that his own family did not believe him. They thought that he had gone crazy and wanted to take him home before he got himself killed. “Who are my mother and my brothers? And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!
Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”  (Mark 3:33-35, NRSV).

Okay, cool, right? It was a bummer that his family didn’t get it, but he had his disciples at least. They got him, didn’t they? In chapter 4 we find out that even his disciples, despite being told the “inner secrets”, still did not understand who Jesus was. Thus, from chapter 4 and onward, we see Jesus’ growing frustration with his disciples, let alone with the Jewish religious leaders, scribes and Herodians.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that the only one’s who seem to really know who Jesus is throughout the entirety of the text are the demons. The least of these, including the women, come the closest to understanding Jesus’ identity, but even they fall short. The only other human being to fully recognize Jesus’ identity was the Roman officer who was supervising over his crucifixion and death. Crazy, right?

So, what’s Mark’s message to us? The message is simple, those who think they are closest to Jesus tend to miss the mark in who he is, as do those who think they have no need for Jesus; however, those who know their need for Christ (e.g., the distant, the broken, the lost, the sinner, the poor, the poor in spirit, the least of these, etc.) are the ones most likely to have Christ’s identity revealed to them. Why? Because their hearts are receptive to it. Let this challenge us to open ourselves up to the Christ who would be our Lord and Savior if we would only acknowledge him as such.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
“You are permitted to understand the secret of the Kingdom of God. But I use parables for everything I say to outsiders, so that the Scriptures might be fulfilled: ‘When they see what I do, they will learn nothing. When they hear what I say, they will not understand. Otherwise, they will turn to me and be forgiven.’”  ¾ Jesus Christ (Mark 4:11-12, NLT)

PRAYER
Lord, open my heart and mind to who you are so that my life may be transformed through you! Amen.