Risen Easter Quotes

Easter is a time when God turned the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life.

Mary Magdalene With wandering eyes and aimless zeal, She hither, thither, goes; Her speech, her motions, all reveal A mind without repose. She climbs the hills, she haunts the sea, By madness tortured, driven; One hour's forgetfulness would be A gift from very heaven! She slumbers into new distress; The night is worse than day: Exulting in her helplessness; Hell's dogs yet louder bay. The demons blast her to and fro; She has not quiet place, Enough a woman still, to know A haunting dim disgrace. A human touch! a pang of death! And in a low delight Thou liest, waiting for new breath, For morning out of night. Thou risest up: the earth is fair, The wind is cool; thou art free! Is it a dream of hell's despair Dissolves in ecstasy? That man did touch thee! Eyes divine Make sunrise in thy soul; Thou seest love in order shine:- His health hath made thee whole! Thou, sharing in the awful doom, Didst help thy Lord to die; Then, weeping o'er his empty tomb, Didst hear him Mary cry. He stands in haste; he cannot stop; Home to his God he fares: 'Go tell my brothers I go up To my Father, mine and theirs.' Run, Mary! lift thy heavenly voice; Cry, cry, and heed not how; Make all the new-risen world rejoice- Its first apostle thou! What if old tales of thee have lied, Or truth have told, thou art All-safe with Him, whate'er betide Dwell'st with Him in God's heart!

Arise! Arise! Arise and shine! May Christ message of eternal life fill your heart with everlasting love, hope, happiness and new dreams.

If a grave is empty, is it a grave? I wonder how Jesus would answer that.

Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us joyfully to affirm: "Death is no more!" Oh, death is still there, to be sure and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a "passover," a "Pascha"—into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory. "Trampling down death by death," He made us partakes of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: "Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave!

That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in this kingdom that Jesus ever delivered. And yet too many Easter services begin with a man standing before a congregation shouting, "He is risen!" to a chorused response of "He is risen indeed!" Were we to honor the symbolic details of the text, that distinction would always belong to a woman.

What kind of life would we have if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead?

We love Jesus as a baby on Christmas, and Jesus risen from the grave on Easter, but somehow we miss Jesus the man, the teacher, the sage, the rebel, the subversive King, the local hero, the neighborhood friend.

People referred to the symbolism of the empty Cross more than once on its journey. It would seem obviously to point to our faith in Jesus’ resurrection. It’s not quite so simple though. The Cross is bare, but in and of itself the empty Cross does not point directly to the Resurrection. It says only that the body of Jesus was removed from the Cross. If a crucifix is a symbol of Good Friday, then it is the image of the empty tomb that speaks more directly of Easter and resurrection. The empty Cross is a symbol of Holy Saturday. It’s an indicator of the reality of Jesus’ death, of His sharing in our mortal coil. At the same time, the empty Cross is an implicit sign of impending resurrection, and it tells us that the Cross is not only a symbol of hatred, violence and inhumanity: it says that the Cross is about something more. The empty Cross also tells us not to jump too quickly to resurrection, as if the Resurrection were a trump card that somehow absolves us from suffering. The Resurrection is not a divine ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card that immunises people from pain, suffering or death. To jump too quickly to the Resurrection runs the risk of trivialising people’s pain and seemingly mapping out a way through suffering that reduces the reality of having to live in pain and endure it at times. For people grieving, introducing the message of the Resurrection too quickly cheapens or nullifies their sense of loss. The empty Cross reminds us that we cannot avoid suffering and death. At the same time, the empty Cross tells us that, because of Jesus’ death, the meaning of pain, suffering and our own death has changed, that these are not all-crushing or definitive. The empty Cross says that the way through to resurrection must always break in from without as something new, that it cannot be taken hold of in advance of suffering or seized as a panacea to pain. In other words, the empty Cross is a sign of hope. It tells us that the new life of God surprises us, comes at a moment we cannot expect, and reminds us that experiences of pain, grief and dying are suffused with the presence of Christ, the One Who was crucified and is now risen.

