“Without Easter, Good Friday would have no meaning. Without Easter, there would be no hope that suffering and abandonment might be tolerable. But with Easter, a way out becomes visible for human sorrows, an absolute future: more than a hope, a divine expectation.”
–Hans Urs von Balthasar To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), p.39
Happy Easter . Durer. Praying hands x pic.twitter.com/r4IYV0ZEm4
— Gea Austen (@GeaAusten) April 1, 2018
Found courtesy of Alan Jacobs there:
What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. — If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, — what I need is certainty — not wisdom, dreams of speculation — and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption.
Happy Easter
— Vir Desideriorum (@VirDesideriorum) April 19, 2025
Frohe Ostern
Buona Pasqua
Feliz Pascua
Joyeuses Pâques
—
Resurrection of Christ (Attavante degli Attavanti, Florence). Cutting, probably from a missal produced for Pope Leo X, commissioned around 1513 for use in the Sistine Chapel
Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books pic.twitter.com/PqR4wyso3R
Words cannot utter
Christ His returning:—
Mankind, keep Jubilee,
Strip off your mourning,
Crown you with garlands,
Set your lamps burning.
Speech is left speechless;—
Set you to singing,
Fling your hearts open wide,
Set your bells ringing:
Christ the Chief Reaper
Comes, His sheaf bringing…
Happy Easter Monday ☀️ pic.twitter.com/GHioesF7no
— Ailish Sinclair (@AilishSinclair) April 21, 2025
Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that we who celebrate with reverence the Paschal feast may be made worthy to attain to everlasting joys; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Three Women on the Tomb of Christ (1843), by Irma Martin pic.twitter.com/UpZgQRTFUG
— Classical Art (@SeekAfterBeauty) April 20, 2025
I keep the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also dwells secure.
For thou dost not give me up to Sheol,
or let thy godly one see the Pit.
Thou dost show me the path of life;
in thy presence there is fulness of joy,
in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.
Resurrection day #EasterSunday
— Ennius (@red_loeb) April 20, 2025
BL Add MS 19352; Theodore Psalter; 1066 CE; Eastern Mediterranean (Constantinople); f.146 @BLMedieval pic.twitter.com/5PUDFv3Ols
Christians around the world are celebrating Easter.
All Christians, from Orthodox and Western churches, are observing the holiday on the same day this year – not often the case because the churches use different calendars.
In Greece, the sky lit up with fireworks, while worshippers in Jerusalem lit candles at the church where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried. Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead, which is remembered at Easter.
Here is a look at how some have been celebrating the holiday as days of festivities culminate in Easter Sunday.
In pictures: Easter celebrated around the world from Greece to Iraq https://t.co/kK2brsmn7I
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 20, 2025
ALMIGHTY God, who through thine only-begotten Son Jesus Christ hast overcome death, and opened unto us the gate of everlasting life; We humbly beseech thee that, as by thy special grace preventing us thou dost put into our minds good desires, so by thy continual help we may bring the same to good effect; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever, one God, world without end. Amen.
Resurrection of Christ (c. 1700), by Noël Coypel pic.twitter.com/N5zAGOP8rs
— Classical Art (@SeekAfterBeauty) April 20, 2025
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
Happy Easter
— Vir Desideriorum (@VirDesideriorum) April 19, 2025
Frohe Ostern
Buona Pasqua
Feliz Pascua
Joyeuses Pâques
—
Resurrection of Christ (Attavante degli Attavanti, Florence). Cutting, probably from a missal produced for Pope Leo X, commissioned around 1513 for use in the Sistine Chapel
Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books pic.twitter.com/PqR4wyso3R
‘It ought to be noticed at this stage that the Christian doctrine, if accepted, involves a particular view of Death. There are two attitudes towards Death which the human mind naturally adopts. One is the lofty view, which reached its greatest intensity among the Stoics, that Death ‘doesn’t matter’, that it is ‘kind nature’s signal for retreat’, and that we ought to regard it with indifference. The other is the ‘natural’ point of view, implicit in nearly all private conversations on the subject, and in much modern thought about the survival of the human species, that Death is the greatest of all evils: Hobbes is perhaps the only philosopher who erected a system on this basis. The first idea simply negates, the second simply affirms, our instinct for self-preservation; neither throws any new light on Nature, and Christianity countenances neither. Its doctrine is subtler. On the one hand Death is the triumph of Satan, the punishment of the fall, and the last enemy. Christ shed tears at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood in Gethsemane: the Life of Lives that was in Him detested this penal obscenity not less than we do, but more. On the other hand, only he who loses his life will save it. We are baptized into the death of Christ, and it is the remedy for the fall. Death is, in fact, what some modern people call ‘ambivalent’. It is Satan’s great weapon and also God’s great weapon: it is holy and unholy; our supreme disgrace and our only hope; the thing Christ came to conquer and THE MEANS BY WHICH HE CONQUERED.’
