God our Father,
as we have celebrated today the mystery of theLord’s resurrection
grant our humble prayer:
free us from all harm
that we may sleep in peace
and rise in joy to sing your praise.
Through Christ ourLord,
Amen
The Lord grant us a quiet night and a perfect end pic.twitter.com/ofDAVJd7z8— Kalina Boulter (@KalinaBoulter) April 14, 2020
Watch and listen to it all from the original writers of the song.
..the Christmas story is largely nonthreatening to nonbelievers: Jesus in the manger, surrounded by Mary and Joseph and the adoring shepherds, is easy to take. As the Gospels of Matthew and Luke recount, there was no little danger involved for Mary and Joseph. But for the most part, it can be accepted as a charming story. Even nonbelievers might appreciate the birth of a great teacher.
By contrast, the Easter story is both appalling and astonishing: the craven betrayal of Jesus by one of his closest followers, the triple denial by his best friend, the gruesome crucifixion and the brutal end to his earthly life. Then, of course, there is the stunning turnaround three days later.
Easter is not as easy to digest as Christmas. It is harder to tame. Anyone can be born, but not everyone can rise from the dead.
Yet the Easter story, essential as it is for Christian belief, can be a confusing one, even for believers. To begin with, the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ appearances after the Resurrection can seem confounding, even contradictory. They are mysterious in the extreme.
Read it all from the WSJ.
The Resurrection of Christ Bartelome Murillo (1618-1682) #baroque #painting pic.twitter.com/sCNbidVVjr
— Tim Marlowe (@aweirdmisc) April 1, 2018
“The compelling evidence for me is the unanimous testimony of all the apostles and even a former persecutor like St. Paul,” said Brant Pitre, assistant professor of theology at Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans. “There was no debate in the first century over whether Jesus was resurrected or not.”
Scholars say that the witnesses to Christ’s resurrection are compelling for a variety of reasons.
“People will seldom die even for what they know to be true. Twelve men don’t give up their lives for a lie,” said Ray, who recently returned from France, where he was filming his “Footprints of God” series at the amphitheater in Lyon, the site of a persecution in A.D. 177. “The martyrs of Lyon underwent two days of torture and all they would say is, ‘I am a Christian.’ They knew the resurrection was true and didn’t question it.”
Barber also highlighted the diversity of sources and how they include different details as well as passages that do not paint the disciples in the best light.
“In the Road to Emmaus story, they write that they didn’t recognize him,” said Barber. “Our Biblical accounts are our best evidence.”
Several of the scholars pointed to 1 Corinthians, where Paul states that Christ appeared to 500 people.
“Some want to shy away from the Gospels because they say they were written later,” explained Barber. “If you want to believe that they were written later, then why wouldn’t the Gospels have made use of this piece of evidence from 1 Corinthians?” asked Barber.
Alleluja!!! Jezus żyje!!!
Przekaż dalej!#Wielkanoc2020 pic.twitter.com/SNEXG3C82L— Bp Ignacy Dec (@BpIgnacyDec) April 14, 2020
Have you prayed using the audio version of today's prayer?
Go to https://t.co/Rn4jDVCRSG to learn more. pic.twitter.com/qCsUYXYdgY
— The Church of England (@churchofengland) April 14, 2020
Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.
Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.
God exists: that is the real message of #Easter. Anyone who even begins to grasp what this means also knows what it means to be redeemed. – Pope Benedict XVI pic.twitter.com/UsFlXg8ven
— Franciscan Friars (@MFVAFriars) April 13, 2020
O Lord, who by triumphing over the power of darkness, didst Prepare our place in the New Jerusalem: Grant us, who have this day given thanks for thy resurrection, to praise thee in that city whereof thou art the light; where with the Father and the Holy Spirit thou livest and reignest, world without end.
You may grasp the Spring
But the wind takes it away
The Sun mite Shine
But the wind is cold as Ice
It’s just a picture In Ones mind
The Season’s no One can hold
For they pass right in front of
Ones Eyes ~♡
~rLs~ And This To Shall Pass pic.twitter.com/D1P34CWKcg— Robin Stanfill ✴🕊 (@RobinStanfill2) April 13, 2020
Gather gladness from the skies;
Take a lesson from the ground;
Flowers do ope their heavenward eyes
And a Spring-time joy have found;
Earth throws Winter’s robes away,
Decks herself for Easter Day.