One Easter, when she heard the priest say He is risen, she found herself standing up from the pew and walking out the cathedral door. She left the order, dyed her hair pink, and hiked the Appalachian Trail. It was somewhere on the Presidential Range that Jesus appeared to her in a vision, and told her there were many souls to feed.

Dr. J. P. Moreland pointed out that the disciples were in a unique position to know whether the resurrection actually happened, and they were willing to go to their deaths proclaiming it was true. Moreland’s logic was persuasive. “Obviously,” he said, “people will die for their religious convictions if they sincerely believe they are true.” Religious fanatics have done that throughout history. While they may strongly believe in the tenets of their religion, however, they don’t know for a fact whether their faith is based on the truth. They’re simply not in a position where they can know for sure. They can only believe. In stark contrast, the disciples were in the unique position to know for a fact whether Jesus had returned from the dead. They said they saw him, touched him, and ate with him. And knowing the truth of what they actually experienced, they were willing to die for him. Had they known this was a lie, they would never have been willing to sacrifice their lives. Nobody willingly dies for something that they know is false. They proclaimed the resurrection to their deaths for one reason alone: they knew it was true, because they had personally encountered and experienced the risen Jesus.33 So, ironically, it’s the evidence for Easter that provided the decisive confirmation for me that the Christmas story is true: that the freshly born baby in the manger was the unique Son of God, sent on a mission to be the savior of the world. GOD’S GREATEST GIFT After spending nearly two years investigating the identity

The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ, shaped according to his messianic vocation to the cross, with arms outstretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world an to the love of God. Paul, we should note carefully, is quite clear about one thing: as we embrace this vocation, the prayer is likely to be inarticulate. It does not have to be a thought-out analysis of the problem and the solution. It is likely to be simply a groan, a groan in which the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the crucified and risen Christ, groans within us, so that the achievement of the cross might be implemented afresh at that place of pain...

The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquility and a clean taste in your soul. It is the taste of heaven, but not the heaven of some wild exaltation. The Easter vision is not riot and drunkenness of spirit, but a discovery of order above all order—a discovery of God and of all things in Him. This is a wine without intoxication, a joy that has no poison in it. It is life without death. Tasting it for a moment, we are briefly able to see and love all things according to their truth, to possess them in their substance hidden in God, beyond all sense. For desire clings to the vesture and accident of things, but charity possesses them in the simple depths of God. If Mass could only be, every morning, what it is on Easter morning! If the prayers could always be so clear, if the Risen Christ would always shine in my heart and all around me and before me in His Easter simplicity! For His simplicity is our feast. This is the unleavened bread which is manna and the bread of heaven, this Easter cleanness, this freedom, this sincerity. Give us always this bread of heaven. Slake us always with this water that we might not thirst forever! This is the life that pours down into us from the Risen Christ, this is the breath of his Spirit, and this is the love that quickens His Mystical Body.

Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf.

…The children of God, being the children of the resurrection.… For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live unto him. —Luke 20:36, 38 (KJV) EASTER: CELEBRATE I’d like to think that, unlike Peter, I wouldn't have denied Jesus three times, but my faith is tepid, sketchy, uncertain. I wish it were different. I wish, like my mother, I could hold on to my faith, no matter what. Weird thing is, I can accept the bizarre claim that an itinerant preacher in first-century Palestine was crucified like a common criminal, was dead and buried…but not buried for long. I can buy that—which, you gotta admit, is a pretty large story to swallow. And I can believe His message is a living one—not because I have that much faith but because it makes sense to me: We're here to help others so that “whenever you cared for one of the least of these, you did it for me.” Yessir. Roger. Understood. But that Someone could forgive my trespasses, my myriad short- comings, my irrational fuming, my weak-willed nature so that I can help others by forgiving them…no. No can do. My ego won’t allow it. This Easter, I think I’ve figured out at least one gift inherent in the Jesus story: It’s about letting go of ego, that ridiculous remnant from our hominid past, that lying leftover that says we’re in control, we need neither the world nor each other, thank you very much, that we don’t require (and therefore don’t deserve) forgiveness…my God. Just let it go. Let. It. Go. Bury the past; then roll away the stone and celebrate what’s risen in its place. Lord, this Easter, help rid me of my selfish ego. Granted, ego is easy and forgiveness is difficult…but today, of all days, I’m willing to try the hard way. —Mark Collins Digging Deeper: Mt 28:8–10; Lk 24:1–12; Jn 11:25–26