–Miracles, emphasis mine
Cecco di Caravaggio Resurrezione di Cristo 1619 pic.twitter.com/3UQBOzdJpN
— Ugo Ramella (@RamellaUgo) April 19, 2025
“A story that is any good can’t be reduced, it can only be expanded. A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you. In fiction two and two is always more than four.”
–Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1957) p. 102
The Institute for Catholic Liberal Education wishes you a blessed Easter: He is risen; He is risen, indeed! May this time of joy and prayer bring consolation to you, your families, and your school communities!
— Institute for Catholic Liberal Education (@CathLibEd) April 4, 2021
(Image: The Resurrection of Christ, Reubens, 1611-1612) pic.twitter.com/3v29whHAoz
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.
#EasterSunday 🙏🏻 #ShallottePoint @EdPiotrowski @medwick @ChrissyKohler @WXIIJackie @jamiearnoldWMBF @LeeHaywoodWX @dogwoodblooms @marioncaldwx @JustinMcKeeWx @StarboardRail @ThePhotoHour @CMorganWX @Christina4casts @AndrewWMBF @ScottyPowellWX @jgreenhillwx @TimBuckleyWX pic.twitter.com/SmeJvnREDK
— Mark Moore (@MMoore_hoops) April 20, 2025
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.
Annibale Carracci, Holy Women at Christ' s Tomb, ca. 1590 pic.twitter.com/nwMvS6LPyM
— Solas (@solas_na_greine) April 20, 2025
Listen to it all and you can read more about it, including finding the lyrics, at Lent and Beyond.
The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy.
— J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973)
The Irish word ‘Cásc’ (in English, Easter) derives from the Romance language line of ‘Pascha’ via Latin & Greek, and so back to Aramaic.
— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) April 20, 2025
(Met Museum) pic.twitter.com/iocEBrqE40
Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may, by your life-giving Spirit, be delivered from sin and raised from death; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
'Alleluia! Christ is risen!'
— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) April 20, 2025
A very happy Easter to you from all of us at Westminster Abbey pic.twitter.com/Ywc1LzmxD7
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel; and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Mag’dalene and Jo-an’na and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles; but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
–Luke 24:1-11
Wishing everyone a very happy Easter and a peaceful Sunday 🙂 #Easter #Easter2025 pic.twitter.com/e0ENIIWISY
— David Oxtaby (@Disc_light) April 20, 2025
That done, there must take place that struggleRead it all.
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home.
Mikhail Nestorov, Christ's Descent into Hell, c.1895 pic.twitter.com/VBcXNdPIsJ
— Solas (@solas_na_greine) April 19, 2025
Yet, there was one large omission that set all other truth dangerously at risk: the omission of holy rest. The refusal to be silent. The obsessive avoidance of emptiness. The denial of any experience and any people in the least bit suggestive of godforsakenness.
It was far more than an annual ignorance on Holy Saturday; it was religiously fueled, weekly arrogance. Not only was the Good Friday crucifixion bridged to the Easter resurrection by this day furious with energy and lucrative with reward, but all the gospel truths were likewise set as either introductions or conclusions to the human action that displayed our prowess and our virtue every week of the year. God was background to our business. Every gospel truth was maintained intact and all the human energy was wholly admirable, but the rhythms were all wrong, the proportions wildly skewed. Desolation””and with it companionship with the desolate, from first-century Semites to twentieth-century Indians””was all but wiped from consciousness.
