Hunter S. Thompson grew up not far from Douglass Boulevard Christian Church. Highlands neighborhood. Went to Male High School. He was a kid with a chip on his shoulder and a serious conviction that the official version of things was almost always a story somebody paid for.

He went on to invent what he called “gonzo journalism, ”immersive, first-person, and deliberately unhinged. Gonzo journalism eventually gave us a phrase that's become shorthand for a certain way of moving through the world: fear and loathing.

Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. Fear and loathing on the campaign trail. Fear and loathing as a permanent American condition.

What Thompson understood, and what made him both essential and frustrating, was that fear isn't just something people feel on their own. Fear, it turns out, is also something systems produce. Deliberately. Methodically. Unceasingly.

Keep people terrorized, and they won't ask questions. Keep them off-balance, and maybe they won't notice who's actually running things.

Keep them doubting their own perceptions, and they'll accept almost any official explanation for what they're seeing with their own eyes. (“Don’t pay any attention to the man behind the curtain.”)

Hunter S. Thompson spent his career writing about a country that had gotten very good at that particular trick.

But he wasn't the first to notice how effective the trick is.

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Two thousand years ago, outside a city that had some experience managing fear, two women got up before dawn and walked toward a sealed tomb.

These women weren't expecting much, except maybe, hopefully, the smell hadn’t gotten up a head of steam. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary had been at the crucifixion. They saw the whole thing. So, they knew up close and personal what Rome could do when it needed to make a point.

Here’s what I don’t think most modern Americans understand: Crucifixion wasn't just one form of execution; it was a kind of theater. Slow, public, deliberately degrading theater designed to put everybody on notice that they’d better think twice before getting any ideas.

The whole point was the fear it produced in onlookers. Pilate understood that. The chief priests understood that. The system worked the way it was supposed to work.

So these women went to the tomb. They walked the way people navigate a world that's just given them an extra-special lesson on what it costs to hope for something different.

No, they weren't coming to celebrate, but to tend a body.

But, I mean, let’s face it, they went to do the work of grief that nobody else was going to do: the washing, the anointing, the quiet labor of love that honor and shame economies never count and certainly (God forbid!) never compensate.

But when they got there, something happened that nobody was counting on: the ground shook.

Matthew uses seismos … that is, shaking, shocking, commotion, from which we get words like "seismic" and "seismology." It’s the same word he uses for earthquake that he uses for the storm at sea and for the moment Jesus died, when the temple curtain ripped from top to bottom.

In Matthew's Gospel, that kind of shaking marks the moments when God breaks into the world as it is. In Matthew, when things start shaking, God’s up to something.

An angel descends, rolls back the stone, and sits on it. But the angel wasn't anything they were expecting, was it? With an appearance like lightning, and clothing white as snow. And the guards, the ones Rome and the temple authorities posted to make sure death stayed locked in place where they could keep an eye on it, they crumple to the ground and become, Matthew says, “like dead men.”