The Risen Presence always appears once your False Self stops attaching, defending, denying, and blaming. As in Matthew's account (28:9), he just walks up and says, “Hi!” Paul actually says in several places that “our former selves have been crucified” already (Romans 6:6). The False Self is fragile and temporary and is thus already “over and out.” Its death knell has already rung. It is just a matter of time until you touch the true, and the false falls away like clumsy scaffolding. This is probably why some saints were pictured holding or looking at a human skull. It was not meant to be morbid but a way of picturing this shock of realization and the utter change of consciousness that follows. Once you experience the Real, the unreal is increasingly a mere diversion or entertainment, not substantial reality. Once you encounter the Risen Presence, you can rather easily let go of the past and the petty. The Risen Christ could be called the “future shock” of God. The Gospel accounts make note that the Resurrection occurs “very early on the first day of the week” (John 20:1), clearly evoking a new creation, a fresh start, a new first (Genesis 1:3–5), but now an eternal day of Easter light. And, of course, scientists now tell us that all light in the universe is electromagnetically connected and that all natural light is in fact one. The Risen Christ is the personification of this one Light that includes all light, which is why he is always described as “dazzling white” or “like lightning” (Matthew 28:3).

When we proclaim at Easter that Jesus is risen from the dead, our faith tells us and the world that now all things are possible in him. This proclamation is not a subjective wish but an objective statement: death itself has been conquered.

Do we value intellectual confusion because we are afraid of clarity? On the other hand, do we reach for a false clarity by ignoring facts we don’t like? Are we convinced, in hearing again that Jesus has risen from the dead, that we too are called to proclaim who Christ is? Finally, are we willing to follow Christ in perseverance, even when everything is not perfectly clear? That is Easter faith, when the joy of our surrender to the risen Christ makes us bold in proclaiming him while always conscious of our own fragility.

We cannot use a supposedly objective historical epistemology as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen.

Here we are able to reach a major conclusion of this study. None of these major figures who constituted the inner circle of Jesus would have become or remained followers of Jesus after the crucifixion if there was no resurrection and no resurrection appearances of Jesus. The church, in the persons of its earliest major leaders, was constituted by the event of the resurrection, coupled with the Pentecost event! The stories of these figures, especially their post-Easter stories, are the validation of this fact. There would be no church without the risen and appearing Jesus.

I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Staunching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides; With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides. Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne! Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled. Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our Kíng back, Oh, upon énglish sóuls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts' chivalry's throng's Lord.

Coming out of that Easter service, I felt hopeful and very happy. My heart felt at peace. It was inexplicable. What Vanya was felt about faith was the same thing I felt on that day. Whatever he was trying to describe, I could sense that finally. Out of my newfound faith, I had hope for what the future lay ahead. All the negative memories of my life went away, like mud washed down the river. I only felt positive about the future, looking forward to the days to come. It was the bright early morning of a new sunny day. Outside, the sky was beautiful. “Christ is Risen!” I confessed out loud, finally. “Christ is Risen, Indeed,” echoed a silent voice within. Epilogue: I like to think that the few lines above are the epilogue of the book to this days Faith as what makes “my heart go on” no matter the depressive moments that I now can feel, Faith gives me the courage to endure all kind of difficulties. One should always remember this small poem of mine. “God is for everybody” God is for everybody For the Russian For the French For all the others Even if they don’t wanted it. God is for everybody Not, only, for the Muslims Not, only, for the Christians Not, only, for the Buddhists Not — Even — only, for the Jews Not for one particular religion God is for everybody Especially for the one that do not want it.

