When I was a boy, Saturday night at 9:00 was Mission Impossible time. Every week Jim Phelps and his crack espionage team would be given their mission. It might be to topple a dictator or free a political prisoner. But whatever the mission was, it was so difficult and risky that it could be called mission impossible.

The soldiers' impossible mission

The soldiers assigned to guard Jesus' tomb were given a mission that seemed so easy that it could have been called mission impossible to fail. Their mission was to make sure that Jesus' disciples would not steal his body from the tomb and then claim a resurrection. The soldiers on guard duty at the tomb were not worried about their mission. That is until the early hours of Sunday morning.

That is when an earthquake shook the soldiers awake so they could see a gleaming angel move the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. Then they saw the inside of the tomb. Their mission was a failure. Jesus was gone. He had risen from the dead. Their assignment to keep God's Son in his grave had been a mission impossible.

That's obviously good news for us who are banking our eternal future on Jesus' promises. So don't let the solid metal alloy exterior of that casket fool you, or the thick concrete liner around it, or the six-foot-deep hole in the ground, or the amount of time it is in the grave. Conquering death and escaping the grave for all who trust in Jesus is not mission impossible—not since Jesus himself did it and promises that we will too.

The impossibility of keeping the news from spreading

But keeping Jesus from rising from the dead was not the only mission impossible of Easter. Trying to stop the resurrection truth from spreading was just as much a mission impossible.

The religious leaders of the Jews tried to do that. They bribed the soldiers to say that Jesus' disciples stole his body. They hoped to squelch forever the truth of Jesus' resurrection.

Oops! A little miscalculation there. A mere 50 days later more than three thousand people would believe Peter's Pentecost message that Jesus was the promised Savior, who died for our sins and rose again. This powerful gospel kept right on spreading to the point that this Easter billions of people will celebrate Jesus' resurrection.

Today, there is one more mission impossible: to continue to share the Easter message in a world that opposes such good news. But with God nothing is impossible.

Contributing editor Norman Burger is pastor at Shepherd of the Hills, Lansing, Michigan.