Risen From The Dead Quotes

Under the table, Greebo sat and washed himself. Occasionally he burped. Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but never managed it from the cat.

Osiris became the type and symbol of resurrection among the Egyptians of all periods, because he was a god who had been originally a mortal and had risen from the dead.

The dwarf has risen from the dead, Tyrion thought. And look, he's uglier than ever, run tell your friends.

And now, I, Moroni would speaksomewhatconcerning these things; I would show unto the world that faith is things which are hoped for and not seen; wherefore, dispute not because ye seenot, for ye recieve no witness until after the trial of your faith. For it was by Faith that Christ showed himself unto our fathers after he had risen from the dead; and he showed not himself unto them until after they had fiath in him; wherefore, it must needs be that some had faith in hime, for he showed himself not unto the world.

It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans? The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.

The alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life everywhere. And the endlessly long winter had at last turned to spring. From life to death and back again to life. It was indeed the greatest magic in the world.

Who,” said the man, his accent thick and British, “are you?” “The Great Pumpkin,” I responded. “I’ve risen from the pumpkin patch a bit early because Butters is just that nifty. And you are?

If Jesus had not risen from the dead, no right-minded person would have glorified anything so hideous and repulsive as a cross stained with the blood of Jesus . . .An unopened grave would never have opened heaven.

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist,” Lesslie Newbigin once said. “Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

Charles Spurgeon had said, “Christianity rests upon the fact that Christ is risen from the dead, His sovereignty depends upon His resurrection.

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, "What can you write that hasn't been written already?" He's absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with right now is that Lagerfeld's powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn't....seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How's that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

Father, I cannot add one minute to my life through worry. In fact, I can take a lot away from my life through trying to carry burdens you alone can carry. Turn my “What ifs?” into “Now thats”—now that Jesus has risen from the dead, everything has changed.

Also another time she had wakened in dead of night, thinking that something touched her, and when she looked she saw that a black scaly tail, tufted with flame at the end, like a fiend's, had switched across her and lay there burning the covers. And when she turned shrieking, to see what manner of thing lay beside her in the bed, she was at first reassured by sight of her husband's face, then saw, to her horror, that horns had risen, black and pointed, from his forehead. After that she screamed again and remembered nothing until Joseph was shaking her awake, and there were neither horns nor tail to be seen. Nor were the bedclothes scorched.

He let them see the cuff on his wrist, as he let them see him. He knew by now the ever-present whisper: Damianos, risen from the dead. He watched the army fall silent before him. He let the Prince he had been drop away, let himself feel the new role, the new self settle about him. ‘Men

How great indeed is our debt to [Joseph Smith]. His life began in Vermont and ended in Illinois, and marvelous were the things that happened between that simple beginning and that tragic ending. It was he who brought us a true knowledge of God the Eternal Father and His Risen Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. During the short time of his great vision he learned more concerning the nature of Deity than all of those who through centuries had argued that matter in learned councils and scholarly forums. He brought us this marvelous book, the Book of Mormon, as another witness for the living reality of the Son of God. To him, from those who held it anciently, came the priesthood, the power, the gift, the authority, the keys to speak and act in the name of God. He gave us the organization of the Church and its great and sacred mission. Through him were restored the keys of the holy temples, that men and women might enter into eternal covenants with God, and that the great work for the dead might be accomplished. . . . "He was the instrument in the hands of the Almighty.

All men like him ever see are aprons. I could be Mada Vittora risen from the dead, but if I had a mop in my hand he's still just ask for tea.

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

The newly created Darth Vader flexes his Force-muscle as the Emperor's enforcer to maintain order and obedience in a galaxy reeling from civil war and the destruction of the Jedi Order. To the galaxy at large, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker - the Chosen One - died on Coruscant during the siege of the Jedi Temple. And, to some extent, the was true - Anakin was dead. But from the site of Anakin Skywalker's last stand - on the molten surface of the planet Mustafa, where he sought to destroy his friend and former master, Obi-Wan Kanobi - a fearsome spectre in black has risen. Once the most powerful Knight ever known to the Jedi order he is not a disciple of the dark side, a lord of the dreaded Sith, and the avenging right hand of the galaxy's ruthless new Emperor. Seduced, deranged and destroyed by the machinations of the Dark Lord Sidious, Anakin Skywalker is dead ... and Darth Vader lives ...

He let them see the cuff on his wrist, as he let them see him. He knew by now the ever-present whisper: Damianos, risen from the dead. He watched the army fall silent before him. He

I know the power names hold better than anyone. Yesterday, I was a girl without an identity, someone risen from the ashes of a dead forest. A girl whose only memories were the movements her body made during a slaughter. Now I have a name. And with that comes the expectation that I’m unchanged,

The ancient world knew as well as we do the law of nature that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of the sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead.

In the end, we are not Catholics because our leaders are flawless, but because we find the claims of Catholicism both compelling and beautiful. We are Catholics because the Church speaks of the Trinitarian God whose very nature is love; of Jesus the Lord, crucified and risen from the dead; of the Holy Spirit, who inspires the followers of Christ up and down the ages; of the sacraments, which convey the Christ-life to us; and of the saints, who are our friends in the spiritual order. This is the treasure; this is why we stay.

Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

Standing on your own feet, naturally, is as tiresome and dangerous as standing your ground; and when the wild dogs begin to circle grinning round you with their dripping tongues hanging out and you know that with mock servility they like to go for your toes first, why, then, you should stand on someone else’s feet, or head if necessary. It is a point of faith for me never to be Hitler; he stood his ground in his own two shoes in his own little hole almost to the end, the fool. But I may disguise myself as any other animate or inanimate object in what follows. I can be eight lame women with falsies, eight cracked chamber pots, or -- let’s get right to the point -- a gladiator who is actually constructed of old clothes, brooms, and a paper plate with a face daubed on in finger-paints, not to mention two vagrants inside each shirt-sleeve and pant-leg, moving Goliath’s limbs at my say-so; but as long as you believe in the gladiator, you are whipped, and the Museum people will set out on your track, and then once they catch you, don’t think I won’t come study your exhibit until I can convince your own sweetheart that I am you come back from the dead. For I am Big George, the eternal winner.

