Believers in the Scriptures wake up on Easter morning knowing that if they will be attending a church service, they will hear a by-now-familiar message about the frantic pre-dawn moments of the first Easter Sunday 2,000 years ago.

A familiar message, yes, but one that does not get boring or otherwise “old.”

“On the first day of the week,” according to the gospel of John, “Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, ‘They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.'”

None of them yet understood the Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.

“Had to” were the important words of that day, but they were oblivious to that reality.

This weekend, as Christians again celebrate what’s often referred to as “victory over sin,” but in a world where sin is very much alive, there are people among us who still strive for a greater understanding of what actually preceded Jesus’ death on the Cross.

While reflecting on that, some arrive at unconventional theories and conclusions that might deviate from long-held, long-accepted interpretations, explanations and teachings. However, while those theories and conclusions might be unconventional, by today’s standards, they nonetheless are not beyond the realm of being reasonable — and accurate.

Let’s focus on one of April 11-12, 2020, during the darkest days of the coronavirus pandemic, presented in the Wall Street Journal’s editor-at-large column under the headline “There are no heroes or villains in the Passion story.”

“Christians feel more than usually bereft this Holy Saturday,” wrote the column’s author, Gerard Baker, in the article’s lead. “Unable to celebrate Easter in the traditional fashion, we are reminded of the fear and sense of aloneness that the disciples felt as they pondered the shocking events of Good Friday.

“But there is something powerfully apt about experiencing Easter during this modern plague,” the article states, “and not just because of the reassurance it brings that after our long Good Friday will come the joy of the resurrection. Easter provides us with a lesson, as this terrible pandemic courses through the planet, on the centrality of –indeed, the necessity of — suffering and evil to human life.”

Baker then discusses why the wife of Pontius Pilate, first regarded as a hero for trying to intervene on Jesus’ behalf, was actually a villain for what amounted to an attempt to thwart Jesus’ mission to die for our sins.

Likewise, also unknowingly but actually getting in the way, besides Pilate’s wife, according to Baker, were St. Simon of Cyrene, who helped Jesus carry the cross, and St. Peter, who struck off the ear of the high priest’s servant.

Baker said Jesus himself compounded the problem when he said of his betrayer that “it would be better for that man if he had never been born.”

Baker said death would have won if Jesus’ mission to die for our sins had been thwarted.

“The simple reality of our humanity is that there would be no joy without suffering,” Baker said, “no life without death.”

Yes, the salvation of humanity won on that day 2,000 years ago.

Thank God.