The preaching of Peter and Paul and all the witnesses of the risen Jesus says that two basic things are demanded of us. First: we must acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and represents; we must learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where the innocent are scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling, to a greater or lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. We must learn to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut ourselves loose from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and prejudice that traps the human family in conflict and misery. And second: we must learn to trust that love and justice are not defeated by our failure; that God has provided from his own strength and resourcefulness a way to freedom, once we have become able to recognize in the face of the suffering Jesus his own divine promise of mercy and life. The resurrection is the manifesting to the world of the triumph of a love that uses no coercion or manipulation but is simply itself – an indestructible love. The challenge of Easter is to believe that God is not defeated by the most extreme rejection imaginable. Good news? Emphatically yes. But not easy news. To recognize God in the crucified Jesus alters so much: it alters what we think about God, and it alters where we look for God in the human world. It suggests uncomfortably that God is likeliest to be found among those we have, like the religious and political establishment of Jesus’ day, dismissed or shut out; it suggests that our models of success and failure have to be turned upside down; it suggests that our eternal future is bound up with whether we are able to turn to those we have hurt and seek forgiveness. And so much else. Put like that, it is not surprising that the gospel and the cross could provoke fear and an unwillingness to allow such thoughts to become part of the current of public discussion. And perhaps it is not surprising either that we who call ourselves Christians may secretly be happier treating the cross just as a ‘religious symbol’ than letting ourselves be shaken and unmade and remade by it.

He has risen. May God resurrect everything that died in you, that is important into your life. May he resurrect your hope, dreams, life, marriage, relationship, love, faith, courage, strength, job, career, skill and talent, passion, humanity and peace. May he rise them, as he is also risen. Luke 24:6-7

The third Preface for Easter tells us that Jesus is ‘still our priest, our advocate who always pleads our cause. Christ is the victim who dies no more, the Lamb once slain who lives forever.’ The original Latin is more paradoxical: Jesus is ‘agnus qui vivit semper occisus’; the lamb who lives forever slain.’ If the risen Lord did not still have his wounds, then he would not have much to do with us now. The resurrection might promise us some future healing and eternal life, but it would leave us now alone in our present hurting. But because of Easter Day we already share in the victory. He still shares our wounds and we share his victory of death. We too are now wounded and healed. When Brian Pierce OP first went to Peruvian Andes, he was surprised by the ubiquitous images of the crucified Christ, covered with blood. It seemed as if the faith of these indigenous people stopped prior to the resurrection and they were left only with images of defeat. But he learned that he was wrong. These crosses are signs of how the risen Christ is now sharing their crucifixion. We can have courage and risk getting hurt. Charles Peguy, the French writer, told the story of a man who died and went to heaven. When he met the recording angel he was asked, ‘Show me your wounds.’ And he replied, ‘Wounds? I have not got any.’ And the angel said, ‘Did you never think that anything was worth fighting for?

And this hope is not wishful thinking but is grounded in history, the sign of which is the risen Christ.

Remember that the cross was Rome’s way of asserting its authority. Roman authorities declared that if you run afoul of our system, we will torture you to death in the most excruciating (ex cruce, from the cross) way possible and then we will leave your body to waste away and to be devoured by the beasts of the field. The threat of violence is how tyrants up and down the centuries have always asserted their authority. Might makes right. The crucified Jesus appeared to anyone who was witnessing the awful events on Calvary to be one more affirmation of this principle: Caesar always wins in the end. But when Jesus was raised from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians knew that Caesar’s days were numbered. Jesus had taken the worst that the world could throw at him and he returned, alive and triumphant. They knew that the Lord of the world was no longer Caesar, but rather someone whom Caesar had killed but whom God had raised from death. This is why the risen Christ has been the inspiration for resistance movements up and down the centuries. In our own time, we saw how deftly John Paul II wielded the power of the cross in communist Poland. Though he had no nuclear weapons or tanks or mighty armies, John Paul had the power of the Resurrection, and that proved strong enough to bring down one of the most imposing empires in the history of the world. Once again, the faculty lounge interpretation of the Resurrection as a subjective event or a mere symbol is exactly what the tyrants of the world want, for it poses no real threat to them.