Out of hope for eternal life, love for this vulnerable and mortal life is born afresh. This love does not give anything up. If we had to surrender hope for as much as one single creature, for us Christ would not have risen. The love founded on hope is the strongest medicine against the spreading sickness of resignation. The modern cynicism which is prepared to accept the death of so many created things is an ally of death. But we Christians are what Christoph Blumhardt called `protest-people against death'. That is why out of the deadly depths we cry out for God's Spirit. That is why we cry out for the Spirit who sustains the whole creation, and wait for the Spirit of the new creation of all things. Our cry from the depths is a sign of life - a sign of divine life.

That was the part of the epic story about coming back from the dead, being restored to life. “He is risen,” it says. He is risen.

The ‘Resurrection’ to which they bore witness was, in fact, not the action of rising from the dead but the state of having risen;

Like gamblers, baseball fans and television networks, fishermen are enamored of statistics. The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers the disciples of Jesus couldn't resist backing their yarns with arithmetic: when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not "a boatload" of fish, nor "about a hundred and a half," nor "over a gross," but precisely "a hundred and fifty three." This is, it seems to me, one of the most remarkable statistics ever computed. Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary. And yet we learn that in the net there were "great fishes" numbering precisely "a hundred and fifty three." How was this digit discovered? Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... " all the way up to a hundred and fifty three, while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of all their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored, till the heap of fish was quantified. Such is the fisherman's compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics! ....Concerning those disciples huddled over the pile of fish, another possibility occurs to me: perhaps they paid the fish no heed. Perhaps they stood in a circle adoring their Lord while He, the All-Curious Son of His All-Knowing Dad, counted them all Himself!

Legend tells us that the High King of Tara, who ruled supreme over all the Kings of Ireland, looked out from his castle one day during the festival of Eostre and saw a fire blazing away on a far hillside. Furious with this obvious disregard for the law, for which the penalty was death, he sent out soldiers to arrest the guilty party. When the soldiers arrived at the hillside they found St Patrick, the patron Saint of Ireland, piling wood onto his fire and immediately seized him. Standing before the King he was asked why he disobeyed the law, and he explained that his fire was a sign that Christ had risen from the dead and was the light of the world. The King so admired Patrick’s courage that he forgave him and became a convert to Christianity!

Why do we need to be pardoned? What are we to be pardoned for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting humbly the historic burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms after we found all other paths closed? For not heeding the Chiapas penal code, one of the most absurd and repressive in history? For showing the rest of the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists even among the world’s poorest peoples? For having made careful preparations before we began our uprising? For bringing guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For being Mexicans? For being mainly indigenous? For calling on the Mexican people to fight by whatever means possible for what belongs to them? For fighting for liberty, democracy and justice? For not following the example of previous guerrilla armies? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves out? Who should we ask for pardon, and who can grant it? Those who for many years glutted themselves at a table of plenty while we sat with death so often, we finally stopped fearing it? Those who filled our pockets and our souls with empty promises and words? Or should we ask pardon from the dead, our dead, who died “natural” deaths of “natural causes” like measles, whooping cough, break-bone fever, cholera, typhus, mononucleosis, tetanus, pneumonia, malaria and other lovely gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, so very dead, so democratically dead from sorrow because no one did anything, because the dead, our dead, went just like that, with no one keeping count with no one saying, “Enough!” which would at least have granted some meaning to their deaths, a meaning no one ever sought for them, the dead of all times, who are now dying once again, but now in order to live? Should we ask pardon from those who deny us the right and capacity to govern ourselves? From those who don’t respect our customs and our culture and who ask us for identification papers and obedience to a law whose existence and moral basis we don’t accept? From those who oppress us, torture us, assassinate us, disappear us from the grave “crime” of wanting a piece of land, not too big and not too small, but just a simple piece of land on which we can grow something to fill our stomachs? Who should ask for pardon, and who can grant it?

Rather, the kingdom already exists in the King himself, and when he ascends, the whole world goes with him (John 12:32). It is not that someday Jesus will do this, that, and the other thing, and then the Kingdom will come. It is not, for example, that at some future date the dead will rise or that in some distant consummation we will reign with him. Rather, it is that we have already been buried with him in baptism, and that we are already risen with him through faith in the operation of God who raised him from the dead, and that we are now - in this and every moment - enthroned together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. But

Another group of gnostics, called Sethians because they identified themselves as sons of Seth, the third child of Adam and Eve, say that the disciples, deluded by “a very great error,” imagined that Christ had risen from the dead in bodily form. But the risen Christ appeared to “a few of these disciples, who he recognized were capable of understanding such great mysteries,”86 and taught them to understand his resurrection in spiritual, not physical, terms.

I generally rested during the day and travelled only when I was secured by night from the view of man. One morning, however, finding that my path lay through a deep wood, I ventured to continue my journey after the sun had risen; the day, which was one of the first of spring, cheered even me by the loveliness of its sunshine and the balminess of the air. I felt emotions of gentleness and pleasure, that had long appeared dead, revive within me. Half surprised by the novelty of these sensations, I allowed myself to be borne away by them, and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy. Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with thankfulness towards the blessed sun, which bestowed such joy upon me.

Christianity did not begin with a group of people trying to remember and follow Jesus' teaching even though he was dead. It began with the belief that God had vindicated Jesus as the Messiah by raising him from the dead. This is why one would be completely mistaken to think that Jesus was a good teacher whose followers eventually developed a myth about his being the Son of God. There would be no Christian movement today if his original followers had not been convinced that he had really risen from the dead.

The hypothesis that the apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus's death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws – this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.' He laughed. 'Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly – how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it.