Beauty now for ashes wear,
Perfumes for the garb of woe.
Chaplets for disheveled hair,
Dances for sad footsteps slow;
Open wide your hearts that they
Let in joy this Easter Day.
Seek God’s house in happy throng;
Crowded let His table be;
Mingle praises, prayer and song,
Singing to the Trinity.
Henceforth let your souls alway
Make each morn an Easter Day.
Join @BishopWorcester tomorrow at 8:30am as he celebrates the Eucharist from his home. Streaming here, Facebook and the website. @WorcCathedral @churchofengland #EasterSunday #Easter2020 #HeIsRisen pic.twitter.com/afWnFqvuSg
— Diocese of Worcester (@CofEWorcester) April 11, 2020
Coronavirus: Easter Sunday under lockdown captured in pictures https://t.co/0vuLhoC7Ma
— David Kisamfu (@thedextazlab) April 12, 2020
Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn’t have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he’s still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he’s gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost their historical and theological nerve.
The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn’t defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon – He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.
Let’s be clear: the stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn’t mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” is the sort of Greek word that tells you,not what something is made of, but what is animating it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God’s life-giving Spirit. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect – and in the whole world.
Happy Easter..
Resurrection of Christ 1475-79 – Giovanni Bellini pic.twitter.com/iCJ7bCFzq9— Araceli Rego (@AraceliRego) April 21, 2019
Listen to it all and you can read more about it, including finding the lyrics, at Lent and Beyond.
Sam believes that Gandalf has fallen a catastrophic distance and has died. But in the end of the story, with Sam having been asleep for a long while and then beginning to regain consciousness, Gandalf stands before Sam, robed in white, his face glistening in the sunlight, and says:
“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?”
But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”
“A great shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from bed… “How do I feel?” he cried.” Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” –he waved his arms in the air– “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), The Return of the King
A blessed Easter! Zalig Pasen!
Michelangelo
Sketch for a scene of the Resurrection pic.twitter.com/gePGrHD8xI— Rembrandt’s Room 🖌 (@RembrandtsRoom) April 12, 2020
Join in with thousands of others praying these words today.
Access a spoken version of today's prayer at https://t.co/Rn4jDVCRSG. pic.twitter.com/53DwIHhRPA
— The Church of England (@churchofengland) April 13, 2020
Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity. In his preaching at Corinth, Paul initially wants to know nothing but the Cross, which “destroys the wisdom of the wise and wrecks the understanding of those who understand”, which “is a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles”. But “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (I Cor 1:19, 23, 25).
Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.
–Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), A Short Primer For Unsettled Laymen
The Risen Christ by Rembrandt. The world’s most famous painters were captivated by Jesus death and resurrection, I pray that you are too. Happy Easter! pic.twitter.com/IViG2gsqZi
— tom konjoyan (@tomkonjoyan) April 12, 2020
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that pierced died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not paper-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
–John Updike (1932-2009)
May the spirits of this day help all of us, the entire world, to resurrect from the doom despair and gloom. Happy Easter! (👇🏽Christ Ressurected by Rembrandt Van Rijn) pic.twitter.com/yQ34UUgg6y
— Liz Mathew (@MathewLiz) April 12, 2020
O God, who by the glorious resurrection of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ hast destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that we, being raised together with him, may know the comfort and strength of his presence, and rejoice in hope of thy everlasting glory; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be dominion and praise for ever and ever.
How does your garden grow? With all this spring weather, the Wissahickon is sprouting up.
Check out our Creekside Classroom for new videos on spring ephemerals and native plants, presented by Lisa Stout! https://t.co/p0ois6Whok pic.twitter.com/4WCUGrX1tC
— Friends of the Wiss (@FOWissahickon) April 18, 2020
This is the real meaning of Easter…
No tabloid will ever print the startling news that the mummified body of Jesus of Nazareth has been discovered in old Jerusalem. Christians have no carefully embalmed body enclosed in a glass case to worship. Thank God, we have an empty tomb.
The glorious fact that the empty tomb proclaims to us is that life for us does not stop when death comes. Death is not a wall, but a door. And eternal life which may be ours now, by faith in Christ, is not interrupted when the soul leaves the body, for we live on…and on.
There is no death to those who have entered into fellowship with him who emerged from the tomb. Because the resurrection is true it is the most significant thing in our world today. Bringing the resurrected Christ into our lives, individual and national, is the only hope we have for making a better world.
