“WHO moved the stone?” Frank Morison asked in his 1975 book of that title. Matthew had already given us the answer: an angel rolled the stone away. Morison’s book looked into different accounts of what happened between Holy Saturday and Easter dawn. Reactions to the book showed that Christians and non-Christians alike wanted answers. I am convinced that Christians still want answers. They want to know what the resurrection means.

Believers have doubts and difficulties with the Easter story, even as some non-believers struggle against its magnetic attraction. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, we have some “inward digesting” to do when it comes to the paschal feast. We need to choose the correct exegetical cutlery. Our banquet of rich fare (Isaiah 25.6) will require seasoning to suit individual palates. But, first, we need to gather the ingredients for the recipe.

Here, my food metaphor breaks down. You cannot have a recipe with a hole in the middle where the signature ingredient should be. But a hole is exactly what our faith is rooted in: a space where a body should have been.

Only Matthew shows us the angel rolling back the stone. I think that he was trying to reassure us that no one cheated by secretly removing the body. That seems to be why he records Pilate setting a company of soldiers to guard the tomb (27.65).

Our lives are full of things that we rely on but do not understand. From plumbing and electrics to medical equipment and mobile-phone technology, we accept that they are true and real, because they work and have measurable, predictable effects. For this reason, it should not be too difficult for us to give the resurrection of Christ a hearing, and to sympathise with the women who were its first witnesses.

They were told something, and sent to share something, which they could not properly grasp, never mind “make sense of” or “believe in”. They thought that they knew what “alive” and “dead” meant. And they knew that Jesus was dead. Why else had they come to the tomb at dawn?

During his teaching ministry, Jesus spoke more than once about life and death. He was in no doubt about which was preferable. I think that his most revealing comment is a woe pronounced upon the scribes and Pharisees: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth” (Matthew 23.27). I can think of no more astringent expression on his lips; and no more painful judgement than to call someone (in the old words) a “whited sepulchre”.

In Bible days, there was no grey area between life and death. This needs stating, because we have made dying harder and more complicated, with the result that many of us will pass through a kind of half-life in which the mind decays but the body lingers. The Lord’s command to “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matthew 8.22) can seem harsh, but it is an honest preparation for Easter, when we learn to set aside the old understanding of death so as to lay hold of “life that really is life” (1 Timothy 6.19).

In Luke’s Gospel, two beings clothed in white knew — without being told — why the women had come to the tomb; they challenged them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.” But, in Matthew, the angel speaks instead of Jesus’s “being crucified” and “being raised”. This exchange between the two orders of created being, human and angelic, witnesses to a stage in the development of the Easter faith before Christians got entangled in philosophies of life and death. The bedrock of belief is not abstract meaning but concrete fact. Jesus was crucified. People saw it happen. They tended the man’s dead body, and laid it to rest in the grave. And Jesus was raised from the dead to a new way of being: “He is not here,” insists Matthew’s angel.

We will see Jesus again, when he, and we, find our way home. This is the faith of the Church: those who believe in him, even though they die, will live; and everyone who lives and believes in him will never die (John 11.25-6).