There is no arguing with people who say that, since there is nothing but Nature, no process can be other than natural. There is no sign, even from heaven, that could break down the intellectual prejudice of such people. If they saw Jesus Christ Himself in glory, they could always say that "at present science cannot account for the phenomenon of a luminous body apparently seated upon a throne, but no doubt it will do so in the course of time." If they saw a dead and corrupting man rise from the grave, they could always argue that he could not have been dead and corrupting, or he could not have risen from the grave. Nothing but the Last Judgment could convince such persons. Even when the trumpet sounds, I believe that some of them, when they have recovered from their first astonishment, will make remarks about aural phenomena.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell’s chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I’m not dead either.

They glowed in the darkness, all of them: pale shining wisps with rings of light where their eyes belonged, as if they were the dead—ghosts risen from their graves—not Gilbert Cline. Harper felt their grief as a slow current of cold water, and herself as a leaf revolving upon it. As

It is a year and eight months since I last looked at these notes of mine. I do so now only because, being overwhelmed with depression, I wish to distract my mind by reading them through at random. I left them off at the point where I was just going to Homburg. My God, with what a light heart (comparatively speaking) did I write the concluding lines!—though it may be not so much with a light heart, as with a measure of self-confidence and unquenchable hope. At that time had I any doubts of myself? Yet behold me now. Scarcely a year and a half have passed, yet I am in a worse position than the meanest beggar. But what is a beggar? A fig for beggary! I have ruined myself—that is all. Nor is there anything with which I can compare myself; there is no moral which it would be of any use for you to read to me. At the present moment nothing could well be more incongruous than a moral. Oh, you self-satisfied persons who, in your unctuous pride, are forever ready to mouth your maxims—if only you knew how fully I myself comprehend the sordidness of my present state, you would not trouble to wag your tongues at me! What could you say to me that I do not already know? Well, wherein lies my difficulty? It lies in the fact that by a single turn of a roulette wheel everything for me, has become changed. Yet, had things befallen otherwise, these moralists would have been among the first (yes, I feel persuaded of it) to approach me with friendly jests and congratulations. Yes, they would never have turned from me as they are doing now! A fig for all of them! What am I? I am zero—nothing. What shall I be tomorrow? I may be risen from the dead, and have begun life anew. For still, I may discover the man in myself, if only my manhood has not become utterly shattered.

Like the Church the individual Christian will not be able to escape the deep ambiguities of this-wordly existence whether in its cultural, social, political or other aspects, and he too will inevitably be a mixture of good and evil, with a compromised life, so that he can only live eschatologically in the judgment and mercy of God, putting off the old man and putting on Christ anew each day, always aware that even when he has done all that it is his duty to do he remains an unprofitable servant, but summoned to look away from himself to Christ, remembering that he is dead through the cross of Christ but alive and risen in Him. His true being is hid with Christ in God. The whole focus of his vision and the whole perspective of his life in Christ’s name will be directed to the unveiling of that reality of his new being at the parousia, but meantime he lives day by day out of the Word and Sacraments. As one baptized into Christ he is told by God’s Word that his sins are already forgiven and forgotten by God, that he has been justified once for all, and that he does not belong to himself but to Christ who loved him and gave Himself for him. As one summoned to the Holy Table he is commanded by the Word of God to live only in such a way that he feeds upon Christ, not in such a way that he feeds upon his own activities or lives out of his own capital of alleged spirituality. He lives from week to week, by drawing his life and strength from the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, nourished by the body and blood of Christ, and in the strength of that communion he must live and work until Christ comes again. As often as he partakes of the Eucharist he partakes of the self-consecration of Jesus Christ who sanctified Himself for our sakes that we might be sanctified in reality and be presented to the Father as those whom He has redeemed and perfected (or consecrated) together with Himself in one. Here He is called to lift up his heart to the ascended Lord, and to look forward to the day when the full reality of his new being in Christ will be unveiled, making Scripture and Sacrament no longer necessary.

To fill the days up of his dateless year Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere? For first of all the sphery signs whereby Love severs light from darkness, and most high, In the white front of January there glows The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose: And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness, A storm-star that the seafarers of love Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of, Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp; The star that Marlowe sang into our skies With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes; And in clear March across the rough blue sea The signal sapphire of Alcyone Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year; And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light When air is quick with song and rain and flame, My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower, My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower; Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire; Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone, A star south-risen that first to music shone, The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears Light northward to the month whose forehead wears Her name for flower upon it, and his trees Mix their deep English song with Veronese; And like an awful sovereign chrysolite Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night, The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars, A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars, The light of Cleopatra fills and burns The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns; And fixed and shining as the sister-shed Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead, The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere, That through September sees the saddening year As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name Francesca's; and the star that watches flame The embers of the harvest overgone Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon, Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras, The star that made men mad, Angelica's; And latest named and lordliest, with a sound Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round, Last love-light and last love-song of the year's, Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.

The other bloodcoats finally noticed the undead livestock situation. Curly mustache slashed at the animal’s now-fully-risen corpse, but Horse didn’t mind, being already dead. If anything, he seemed curious, nuzzling at his gore-caked shoulder with a bloody nose, neck hanging open like a second mouth. The long lashes around his opaque eyes fluttered, dislodging a fly that had landed there. “Sorry, Horse,” Lore mumbled, then heaved up her coffee on the cobblestones. When she looked up, Curly Mustache was staring at her, at all the ways channeling Mortem had made her monstrous, his face gone nearly as pale as her own. “Heresy,” he said, voice hoarse from shouting. “Evil!” “Melodrama.

There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus' resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus' death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead. This conclusion has been reached by data that suggest that (1) the disciples themselves claimed that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, and (2) subsequent to Jesus' death by crucifixion, his disciples were radically transformed from fearful, cowering individuals who denied and abandoned him at his arrest and execution into bold proclaimers of the gospel of the risen Lord. They remained steadfast in the face of imprisonment, torture, and martyrdom. It is very clear that they sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead.

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos. Easy to see why the Romans, usually tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?