“Because I live ye shall live also.”
That is the real meaning of Easter.
–Peter Marshall (1902-1949), The First Easter
Cecco del Caravaggio’s huge (11’x6’) Resurrection, at the Art Institute of Chicago, reminds us that despite its place at the heart of the canon, Baroque art remains deeply strange pic.twitter.com/IfslNYoYvl
— Jonathan Ziemba (@jonathan_ziemba) February 15, 2020
Mary is distressed, very distressed:
Not only has she seen the most terrible death inflicted on the man of all men who did her the greatest kindness, Luke tells us she is the woman who was delivered of 7 evil spirits by Jesus,She is now distressed that even in his death, and she has seen him die, the simplest and most basic expressions of love and respect cannot be given by her to him, anointing his body with oil.
The angels ask her why she is weeping, and she says “they” have taken away my Lord and she doesn’t know where.
When you are feeling at your most powerless and forsaken it is as if you have been kicked in the teeth again.
Then the mysterious figure appears who she thinks is the gardener; in an extraordinary touch, she gently accuses him of taking the body, and pleads with him to allow her to know where, so that she can simply come to do what she can for him even in the aloneness of his death and burial.
And then the man speaks her name.
Mary
It is as if the whole gospel comes to a standstill at that moment.
Mary
A realisation of a new reality in the universe dawns on this woman from Magdala in Galilee.
Mary
By simply calling her name Jesus expresses the full meaning of his love for her, even delight in astonishing her, and he enables her to know, that all she imagines as the worst, is over.
The Resurrected Christ first appears to Mary Magdalene. She thinks He is a gardener, until He says her name, “Mary.” She then tries to hold Him, but He says, “Noli me tangere” (Do not touch me), because He has not yet ascended to the Father.
“Noli Me Tangere,” by Fra Angelico. pic.twitter.com/GkGPPbyUf2
— Christian Culture (@Christian8Pics) April 23, 2019
Bishop, for many of us this will be the first time in our lives we won’t be in church on Easter morning. No Easter lilies; No packed crowd singing “Welcome Happy Morning;” No flowering of the cross. No big Easter dinner with extended family. The feeling of malaise is giving way to something darker. How are we to approach Easter this year?
There’s some remarkable irony there. Just think about that first Easter morning when Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome went to the tomb on the first day of the week just as the sun was rising. They were not going in the way you and I go to the Easter morning service with a great deal of expectation and hope, waiting to say, “Alleluia, the Lord is risen,” and hear one another say, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” They were going with spices to anoint the buried body of Jesus. They were hardly in a mood of expectation, of joy, of hope. They were going there overwhelmed by life, overwhelmed with what they had lost, what they did not have, who they could not see, the one they could not hold.
If we go through all of the Easter stories, one after another it is of Jesus appearing to a relatively small group of people. Not in a religious setting. Not in a synagogue, not in a temple, but in a home. It may be that we need to rediscover the power of the resurrection to lift us in the midst of our gloom, in the midst of our daily lives. It’s not something we have to go to to experience him, but whenever we gather in his name, he can be among us. That’s one aspect we need to cultivate and, perhaps, rediscover.
To be honest, I will miss it too—Easter morning at church. I will miss singing, “Welcome happy morning.” “The Day of Resurrection,” all of those great Easter hymns. I think I can play them here at home. In fact, I think I will!
Happy #Easter! Commemorating the Resurrection of Christ after his Crucifixion on Good Friday, Easter is one of the most important Christian holidays. This dynamic drawing by Rubens from 1614 shows Jesus rising from the tomb pic.twitter.com/0XiN1fMvFI
— British Museum (@britishmuseum) April 1, 2018
If I had a Son in Court, or married a daughter into a plentifull Fortune, I were satisfied for that son or that daughter. Shall I not be so, when the King of Heaven hath taken that sone to himselfe, and married himselfe to that daughter, for ever? I spend none of my Faith, I exercise none of my Hope, in this, that I shall have my dead raised to life againe. This is the faith that sustains me, when I lose by the death of others, and we, are now all in one Church, and at the resurrection, shall be all in one Quire.
