The Moment of Resurrection

I am the most beginning of beginners at watercolor painting. But I wanted a way to celebrate Easter. And, as I mentioned last week, I was intrigued by the calculation of the moment of resurrection, based on the Shroud of Turin, that the moment “took 34,000 trillion watts of energy emanating from the body in a flash of one 140th of a billionth of a second to produce that image.” It had to be a huge amount of energy, but a short enough time that it didn’t burn the Shroud and everything else.

So I imagined that brief flash, possibly too brief to have been perceived by human eyes, had there been any to see it. But you can do such things in imagination.

 

"The Moment of Resurrection" by Linda Nuttall, April 2025

I would like to have produced something better; I won’t mention the flaws, but I do see many. But as a way of celebrating Easter, I’m somewhat pleased with how it turned out.

I imagined it with the stone already rolled away by the angels—so they are perhaps inside to witness. There wouldn’t have been a lot of room, but I didn’t feel capable of painting them on the outside looking in.

Also, the arched doorway is not likely how it looked. The opening would likely have been much smaller, and possibly squarish. But we have a Church symbol, using the arched doorway with the Christus statue, by Thorvaldsen, representing the risen Savior emerging from the tomb. The arch shape does match the gate into Jerusalem that the returning Lord will enter through. So, anyway, I took that artistic license. 

Church symbol introduced in 2020

I also added the olive tree at the edge of the scene. I don’t know how close the tomb is to the Mount of Olives, where Gethsemane was, the place of the olive press, a symbolic representation of Jesus’s suffering. But it seemed like something worth having in the scene.

The area isn’t typically verdant, but a photo I saw of the garden tomb had some flowers in the foreground. And Mary Magdalene, who first saw the risen Lord, mistook Him for the gardener before He called her by name, so I thought there ought to be some garden flowers there.

Since I wrote last week about the Shroud of Turin, and the strong possibility that it was evidence of the death and resurrection of Christ, I found additional sources.

There’s a conversation Pastor Jeremiah Johnston has with Michael Knowles, where he goes through many of the same evidences he had with Glenn Beck, but he also has with him the head covering. This answered a question I had: why was the image on the Shroud but not on the head covering? He explained that they would have covered His head while taking his dead body down from the cross, and they would have laid him down, and then removed the head covering to wrap the body, and then would place the head covering over the top. The head covering, by the way, has had a known provenance since the beginning. The head covering, interestingly, has stains that coincide with markings on the Shroud, so that the two items verify each other.

There are others also talking about the Shroud and its authenticity. The Happy Lady compiled a 37-minute video of short clips of people talking about the Shroud, and about the reality of the resurrection of our Savior. In the middle (maybe 20 minutes in, if I remember right), she shows the AI generated image based on the Shroud of Turin, which AI has animated. It’s startling how lifelike it is. She also has clips of a woman, raised Jewish, who had a near death experience as a teen when she was thrown from a horse. She could describe Jesus and how He looked. Artists had attempted to depict Him based on her detailed description, but she said they were never quite right. And then, when she eventually saw that AI image based on the Shroud, she was stunned at how closely it resembled the Jesus she had met.

I don’t base my testimony of Christ’s atonement and resurrection on a piece of cloth, or even on others’ testimonies. I have the whisperings of the Spirit telling me these truths. But I love seeing the possible evidences, and pray that interest in such things might bring someone close enough to encounter the real Jesus Christ in their lives.

He lives! That moment of resurrection changed everything for all mankind for all eternity.