...the giving of tea parties is by no means my favorite amusement. In fact, I would prefer to be pursued across the desert by a band of savage Dervishes brandishing spears and howling for my blood. I would rather be chased up a tree by a mad dog, or face a mummy risen from its grave. I would rather be threatened by knives, pistols, poisonous snakes, and the curse of a long-dead king....

The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,” he said, “was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws—this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.” He laughed. “Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly—how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?

Dumbest thing someone says trying to be comforting, which in this case turns out of be true: 'There is no need for you to be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he is risen, as he said he would.'-Angel of the Lord, post-descending from heaven and violent earthquakes, sitting calmly on tombstone he rolled away, and scaring the crap out of Jesus' lady friends.

Others have suggested that the disciples deliberately lied, thus spreading the story that Jesus had risen from the dead in order to keep their movement going. But this becomes preposterous when we remember that the disciples were willing to die rather than to deny that Jesus rose from the dead. Some say that they just cannot believe “the story of the miracle." But the trouble is, that they must then decide what to do with the “miracle of the story." That is, they are left with the insoluble problem of how such a sober story could ever have been written. The story is either true, or else it is the product of insanity or wickedness. And, after nearly two thousand years, no one has been able to show that it comes from either insane or wicked men. No satisfactory explanation has come forth except to believe that it actually did happen.

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him? Did I speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in which the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and the slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear.

MATTHEW 28  m Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and  n the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And behold, there was a great earthquake, for  o an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 p His appearance was like lightning, and  q his clothing white as snow. 4And for fear of him the guards trembled and  r became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here, for he has risen,  s as he said. Come, see the place where he [1] lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold,  t he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” 8So they departed quickly from the tomb  u with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9And behold, Jesus  v met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and  w took hold of his feet and

Something else, something little that I thought I might share with you. Would you mind? What’s to mind? I’m just talking. On the boat, when the disciples see you standing on the shore and then they realize that it’s you and that you’ve risen from the dead? Peter’s standing on the deck in the total altogether. So why not? He’s a fisherman, he’s young, he should enjoy. But right away he can’t wait for the boat to go in, he’s so excited, so beside himself with joy that it’s you. So he grabs the nearest garment—do you remember this?—but he doesn’t even want to take the time to pull it on. He just ties it around and jumps off the boat and then starts swimming like crazy for the shore. Is that something? Whenever I think of it, I glow! It isn’t some goyischer holy picture full of reverence and stiffness and probably lies; it isn’t some image being peddled, some myth. I can’t believe it didn’t happen. It’s so human, so surprising, and so real all at once. Peter must have loved you very much.

He got into the tub and ran a little cold water. Then he lowered his thin, hairy body into the just-right warmth and stared at the interstices between the tiles. Sadness--he had experienced that emotion ten thousand times. As exhalation is to inhalation, he thought of it as the return from each thrust of happiness. Lazily soaping himself, he gave examples. When he was five and Irwin eight, their father had breezed into town with a snowstorm and come to see them where they lived with their grandparents in the small Connecticut city. Their father had been a vagabond salesman and was considered a bum by people who should know. But he had come into the closed, heated house with all the gimcrack and untouchable junk behind glass and he had smelled of cold air and had had snow in his curly black hair. He had raved about the world he lived in, while the old people, his father and mother, had clucked sadly in the shadows. And then he had wakened the boys in the night and forced them out into the yard to worship the swirling wet flakes, to dance around with their hands joined, shrieking at the snow-laden branches. Later, they had gone in to sleep with hearts slowly returning to bearable beatings. Great flowering things had opened and closed in Norman's head, and the resonance of the wild man's voice had squeezed a sweet, tart juice through his heart. But then he had wakened to a gray day with his father gone and the world walking gingerly over the somber crust of dead-looking snow. It had taken him some time to get back to his usual equanimity. He slid down in the warm, foamy water until just his face and his knobby white knees were exposed. Once he had read Wuthering Heights over a weekend and gone to school susceptible to any heroine, only to have the girl who sat in front of him, whom he had admired for some months, emit a loud fart which had murdered him in a small way and kept him from speaking a word to anyone the whole week following. He had laughed at a very funny joke about a Negro when Irwin told it at a party, and then the following day had seen some white men lightly kicking a Negro man in the pants, and temporarily he had questioned laughter altogether. He had gone to several universities with the vague exaltation of Old Man Axelrod and had found only curves and credits. He had become drunk on the idea of God and found only theology. He had risen several times on the subtle and powerful wings of lust, expectant of magnificence, achieving only discharge. A few times he had extended friendship with palpitating hope, only to find that no one quite knew what he had in mind. His solitude now was the result of his metabolism, that constant breathing in of joy and exhalation of sadness. He had come to take shallower breaths, and the two had become mercifully mixed into melancholy contentment. He wondered how pain would breach that low-level strength. "I'm a small man of definite limitations," he declared to himself, and relaxed in the admission.

The Resurrection MATTHEW 28  m Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and  n the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2And behold, there was a great earthquake, for  o an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 p His appearance was like lightning, and  q his clothing white as snow. 4And for fear of him the guards trembled and  r became like dead men. 5But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6He is not here, for he has risen,  s as he said. Come, see the place where he [1] lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold,  t he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. See, I have told you.” 8So they departed quickly from the tomb  u with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9And behold, Jesus  v met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came up and  w took hold of his feet and  x worshiped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid;  y go and tell  z my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.

How long does a building stand before it falls? How long does a contract last? How long will brothers share the inheritance before they quarrel? How long does hatred, for that matter, last? Time after time the river has risen and flooded. The insect leaves the cocoon to live but a minute. How long is the eye able to look at the sun? From the very beginning nothing at all has lasted. See how the dead and the sleeping resemble each other. Seen together, they are the image of death. The simple man and the ruler resemble each other. The face of the one will darken like that of the other.

