There are two things to home-in on:
• it was humanity that chose to kill Jesus
• It was God that chose to raise Jesus

Easter Sunday reminds us that God took and overcame everything that we could throw at God: but that's a story for another day.

As to our part in the killing it's worth considering this: we, who have seen images of the Christ upon the cross, have been conditioned to think of his death as something extraordinary. "How could they kill Him?" we say. Looking at him (as portrayed in Western art) all haloed and holy, with myriad angels weeping for him, it is virtually impossible for most people to accept that he could have been mistaken for an ordinary man.

It wasn’t like that at all. This was an ordinary day for the soldiers; this messiah was just like all the other self-proclaimed 'messiahs' that had gone through their hands. A peasant from the back-waters of the North. There was nothing outstandingly malicious about how it was handled; it was an ordinary bloke who needed dispatching in the ordinary way. None of the players were conscious enemies of God, or the gods.

Jesus dies like a migrant who suffocates in a freight lorry, like a rubbish-picker caught in a slide. Or, of course, like all the other slaves ever punished by crucifixion; a fate so low, Cicero wrote, that no well- bred person should ever mention it.

But God mentions it, in fact God shouts it from the heavens, tearing his veil and rattling the world. God howls with pain and anguish. A declaration by the Maker of the world, in pain and solidarity, that to Him the measure of the waste of history is not the occasional tragedies of kings but the routine loss of every day. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.” (Matt 10:29)

The God of Love weeps for his Son as a mother who buries her child. The agony of Love and loss laid bare.
We cannot know / we cannot share / what pain he had to bear / but we believe it was for us / he hung and suffered there.

So, today we must just stand in silence with God and the women, and put our trust in the One who spoke of new life.