–John Donne (1572-1631) [my emphasis]
“Let us keep our Easter feast in the thankful remembrance of Christ’s benefits, which he hath plentifully wrought for us by his resurrection … whereby we be delivered from the captivity and thraldom of all our enemies” – ‘An Homily for #EasterDay‘, Book of Homilies pic.twitter.com/7Vn5tiuISu
— laudablePractice (@cath_cov) April 12, 2020
Today we celebrate Easter Day!
Read or listen to today's prayer at https://t.co/Rn4jDVCRSG. pic.twitter.com/8pqkHpYgIx
— The Church of England (@churchofengland) April 12, 2020
The resurrection was as inconceivable for the first disciples, as impossible for them to believe, as it is for many of us today. Granted, their reasons would have been different from ours. The Greeks did not believe in resurrection; in the Greek worldview, the afterlife was liberation of the soul from the body. For them, resurrection would never be part of life after death. As for the Jews, some of them believed in a future general resurrection when the entire world would be renewed, but they had no concept of an individual rising from the dead. The people of Jesus’ day were not predisposed to believe in resurrection any more than we are.
Celsus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the second century A.D., was highly antagonistic to Christianity and wrote a number of works listing arguments against it. One of the arguments he believed most telling went like this: Christianity can’t be true, because the written accounts of the resurrection are based on the testimony of women””and we all know women are hysterical. And many of Celsus’ readers agreed: For them, that was a major problem. In ancient societies, as you know, women were marginalized, and the testimony of women was never given much credence.
Do you see what that means? If Mark and the Christians were making up these stories to get their movement off the ground, they would never have written women into the story as the first eyewitnesses to Jesus’ empty tomb. The only possible reason for the presence of women in these accounts is that they really were present and reported what they saw. The stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty and an angel declares that Jesus is risen.
Botticelli’s Resurrection of Christ (1490) #EasterDayImages pic.twitter.com/HFZhC7SmrK
— Tim Montgomerie (@montie) March 27, 2016
The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
Spring has sprung in #Summerville! #FlowertownInBloom
Posted by Visit Summerville on Friday, March 25, 2016
Thanks be unto thee, O Christ, because thou hast broken for us the bonds of sin and brought us into fellowship with the Father.
Thanks be unto thee, O Christ, because thou hast overcome death and opened to us the gates of eternal life.
Thanks be unto thee, O Christ, because where two or three are gathered together in thy Name there art thou in the midst of them.
Thanks be unto thee, O Christ, because thou ever livest to make intercession for us.
For these and all other benefits of thy mighty resurrection, thanks be unto thee O Christ.
‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!’ Rubens painted the Resurrection of Christ (1611-12) as the centre of a triptych for the Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp, in a monumental and powerfully emotive Baroque style. #Easter pic.twitter.com/5OaAC895ya
— Art Theoria (@Art_Theoria) April 1, 2018
There won’t be choral cantatas and churchwide egg hunts and congregations gathered for sunrise services or sunset prayers.
There won’t be extended family dinners or traditional communion ceremonies.
Two of the most significant religious seasons of the year, Easter and Passover, collide this week with a historic season of illness, anxiety and widespread isolation, as the coronavirus pandemic bears down across the globe.
While traditions and ceremonies have been dampened, the significance and spiritual comfort of the holidays has been heightened. And while churches and synagogues across the nation and here in the Midlands will have their doors closed to most parishioners this week, their messages of hope and meaning will be spoken far and wide.
“I would say, in fact, the meaning has been magnified,” said George Wright, pastor of Shandon Baptist Church in Columbia. “This Easter, everybody is recognizing life is not normal. In that reflective mode, people are asking questions they normally don’t consider. They’re looking for hope and looking for some answers in all of this.”
“I’m preaching about the empty tomb to an empty room,” one Columbia pastor says. “But I know people are still tuned in, and God’s going to bless it.” How are you celebrating Easter or Passover this week? https://t.co/u68wkILfzC
— The State Newspaper (@thestate) April 6, 2020
The Rev’d Professor N.T Wright is an English New Testament scholar, Pauline theologian, and retired Anglican bishop. He writes about theology, Christian life, and the relationship of these two things and has written over seventy books. He is a guest speaker throughout Easter 2019.
Listen to it all (about 24 1/3 minutes).
(2009 [London] Times) Tom Wright–The Church must stop trivialising #Easter https://t.co/QRZfgvbKEq #easter2019 #anglican #theology #apologetics #21stc pic.twitter.com/iJmw4MoY9g
— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 22, 2019