When they had ended their prayers, the Angel of Death recovered his loquacity and his gayety and ascending the chariot again, preceded by Gil Gil, spoke as follows. 'The village you see on that mountain is Gethsemane. In it was the Garden of Olives. On the other side you can distinguish an eminence crowned by a temple which stands out against a starry sky - that is Golgotha. There I passed the greatest day of my existence. I thought I had vanquished God himself - and vanquished he was for some hours. But, alas! on that mount, too, it was that three days later I saw myself disarmed and my power brought to naught on the morning of a certain Sunday. Jesus had risen from the dead. There, too, took place on the same occasion my great single combat with Nature. There took place my duel with her, that terrible duel (at the third hour of the day, I remember it well), when, as soon as she saw me thrust the lance of Longinus in the breast of the Saviour she began to throw stones at me, to upturn the cemeteries, to bring the dead to life, and I know not what besides. I thought poor Nature had lost her senses.' The Angel of Death seemed to reflect for a moment... ("The Friend of Death")

His booted feet pounded out an insane, frantic rhythm underneath him as he raced into the cavern across from Baba Yaga’s den at a dead sprint. Pieces of dragon dung flew off him and hit the ground behind him in miniature chunks. He didn’t dare look behind him to see if the dragon had risen from the ground yet, but the deafening hiss that assaulted his ears meant she’d woken up. Icy claws of fear squeezed his heart with every breath as he ran, relying on the night vision goggles, the glimpse he’d gotten of the map, and his own instincts to figure out where to go. Jack raced around one corner too sharply and slipped on a piece of dung, crashing hard on his right side. He gasped as it knocked the wind out of him and gritted his teeth, his mind screaming at him to get up and run, run, run. He pushed onto his knees, nursing what felt like bruised ribs and a sprained wrist, and then paled as an unmistakable sensation traveled up the arm he’d used to push himself up. Impact tremors. Boom. Boom. Boom, boom, boom. Baba Yaga was coming. Baba Yaga was hunting him. Jack forced himself up onto his feet again, stumbling backwards and fumbling for the tracker. He got it switched on to see an ominous blob approaching from the right. He’d gotten a good lead on her—maybe a few hundred yards—but he had no way of knowing if he’d eventually run into a dead end. He couldn’t hide down here forever. He needed to get topside to join the others so they could take her down. Jack blocked out the rising crescendo of Baba Yaga’s hissing and pictured the map again. A mile up to the right had a man-made exit that spilled back up to the forest. The only problem was that it was a long passage. If Baba Yaga followed, there was a good chance she could catch up and roast him like a marshmallow. He could try to lose her in the twists and turns of the cave system, but there was a good chance he’d get lost, and Baba Yaga’s superior senses meant it would only be a matter of time before she found him. It came back to the most basic survival tactics: run or hide. Jack switched off the tracker and stuck it in his pocket, his voice ragged and shaking, but solid. “You aren’t about to die in this forest, Jackson. Move your ass.” He barreled forward into the passageway to the right in the wake of Baba Yaga’s ominous, bubbling warning, barely suppressing a groan as a spike of pain lanced through his chest from his bruised ribs. The adrenaline would only hold for so long. He could make it about halfway there before it ran out. Cold sweat plastered the mask to his face and ran down into his eyes. The tunnel stretched onward forever before him. No sunlight in sight. Had he been wrong? Jack ripped off the hood and cold air slapped his face, making his eyes water. He held his hands out to make sure he wouldn’t bounce off one of the cavern walls and squinted up ahead as he turned the corner into the straightaway. There, faintly, he could see the pale glow of the exit. Gasping for air, he collapsed against one wall and tried to catch his breath before the final marathon. He had to have put some amount of distance between himself and the dragon by now. “Who knows?” Jack panted. “Maybe she got annoyed and turned around.” An earth-shattering roar rocked the very walls of the cavern. Jack paled. Boom, boom, boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom, boomboomboomboom— Mother of God. The dragon had broken into a run. Jack shoved himself away from the wall, lowered his head, and ran as fast as his legs would carry him.

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 thing that must really be understood is that our knowledge of God cannot be acquired simply through academic processes. What we really know about God is what He has faithfully revealed to us. When Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the disciples, they still could not believe. Belief is not based upon seeing, because if it were, they would have believed that Jesus was risen from the dead when they saw Him. It took a spiritual application of revelation that cannot be brought about by reason or logic. When their eyes were opened, which is only done through the work of the Holy Spirit, they were able to believe. What the Holy Spirit does not reveal to us is not worth knowing. It is my contention that everything we do in some way reflects our perception of God. It does not take long to understand a person when you begin to understand his or her perception of God. I believe it is critical that our perception of God be worthy of God and that it reflect the truth revealed to us about the God of the Word. Even those who do not believe in God make a god out of not believing in God. What is it that you really believe and think of when you hear the word God? Your perception of God determines everything about you. For this reason, our perception of God needs to be based on a solid foundation that will not let us down under any circumstance. We need to really understand the history of man’s progressive degeneration. Some believe man is on his way up. The evidence, however, does not support this idea at all. If man were on his way up, why is he still wrestling with the sins of his forefathers? Why is it that man has not solved his problems, but seems only to add to them?

the thing gripped the battered and sea-stained and case-hardened mind of Bowers as ivy grips an old wall. Bowers was close on seventy, British-born. Sixty years of sea and tossing from ship to ship, from port to port, from hemisphere to hemisphere, had left him just what he was, a man heavy with years, yet in some extraordinary fashion young. In all his time he had never risen to a command or found himself in the after-guard, he was ignorant as the mainmast of literature and art, politics and history, and he signed the pay sheet with a cross; all the same the fate of the children had perhaps made a deeper impression on this amphibian than it had on the more educated Stanistreet; the sight of the girl and her companion brought on board, so young, beautiful—yet dead, like stricken flowers, had given his simple mind a twist from which it had not recovered.