But there came a point at which I was convinced that it was critically important to pay more attention to what God does than what I do; to find daily, weekly, yearly rhythms that would get that awareness into my bones. Holy Saturday for a start. And then, times to visit people in despair, and learn their names, and wait for resurrection.
Embedded in my memory now is this most poignant irony: those seven or eight Indians, with the Thunderbird empties lying around, drunk in the alley behind the Pastime Baron Saturday afternoon, while we Scandinavian Christians worked diligently late into the night, oblivious to the holiness of the day. The Indians were in despair, religious despair, something very much like the Holy Saturday despair narrated in the Gospels. Their way of life had come to nothing, the only buffalo left to them engraved on nickels, a couple of which one of their squaws had paid out that morning for four bony ham hocks. The early sacredness of their lives was a wasteland; and they, godforsaken as they supposed, drugged their despair with Thunderbird and buried their dead visions and dreams in the alley behind the Pastime, ignorant of the God at work beneath their emptiness.
Holy Saturday is a day of quiet reflection, commemorating the time Jesus' body lay in the tomb. It is a moment to pause between the sorrow of the crucifixion and the joy of the resurrection.
— Anglican Communion (@AnglicanWorld) April 19, 2025
Bible Verse:
"Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble. They come up… pic.twitter.com/1HJoznqwch
This ultimate solidarity is the final point and the goal of that first ‘descent,’ so clearly described in the Scriptures, into a ‘lower world’ which, with Augustine, can already be characterised, by way of contrast with heaven, as infernum. Thomas Aquinas will echo Augustine here. For him, the necessity whereby Christ had to go down to Hades lies not in some insufficiency of the suffering endured on the Cross but in the fact that Christ has assumed all the defectus of sinners…Now the penalty which the sin of man brought on was not only the death of the body. It was also a penalty affected the soul, for sinning was also the soul’s work, and the soul paid the price in being deprived of the vision of God. As yet unexpiated, it followed that all human beings who lived before the coming of Christ, even the holy ancestors, descended into the infernum. And so, in order to assume the entire penalty imposed upon sinners, Christ willed not only to die, but to go down, in his soul, ad infernum. As early as the Fathers of the second century, this act of sharing constituted the term and aim of the Incarnation. The ‘terrors of death’ into which Jesus himself falls are only dispelled when the Father raises him again…He insists on his own grounding principle, namely, that only what has been endured is healed and saved.
That the Redeemer is solidarity with the dead, or, better, with this death which makes of the dead, for the first time, dead human beings in all reality- this is the final consequence of the redemptive mission he has received from the Father. His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s) of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, of the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is ‘cast down’ (hormemati blethesetai, Apocalypse 18, 21; John 12; Matthew 22, 13). But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father’s mission in all its amplitude: the ‘exploration’ of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity…This vision of chaos by the God-man has become for us the condition of our vision of Divinity. His exploration of the ultimate depths has transformed what was a prison into a way.
––Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter [emphasis mine]
#HolySaturday “The Church is still in silence, the tabernacle is empty. Yet this is a day of the most radiant expectation – – we are in the presence of something greater than we can see.” Sr. Wendy Beckett. Jesus♥️Caritas pic.twitter.com/8UevSQ0Ckw
— Barry Naylor ن (@KaJuror) April 20, 2019
In the midst of life we are in death.
We grow and wither as quickly as flowers;
we disappear like shadows.
To whom can we go for help, but to you, Lord God,
though you are rightly displeased because of our sins?
And yet, Lord God Almighty,
most holy and most merciful Saviour,
deliver us from the bitterness of eternal death.
You know the secrets of our hearts;
mercifully hear us, most worthy judge eternal;
keep us, at our last hour,
in the consolation of your love.You, O Lord, are gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.
As kind as a father is to his children,
so kind is the Lord to those who honour him.
For you know what we are made of;
you remember that we are dust.
As for us, our life is like grass.
We grow and flourish like a wildflower;
then the wind blows on it, and it is gone
no-one sees it again.