In addition, according to Dupuis's original multi-volume work in French (not included in the English translation), Mithra was "put to death by crucifixion, and rose again on the 25th of March." Concerning the Persian crucifixion, Robertson states, "...the Persian Sun God Mithra is imaged in the Zendavesta 'with arms stretched out towards immortality."240 Mithra's suffering was considered an act of salvation, and his resurrection was celebrated with his priests shouting, "He is risen," as they do to this day in Eastern Orthodox Christianity at Easter.

sad-faced mourners, who each day are wending Through churchyard paths of cypress and of yew, Leave for today the low graves you are tending, And lift your eyes to God’s eternal blue! It is no time for bitterness or sadness; Choose Easter lilies, not pale asphodels; Let your souls thrill to the caress of gladness, And answer the sweet chime of Easter bells. If Christ were still within the grave’s low prison, A captive of the Enemy we dread; If from that rotting cell He had not risen, Who then could dry the gloomy tears you shed? If Christ were dead there would be need to sorrow, But He has risen and vanquished death today; Hush, then your sighs, if only till tomorrow, At Easter give your grief a holiday. May Riley Smith

Though my approach throughout the book will be positive and expository, it is worth noting from the outset that I intend to challenge this dominant paradigm in each of its main constituent parts. In general terms, this view holds the following: (1) that the Jewish context provides only a fuzzy setting, in which ‘resurrection’ could mean a variety of different things; (2) that the earliest Christian writer, Paul, did not believe in bodily resurrection, but held a ‘more spiritual’ view; (3) that the earliest Christians believed, not in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, but in his exaltation/ascension/glorification, in his ‘going to heaven’ in some kind of special capacity, and that they came to use ‘resurrection’ language initially to denote that belief and only subsequently to speak of an empty tomb or of ‘seeing’ the risen Jesus; (4) that the resurrection stories in the gospels are late inventions designed to bolster up this second-stage belief; (5) that such ‘seeings’ of Jesus as may have taken place are best understood in terms of Paul’s conversion experience, which itself is to be explained as a ‘religious’ experience, internal to the subject rather than involving the seeing of any external reality, and that the early Christians underwent some kind of fantasy or hallucination; (6) that whatever happened to Jesus’ body (opinions differ as to whether it was even buried in the first place), it was not ‘resuscitated’, and was certainly not ‘raised from the dead’ in the sense that the gospel stories, read at face value, seem to require.11 Of course, different elements in this package are stressed differently by different scholars; but the picture will be familiar to anyone who has even dabbled in the subject, or who has listened to a few mainstream Easter sermons, or indeed funeral sermons, in recent decades.

Every Catholic Church has the stations depicted, the fourteen that are currently depicted are not necessarily what were listed when the devotion was first being developed. It grew out of a practice to all Catholic.

Every Catholic Church has the stations depicted, the fourteen that are currently depicted are not necessarily what were listed when the devotion was first being developed. It grew out of a practice to all Catholic.

Stations of the Cross are usually observed during lent, especially of Lenten Fridays and most importantly on Good Friday. This is the one popular devotion for Roman Catholics. The purpose of this devotion is to focus on the Passion of the Christ.

Tear up these joyful bluish skies, For a glimpse of this majesty, I thirst! Cherubs in glittering clouds of white, Dazzling royalty in gold and mantle of red...

Spend every moment in "Hope" and "Love" for God for he has risen and brought us courage.

Christ is risen from the dead. Everything follows from this, as the Church's celebration of Easter makes clear. At Easter, the Church goes back to her origins in order to experience the divine truth and life that is what she is really about. The Last Supper, the death of Jesus on the cross and his resurrection are the events, both human and divine, that brought the Church into being and that energize her today. They are the foundations of her identity, the source of the grace that comes through her and the guarantee of her authority to speak to the world and to guide and shape the lives of her members. Had Christ not risen, there would have been neither faith nor Church.

The risen Christ goes beyond our familiar pattern of life and, even more amazing, he invites us to follow him into this new life. Yet our hope for salvation is not an escape from the material universe and from our bodies; on the contrary, our material bodies are to be redeemed and will be as at home in eternal life as our spiritual souls. That is the promise of Easter for us.