Two Set Out on Their Journey We sit side by side, brother and sister, and read the book of what will be, while a breeze blows the pages over— desolate odd, cheerful even, and otherwise. When we come to our own story, the happy beginning, the ending we don’t know yet, the ten thousand acts encumbering the days between, we will read every page of it. If an ancestor has pressed a love-flower for us, it will lie hidden between pages of the slow going, where only those who adore the story ever read. When the time comes to shut the book and set out, we will take childhood’s laughter as far as we can into the days to come, until another laughter sounds back from the place where our next bodies will have risen and will be telling tales of what seemed deadly serious once, offering to us oldening wayfarers the light heart, now made of time and sorrow, that we started with.

When Jesus predicted his resurrection from the dead, we are told that the disciples did not seem to have a clue what he was talking about or simply did not believe (Mark 8:31-33; 9:31-32; 14:27-31; Luke 24:13-24). Even when his empty tomb was discovered, it is reported that the first conclusion was that someone had stolen the body (John 20:2, 13-15). When the women reported that they had seen him risen, the disciples thought they were telling an idle tale (Luke 24:10-12). Upon viewing the empty tomb, they still did not know what to think (John 20:9).Thomas simply refused to believe (John 20:24-25). Now it seems quite unlikely that the disciples or early Christians who highly respected them would invent sayings of Jesus that would place them in such a bad light.This is what is referred to as the "principle of embarrassment," which will be discussed later, and argues strongly in favor of the authenticity of the predictions of Jesus concerning his resurrection.

tells us in Ephesians 1:20–21 that when God raised Jesus from the dead, “he seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (ESV). It was only after Christ had risen that God’s plan was “made known … to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10). These cosmic forces are “the rulers and the authorities” disarmed and put to shame by the cross (Col 2:15). The incident at Babel and God’s decision to disinherit the nations drew up the battle lines for a cosmic turf war for the planet. The corruption of the elohim sons of God set over the nations meant that Yahweh’s vision of a global Eden would be met with divine force. Every inch outside Israel would be contested, and Israel itself was fair game for hostile conquest. The gods would not surrender their inheritances back to Yahweh; he would have to reclaim them. God would take the first step in that campaign immediately after Babel.

One may readily concede that the historical factuality of the resurrection cannot be affirmed with the same level of confidence as the historical factuality of the crucifixion. All historical judgments can be made only with relative certainty, and the judgment that Jesus rose from the dead can be offered—from the historian’s point of view—only with great caution. The character of the event itself hardly falls within ordinary categories of experience.28 Still, something extraordinary happened shortly after Jesus’ death that rallied the dispirited disciples and sent them out proclaiming to the world that Jesus had risen and had appeared to them. Reductive psychological explanations fail to do justice to the widespread testimony to this event within the original community and to the moral seriousness of the movement that resulted from it. The best explanation is to say that God did something beyond all power of human imagining by raising Jesus from the dead. To make such a claim is to make an assertion that redefines reality.29 If such an event has happened in history, then history is not a closed system of immanent causes and effects. God is powerfully at work in the world in ways that defy common sense, redeeming the creation from its bondage to necessity and decay. That, of course, is precisely what the early Christians believed and proclaimed: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. (EPH. 1:17–21. emphasis mine)

Evangelium Secundum Lucam - Chapter 24 The Gospel According To Luke 1 una autem sabbati valde diluculo venerunt ad monumentum portantes quae paraverant aromata And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came to the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared. 2 et invenerunt lapidem revolutum a monumento And they found the stone rolled back from the sepulchre. 3 et ingressae non invenerunt corpus Domini Iesu And going in, they found not the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 et factum est dum mente consternatae essent de isto ecce duo viri steterunt secus illas in veste fulgenti And it came to pass, as they were astonished in their mind at this, behold, two men stood by them, in shining apparel. 5 cum timerent autem et declinarent vultum in terram dixerunt ad illas quid quaeritis viventem cum mortuis And as they were afraid and bowed down their countenance towards the ground, they said unto them: Why seek you the living with the dead? 6 non est hic sed surrexit recordamini qualiter locutus est vobis cum adhuc in Galilaea esset He is not here, but is risen. Remember how he spoke unto you, when he was yet in Galilee,

The Constructed Space" Meanwhile surely there must be something to say, Maybe not suitable but at least happy In a sense between us two whoever We are. Anyhow here we are and never Before have we two faced each other who face Each other now across this abstract scene Stretching between us. This is a public place Achieved against subjective odds and then Mainly an obstacle to what I mean. It is like that, remember. It is like that Very often at the beginning till we are met By some intention risen up out of nothing. And even then we know what we are saying Only when it is said and fixed and dead. Or maybe, surely, of course we never know What we have said, what lonely meanings are read Into the space we make. And yet I say This silence here for in it I might hear you. I say this silence or, better, construct this space So that somehow something may move across The caught habits of language to you and me. From where we are it is not us we see And times are hastening yet, disguise is mortal. The times continually disclose our home. Here in the present tense disguise is mortal. The trying times are hastening. Yet here I am More truly now this abstract act become.

When my prince had fallen, the spirit ofthe depths opened my vision and let me become aware of the birth of the new God. The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly.129 I understood that the Godl3o whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there. I understood that the new God would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?131 If we have risen near the heights of good and evil, then our badness and hatefulness lie in the most extreme torment. Man's torment is so great and the air of the heights so wealc that he can hardly live anymore. The good and the beautiful freeze to the ice of the absolute idea/32 and the bad and hateful become mud puddles full of crazy life. Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impos- sible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his underworldly brother. No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it.133 The men ofyore said that he had preached there to the deceased.134 What they say is true, but do you know how this happened? It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious Hell's masquerade of the holiest mysteries. How else could Christ have saved his Antichrist? Read the unknown books of the ancients, and you will learn much from them. Notice that Christ did not remain in Hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond.135 Our conviction of the value of the good and beautiful has become strong and unshakable, that is why life can extend beyond this and still fulfil everything that lay bound and yearning. But the bound and yearning is also the,hateful and bad. Are you again indignant about the hateful and the bad? Through this you can recognize h()w great are their force and value for life. Do you think that it is dead in you? But this dead can also change into serpents.136These serpents will extinguish the prince ofyour days.

