There is a small limestone figurine, barely four inches tall, that was carved roughly 25,000 years ago somewhere in what is now Austria. She has no face. Her arms are thin suggestions. But her belly, breasts, and hips are rendered with a sculptor's devotion — round, full, generous.

There is a moment in the Easter story that tends to get rushed past in sermons and Sunday school lessons, yet it may be the most quietly extraordinary moment in all of Western religious history. A woman stands alone in a garden, weeping. She has come at dawn, before the men, before the crowds,…