But for those who honour the Lord, his love lasts forever,
and his goodness endures for all generations.Burial of Christ by Carl Heinrich Bloch pic.twitter.com/5WUdDb66Hi
— Paige Carpenter (@roguedoe) April 19, 2025
Jesus dies. His lifeless body is taken down from the cross. Painters and sculptors have strained their every nerve to portray the sorrow of Mary holding her lifeless son in her arms, as mothers today in Baghdad hold with the same anguish the bodies of their children. On Holy Saturday, or Easter Eve, God is dead, entering into the nothingness of human dying. The source of all being, the One who framed the vastness and the microscopic patterning of the Universe, the delicacy of petals and the scent of thyme, the musician’s melodies and the lover’s heart, is one with us in our mortality. In Jesus, God knows our dying from the inside.
–The Rt. Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Rowell
It's the Feast of Nicodemus today, the Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin who was responsible for the burial of Jesus with Joseph of Arimathea. The image (below) is The Entombment by Titian. pic.twitter.com/or08CKxFxI
— Mike Williams (@MikesVoice) August 3, 2021
O God of the living, on this day your Son our Savior descended to the place of the dead: Look with kindness on all of us who wait in hope for liberation from the corruption of sin and death, and give us a share in the glory of the children of God; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.
Entombment of Christ
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) April 19, 2025
-by Caravaggio#HolySaturday pic.twitter.com/P3mwvf4yzE
In this empty hallway, there’s nothing expected of us at this moment. The work is out of our hands, and all we can do is wait, breathe, look around. People sometimes feel like this when they’ve been up all night with someone who’s seriously ill or dying, or when they’ve been through a non-stop series of enormously demanding tasks. A sort of peace, but more a sort of ‘limbo’, an in-between moment. For now, nothing more to do; tired, empty, slightly numbed, we rest for a bit, knowing that what matters is now happening somewhere else.
–Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams
The Body of Christ Borne to the Tomb, William Blake c.1799 pic.twitter.com/lyBEQ5crks
— Solas (@solas_na_greine) April 19, 2025
Holy Saturday is a neglected day in parish life. Few people attend the Services. Popular piety usually reduces Holy Week to one day Holy Friday. This day is quickly replaced by another Easter Sunday. Christ is dead and then suddenly alive. Great sorrow is suddenly replaced by great joy. In such a scheme Holy Saturday is lost.
In the understanding of the Church, sorrow is not replaced by joy; it is transformed into joy. This distinction indicates that it is precisely within death the Christ continues to effect triumph.
–Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983)
Art:
— Kalina Boulter (@KalinaBoulter) April 3, 2021
The Dead Christ
By
Philippe de Champaigne (1602–1674)
Louvre Museum   #Triduum #HolySaturday #Jesus❤️#HolyWeek2021 #3April #3Apr2021#ReligiousArt #CatholicArt #Christian #Catholic #KalinaB pic.twitter.com/57872srXhV
HOW life and death in Thee
Agree !
Thou hadst a virgin womb
And tomb.
A Joseph did betroth
Them both.
–Richard Crashaw (1613-1649)
Entombment, 1170s, Winchester Cathedral.
— Rembrandt's R👀m 🖌 (maaiked.bsky.social) (@RembrandtsRoom) July 8, 2024
Actually older than Pietro Lorenzetti's Entombment in Assisi – a humbling thought! pic.twitter.com/khPGSMNSGU
I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been, if you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you, you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.
–C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Holy Saturday is the strangest day in the Christian year.
— Fr Joseph Hudson (@acloudofsaints) April 19, 2025
Christ is dead.
The altar is bare.
There is no Mass.
No song.
No light.
We wait by the sealed tomb.
🧵 What does it mean to wait in this silence? pic.twitter.com/kY5zKG95EN
O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
There's something eery about the Cathedral with no main lights. #HolySaturday pic.twitter.com/O5IvoSWP5L
— OurCofE (@OurCofE) March 26, 2016
So then, there remains a sabbath rest for the people of God; for whoever enters God’s rest also ceases from his labors as God did from his.
–Hebrews 4:10-11
Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), The Corpse of Christ, c. 1582
— Marzena (@Marzena99557145) March 29, 2024
oil on canvas
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart pic.twitter.com/lzREHchK5B