During the last three years and a half, hundreds of American men, women, and children have been murdered on the high seas and in Mexico. Mr. Wilson has not dared to stand up for them...He wrote Germany that he would hold her to "strict accountability" if an American lost his life on an American or neutral ship by her submarine warfare. Forthwith the Arabic and the Gulflight were sunk. But Mr. Wilson dared not take any action...Germany despised him; and the Lusitania was sunk in consequence. Thirteen hundred and ninety-four people were drowned, one hundred and three of them babies under two years of age. Two days later, when the dead mothers with their dead babies in their arms lay by the scores in the Queenstown morgue, Mr. Wilson selected the moment as opportune to utter his famous sentence about being "too proud to fight." Roosevelt threw his speech script to the floor and continued in near absolute silence. Mr Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn. There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn: the shadows of men, women, and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands; the shadows of the helpless who Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves; the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits; the shadows of troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths, and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task, and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of foes who knew no mercy. Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn: the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.

Be thou joyous, Prince! Whose lot is set apart for heavenly Birth. Two stamps there are marked on all living men, Divine and Undivine; I spake to thee By what marks thou shouldst know the Heavenly Man, Hear from me now of the Unheavenly! They comprehend not, the Unheavenly, How Souls go forth from Me; nor how they come Back unto Me: nor is there Truth in these, Nor purity, nor rule of Life. "This world Hath not a Law, nor Order, nor a Lord," So say they: "nor hath risen up by Cause Following on Cause, in perfect purposing, But is none other than a House of Lust." And, this thing thinking, all those ruined ones—Of little wit, dark-minded—give themselves To evil deeds, the curses of their kind. Surrendered to desires insatiable, Full of deceitfulness, folly, and pride, In blindness cleaving to their errors, caught Into the sinful course, they trust this lie As it were true—this lie which leads to death—Finding in Pleasure all the good which is, And crying "Here it finisheth!" Ensnared In nooses of a hundred idle hopes, Slaves to their passion and their wrath, they buy Wealth with base deeds, to glut hot appetites; "Thus much, to-day," they say, "we gained! thereby Such and such wish of heart shall have its fill; And this is ours! and th' other shall be ours! To-day we slew a foe, and we will slay Our other enemy to-morrow! Look! Are we not lords? Make we not goodly cheer? Is not our fortune famous, brave, and great? Rich are we, proudly born! What other men Live like to us? Kill, then, for sacrifice! Cast largesse, and be merry!" So they speak Darkened by ignorance; and so they fall—Tossed to and fro with projects, tricked, and bound In net of black delusion, lost in lusts—Down to foul Naraka. Conceited, fond, Stubborn and proud, dead-drunken with the wine Of wealth, and reckless, all their offerings Have but a show of reverence, being not made In piety of ancient faith. Thus vowed To self-hood, force, insolence, feasting, wrath, These My blasphemers, in the forms they wear And in the forms they breed, my foemen are, Hateful and hating; cruel, evil, vile, Lowest and least of men, whom I cast down Again, and yet again, at end of lives, Into some devilish womb, whence—birth by birth—The devilish wombs re-spawn them, all beguiled; And, till they find and worship Me, sweet Prince! Tread they that Nether Road. The Doors of Hell Are threefold, whereby men to ruin pass,—The door of Lust, the door of Wrath, the door Of Avarice. Let a man shun those three! He who shall turn aside from entering All those three gates of Narak, wendeth straight To find his peace, and comes to Swarga's gate.

You are so stupid.” Astonishment broke through his pain. Could I still undo what I had done? “I lied!' I spat my whisper at him. “I knew you read my journal. I knew you read my dreams. I wrote there what I thought would hurt you most! I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!” I took a breath. “He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!” “What?” His mouth hung open after that word, his eyes wide. He made a stupid face of astonishment. As if he hadn’t always known he was loved the best. That he was Beloved. “Stupid again! Asking stupid questions. Go with him. Go now. It’s you he wants, not me. Go!” When had my voice risen to a shout? I did not know, I did not care. Let it be a spectacle, let all the camp be roused and folk stare at me. For that was what was happening. Dutiful had come to his feet, a sword in hand, looking around for an enemy. They were all half-awake, roused by my shouts. Hap was staring with his mouth hanging open. Nettle’s hands clutched her face in horror at the truth I had shouted. And my father lifted a hand. His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. Beloved. He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool. He rose, the blanket that had draped his shoulders falling to the earth. He pulled the glove from his hand and let it fall. He walked uncertainly, like a puppet with his strings pulled by an apprentice puppeteer. He reached my father. So tenderly, he set his hand into my father’s. Then he leaned down until he lay upon the wolf, his face turned to my father’s face. He put his arm across my father’s bony back. He drew him close and set his silver fingers to the wolf. For a moment all was still. Then I saw Beloved’s fingers stir the soft fur of the wolf’s back. The firelit bodies of my father and Beloved softened and merged. I felt something I could not describe. Like the whoosh of air when a door opens, and then closes again, but it was in the Skill-current, and so strong that I saw Nettle flinch at it, too. Briefer than an instant, I saw light striate out from them. A nexus, a node on the path of fate. Then it was finished. Something finally complete, as it should have been. Their colors dimmed and the wolf’s eyes gleamed. It was slow and it was sudden, that they were gone and only the wolf remained. The snarl faded. The wolf’s ears pricked and swiveled. His broad head turned slowly. He lifted his muzzle and snuffed the night air. Such eyes he had! They were a darkness full of the brilliance of life. For one brief instant, light caught in them and glowed green. We were all motionless, as if a huge predator faced us. Then, like a wet dog, the wolf shook himself and tiny fragments of stone flew in all directions, as if he had rolled in them. His slow look roved over us, pausing at each in turn. His gaze lingered on me the last. His eyes were both hard and amused. Those we’re astonishing lies, cub. And the very last one the most inspired of all. You have your father’s talent for it. He have one final shake of his coat. I go to the hunt!

