Easter 2023 Church Service

The Day That Changed Everything Was Witnessed by People Who Almost Missed It

Easter is one of those words that has been so thoroughly domesticated it can mean almost anything. Chocolate eggs, bank holidays, spring flowers, a long weekend. But strip all of that away and you are left with a claim so extraordinary that it either changes everything or it means nothing at all.

Dave Connolly brought his Easter talk to Crowd Church with the kind of directness you would expect from a man who has spent decades in pastoral ministry. No filler, no sentimentality — just a careful look at John 20:1-10 and three characters who were, in his words, "about as real as they get."

The Most Unlikely Witnesses

The first person to see the empty tomb was Mary Magdalene. Dave pointed out just how significant this is. In first-century Israel, a woman's testimony was legally inadmissible. She could not serve as a witness in court. Her evidence was considered worthless.

"And yet in John 20, it is a woman who is entrusted with the most crucial testimony the world can ever hear," Dave said.

There is something else about Mary that makes her an unlikely choice. Luke 8 identifies her as someone "from whom seven demons had been cast out." She had a past. And yet Jesus chose her as the first witness of the resurrection.

Dave quoted Philip Yancey on this: "Jesus appointed the Samaritan woman as his first missionary. He defended the woman who anointed him with the expensive perfume. And Mary Magdalene, who had seven demons, he honoured as the very first witness of the resurrection."

The punchline: "Where we shame, Jesus elevates."

The Comedy of Peter and John

Then there are the two disciples who hear the report and go running to investigate. One of them — probably John — gets there first but hesitates at the entrance. Peter arrives second but barges straight in without pausing. It is almost slapstick.

"These are people who are completely unexpected and somewhat unusual," Dave observed. "The good news of Easter is that it is for ordinary people with all our peculiar ways. It is not for airbrushed anaerobic people."

The passage makes clear that even after seeing the empty tomb, they did not understand. Verse 9 says it plainly: "For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead."

Jesus had told them it would happen. Multiple times. And they still turned up on that Sunday morning expecting nothing but a dead body.

They Just Didn't Get It

Dave leaned into this point hard, and it is one of the most encouraging things in the passage. These were not spiritual superstars who had it all figured out. They were confused, grief-stricken, and slow to believe.

"If the disciples had understood, they would have been there waiting," he said. "But they didn't understand. They just did not get it."

He noted something subtle about how John opens the chapter: "Now on the first day of the week." Not "on the third day," which would imply they were counting down in anticipation. They were not counting anything. They had lost hope.

And yet. Even in their confusion, something began to shift. Verse 8: "Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed."

The Evidence That Does Not Fit

Dave addressed the common objection that it was simply grave robbery. He pointed out that Emperor Claudius eventually ordered capital punishment for tomb desecration, so it was a known problem. But the details in the text do not fit a robbery.

The burial clothes were left behind — the most valuable items in the tomb. And the face cloth was not thrown aside but folded neatly and placed separately. As Dave put it with a grin: "Jesus had taken it off and folded it neatly as if to say, I won't be needing this anymore."

Nobody unwraps a body and leaves the expensive linen behind. Nobody folds a face cloth during a heist. The details point to something that cannot be explained by theft or deception.

Transformation, Not Decoration

The word Dave kept returning to was transformation. Not improvement, not adjustment, not a fresh coat of paint on the same old life.

"He doesn't just patch up or paint over things in our lives," Dave said in Conversation Street. "He changes it. It's a transformation that takes place not just in how we think — literally in how we live and how we view things."

He connected this to the pattern visible across all the resurrection appearances: the people Jesus appears to are always in the grip of some human emotion — grief, fear, doubt. And the risen Christ meets them right there, in the middle of it. As a result, their condition is transformed.

Matt Edmundson reinforced this in the conversation: "Christianity is not about behaviour modification. It's not about self-help. It's not about life improvement. It's about a spiritual transformation because you were spiritually dead and you need Jesus to make you spiritually alive."

The Evidence Scholars Accept

Dave listed three facts about the resurrection that even critical scholars — people who are not predisposed to believe — generally accept. The tomb was found empty by a group of women. The disciples had genuine experiences with someone they believed was the risen Christ. And the church was established and grew on the basis of their preaching, which had the resurrection at its centre.

"It is hard to describe how profoundly Easter transformed these people," he said. "It changed everything about them. The rest of the New Testament is evidence of the effects of what happened on Easter morning."

He then added a thought that puts the whole thing in perspective: "A false report might last forty days, but the church which was founded on a risen Christ has lasted for over two thousand years, producing generations of Godly men and women."

The Same Power Today

Dave quoted Romans — the spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. The same spirit. Not a portion of it, not a watered-down version, but the same resurrection power.

He shared a story about a friend in North Africa who came to a deep awareness that the Holy Spirit lived in her. When asked what that meant practically, she said: "There are places I don't go anymore because I don't want to take him there."

That is not religion imposing rules. That is someone whose identity has been so transformed that their desires have changed from the inside out.

The Question That Remains

Dave's closing challenge was gentle but clear: "The Jesus we read about in these verses is still alive today. The Easter message is far too important to dismiss. I would encourage you with all my heart to seek him out."

For those still investigating, he recommended Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ and Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict — both written by people who set out to disprove the resurrection and found the evidence pointed the other way.

But ultimately, as Dave reminded us, this is not just an intellectual exercise. "You do have to come to a place where you are willing to surrender your life to Christ. It is about faith."

The same transformation that turned confused fishermen into world-changers is still available. The same power that folded the grave clothes and walked out of a sealed tomb is still at work. And the invitation to experience it for yourself remains open to anyone willing to look at the evidence and respond.