He Rose. But What Does That Mean For You?

It is Easter Sunday. And somewhere right now, someone is in their best outfit , the one that stretched the budget , sitting in a pew, or at a table, or scrolling past this, wondering what it all means. I want to talk to that person. And to the one who left the church years ago and never quite found the words for why. And to the one who stayed and loves it. All of you are welcome here.

This is not a blog about whether Yeshua of Nazareth literally died and physically rose from the dead three days later. That is a question for your own heart, your own tradition, your own sacred knowing. What this is about is the story , the stunning, layered, historically radical, mythically resonant story , and what it was trying to tell us all along.

Because if there is one thing that Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime teaching us, it is this: myths are not lies. Myths are the most honest thing humanity has ever produced. They are the language we reach for when ordinary words cannot hold what we are trying to say.

Before the Cross, There Was Ostara

Let us start where most Easter sermons never do: in the spring. Long before the Council of Nicaea convened in 325 CE to decide what Christianity would officially be, cultures across the ancient world were already celebrating the return of life after winter. The Germanic goddess Eostre , for whom our word “Easter” is believed to derive , was a deity of dawn, fertility, and renewal. Eggs. Hares. The insistence that death does not get the final word.

This is not manipulation. Or rather, yes, there was manipulation, but the impulse underneath was true. Human beings have always known, in their bones, that death is not the end. That is not a Christian idea. That is an ancient idea. A Kemetic idea. A Mayan idea. An Ifa idea. A Belizean idea. An idea that lives in the marrow of every indigenous tradition that ever oriented itself toward the cycles of the earth.

Constantine did not invent the resurrection impulse. He colonized it. Caged it inside one story, one empire, one creed agreed upon by a committee of powerful men. But the impulse itself is ours. It has always been ours.

Who Was Yeshua, Really?

Yeshua bar Yosef was an Aramaic Jewish teacher from Galilee , a rural, working-class region under brutal Roman occupation. He was not the blond, blue-eyed figure that centuries of European painting made him. He was a brown man from a colonized community who made the powerful very, very uncomfortable.

Consider what he actually did: He touched lepers , the people his society had declared unclean, untouchable, socially dead. He spoke to Samaritan women at wells when no self-respecting Jewish man of his time would. He welcomed sex workers and tax collectors to his dinner table. He flipped the money changers’ tables in the Temple, directly confronting the Sanhedrin priests who had entered into a comfortable arrangement with Roman power at the expense of the people they were supposed to serve.

He did not die because Rome was afraid of his theology. He died because his politics were too dangerous. Love as a structural force is always a threat to systems built on control.

The Sanhedrin and Pilate did not collaborate on an execution because this man told people to love each other. They collaborated because he was organizing the poor, the sick, the outcast , the very people empire needs to stay invisible , into a community of radical dignity. That is a revolution. And empire knows exactly what to do with revolutions.

Paul Built the Church. Yeshua Built a Community.

Here is something most Easter sermons will not say: Yeshua never wrote a single word down. Not one. What we have are accounts, written decades after his death, by people transmitting a living oral tradition through their own cultural lens. The Gospels are not neutral transcripts. They are testimony. Beautiful, flawed, Spirit-moved testimony.

And then there is Paul. Paul, who never met Yeshua in person. Paul, whose letters , written before the Gospels , shaped what “Christianity” would become more than almost anyone else. Paul, who took a movement deeply rooted in Jewish communal practice and Aramaic wisdom and began translating it for a Greco-Roman world with very different categories of meaning.

Think of it this way: Yeshua wrote a love letter. An intimate, particular love letter to his community, his people, his moment. He was speaking to someone. And then that letter was found, copied, translated, debated over, weaponized, and declared the universal love letter for all of humanity , by an emperor who needed a unifying ideology for his crumbling empire.

That does not make the letter worthless. But it does mean we need to read it differently. We need to ask: what was he actually saying, to whom, and why? And then: what, if anything, is still medicine?

The Myths Are the Medicine

The virgin birth. The walking on water. The feeding of multitudes with what could not possibly be enough. Lazarus rising. Yeshua rising. What do we do with these stories if we cannot , or choose not to , hold them as literal events?

We do what indigenous people have always done with sacred story: we enter them. We ask who we are in the story. We let the myth work on us.

The virgin birth is a story about something being born in you that did not come from the usual sources. Something that cannot be explained by lineage or circumstance or what was supposed to be possible. Something sacred that arrives when the conditions are right and you are willing to say yes.

The feeding of multitudes is a story about scarcity being an illusion when people stop hoarding and start sharing. Five loaves and two fish become enough when the community pools what it has. That is not a miracle in the supernatural sense. That is a miracle in the truest sense: a reorientation of reality.

The walking on water is a story about what becomes possible when you stop letting the storm define the ground beneath your feet. When Peter looks at the waves, he sinks. When he looks at Yeshua , at the principle, the teaching, the energetic anchor , he walks. What are the waves you keep looking at?

Lazarus rising happens before Yeshua’s own death. It is not a coincidence. The story wants us to understand that resurrection is not a one-time event. It is a pattern. A cosmic rhythm. Something that happens over and over, to those who are willing to believe that what looks like an ending is actually a threshold.

In Nativ Elementz wisdom, there are no beginnings and no endings. There is only transformation. The caterpillar does not “die” , it dissolves into something it could not have imagined while it was still a caterpillar.

What the Aramaic People Knew

Scholars of Aramaic , the language Yeshua actually spoke , have long noted that the concepts in that tradition do not translate cleanly into Greek or Latin or English. Words that get rendered as “sin” in English mean something closer to “missing the mark” , being off-center, misaligned, not yet your fullest self. Not moral condemnation. An invitation to recalibrate.

The phrase often translated as “I am the way, the truth, and the life” sounds, in its Aramaic resonance, less like an exclusive claim and more like a teaching about alignment: I am demonstrating the path. I am showing you what truth feels like in a body. I am what life looks like when it is fully inhabited.Follow this energy. Not this person. This frequency.

“I and the Father are one” is not a claim to uniqueness. It is an invitation into unity. The mystical traditions within Christianity , the ones that kept getting declared heresy by the institutional church , understood this. The divine and the human are not in opposition. The sacred does not live above us, judging. It lives as us, becoming.

A Word For My People

If you are a person of color celebrating Easter today , maybe in a hat that cost too much, maybe at a table that stretched the budget, maybe singing songs your grandmothers sang in churches that were also your sanctuary and your shelter , I see you. And I want to say something with love, not judgment:

You are allowed to hold the beauty and examine the history at the same time. You are allowed to love what has nurtured you and still ask hard questions about how it arrived in your community. Colonization did not only take land. It took cosmology. It replaced indigenous ways of knowing the sacred with one particular story, presented as the only story.

But here is what colonization could not do: it could not take your capacity to receive what is genuinely healing within any tradition you encounter. You are allowed to be a sovereign reader of your own spiritual life. You always have been.

We as humans in 2026 have the ability to pick and choose that which transforms us and makes us our best versions. Systems , all systems , have their own agenda. But we are not here to preserve systems. We are here to become kind, compassionate, loving, transformative beings. And anything inconsistent with that, we are allowed to release.

As it was said: remove the log from your own eye before you address the speck in someone else’s.

So What Does Resurrection Mean For You?

Not as doctrine. Not as something that happened to someone else two thousand years ago in a garden outside Jerusalem. But as a living question in your actual life right now.

What in you needs to be allowed to die? What old story about who you are, what you deserve, what is possible , what has been in the tomb long enough? And what is waiting on the other side of that threshold?

Yeshua was baptized and something was named in him publicly: Beloved. In you I am well pleased. Before he did a single miracle. Before he fed anyone or healed anyone or said anything particularly profound. Just , beloved. In you. As you are. Right now.

If that text has any message at all, it is that. Your divinity is not something you earn. It is something you remember.

Healing, as we say at Nativ Elementz, is a remembering.

You do not have to believe in the literal resurrection to receive the gift this story is offering. You just have to be willing to believe , even for a moment , that what you thought was finished might not be. That what feels like an ending might be a threshold. That the stone over the entrance to whatever you have buried in yourself can, in fact, be moved.

We are all, in some way, in the tomb right now. The question is always: do we trust that morning is coming?

Whether this is a day of sacred celebration for you, a day of cultural habit, a day of beautiful food and family, or simply a Sunday , may something in you rise today. May you locate, in whatever language your soul speaks, the unshakeable truth that you are not done. That you are not too much or not enough. That the sacred is not watching you from a distance but breathing through you right now.

That has always been the message, across every tradition that ever pointed toward the divine. The container changes. The message does not.

ÀṢẹ