You've got to have met God. Religion doesn't start with a set of laws or rules and it doesn't start with a set of ideas. It starts with an encounter, with the living God and in our case, Christ risen from the dead. In that encounter you meet someone you can trust. That's faith: trust in truth. But then you've got the obligation to keep searching for the truth of the faith so that your life is oriented in a way that is consistent with the faith. The trust is a matter of love and faith is a matter of truth. The two together give you the guidance that you look for.

When it comes to piety something along this line had already happened by the time the preachers of my youth commended it to me. I hate to say it, but even the piety of Wesley and Whitfield was a downgrade of the real thing.3 This is because by the eighteenth-century piety’s sphere had already contracted. It is a well-documented story, so I won’t go into detail, but I think I can sum it up succinctly. By the time of Wesley and Whitfield, what had once been regarded as public truth had been reduced to private convictions. Authority in general had eroded due to revolutions in politics, the sciences, and even economics. To meet the challenge evangelists were forced to stress direct, very personal experience of the supernatural by everyone. The second-hand Truth contained in catechisms and confessions was no longer enough. Even eyewitness accounts of the risen Christ were not as trustworthy as a “warmed heart.” This is how we ended up with a hymn like “I Serve a Risen Savior.” In that song the line that is supposed to persuade you to believe that Jesus rose from the dead is, “You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!”4 What we are left with today is heart religion, because now the heart is the only place Jesus can be publicly acknowledged to live. Ironically, many people think that this is the sum total of Christianity, and the notion that this is actually a downgrading of the faith is inconceivable.

Mind without heart The leaf had fallen, The branch still stood there intact, It was a gradual event and not at all sudden, The fallen leaf, the still existing branch was an undeniable fact, But why did the branch still hang on, waiting for something? As the leaf from the floor looked at it while time consumed it, Maybe the branch wanted to see the leaf on the floor dying, And with its shadow touch it, and feel it; and whisper to it, “There where you grew you shall grow again next season, I will wait for you here throughout the winter, And to do so, I need no motivation because I have my reason, I have loved you and I do not wish to be a quitter,” And finally there was nothing left of the leaf, the fallen and dead leaf, There was only its trace, a faint impression on the soil, This added to the branch’s anguish and grief, For time had robbed her of its every moment of toil, People passed by and trampled the leaf’s almost fossilised impression, Until there was nothing left of the leaf neither on the branch nor on the soil, The branch chided the fate’s paucity and time’s baseless aggression, For they even erased the leaf’s last impression that was as thin as silver foil, By the time winter entered its prime, The branch stood there waiting for it to pass, Not because it wanted to feel the joys of summer time, But it wanted the leaf to re-appear and re-grow so that it could undo time’s act so crass, Time passed by, spring arrived, the branch was filled with leaves, But that leaf never grew again, the same leaf, the fallen one, So the branch misses him and it continuously grieves, But she shows it to no one, because no leaf compares to her dear leaf, the fallen one, Maybe that is why it is beginning to bend, Though it is converted in thousands of fresh leaves, The branch has been unable to cope with the dear leaf’s premature end, So she keeps peeping into time’s graves, To find the grave of the leaf that she lost prematurely, And lie there beside him, and finally fall, Then be together with him timelessly, And say, “For you I too had to fall afterall!” Today the sun has risen but the branch has fallen forever, Exactly where the leaf had fallen, It is a love of different kind, and the branch is a special lover, Who would never let go of what time from her had stolen, After a year the branch too disappeared from the floor, Now there is neither the branch nor the leaf, Time knows it, fate planned it, but I witnessed it; and this I cannot ignore, But knowing they are somewhere together now, even if that be the graveyard of time, is a relief, Time and fate are never obsequious, Because they neither love nor hate, But they are masquerading and pretentious, And they never know how it feels when the branch lies naked in a leafless state, That is time’s and fate’s irony of which they may never know, But you and I who have minds and hearts, Yet become part of a fake and grotesque show, Where either mind thinks without the heart or the heart from mind’s innocence departs!

Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient. His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror. After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23

The task of evangelism, now that Christ has risen, is not so much to run around at night, poking our flashlights into corners and cellars. Rather, the task of evangelism is more like pulling back the curtains. “But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Eph. 5: 13–14). Get out of that bed! Christ will shine on you!

Search (no subject) W Widsith 412 to me 1 minute agoDetails And first, as to their honesty. Here they are entitled to the benefit of the general course of human experience, that men ordinarily speak the truth, when they have no prevailing motive or inducement to the contrary. This presumption, to which we have before alluded, is applied in courts of justice, even to witnesses whose integrity is not wholly free from suspicion; much more is it applicable to the evangelists, whose testimony went against all their worldly interests. The great truths which the apostles declared, were, that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in him, could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling terrors that can be presented to the mind of man. Their master had recently perished as a malefactor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. His religion sought to overthrow the religions of the whole world. The laws of every country were against the teachings of his disciples. The interests and passions of all the rulers and great men in the world were against them. The fashion of the world was against them. Propagating this new faith, even in the most inoffensive and peaceful manner, they could expect nothing but contempt, opposition, revilings, bitter persecutions, stripes, imprisonments, torments and cruel deaths. Yet this faith they zealously did propagate; and all these [pg 026]miseries they endured undismayed, nay, rejoicing. As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigour and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience and unblenching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact.

And first, as to their honesty. Here they are entitled to the benefit of the general course of human experience, that men ordinarily speak the truth, when they have no prevailing motive or inducement to the contrary. This presumption, to which we have before alluded, is applied in courts of justice, even to witnesses whose integrity is not wholly free from suspicion; much more is it applicable to the evangelists, whose testimony went against all their worldly interests. The great truths which the apostles declared, were, that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in him, could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling terrors that can be presented to the mind of man. Their master had recently perished as a malefactor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. His religion sought to overthrow the religions of the whole world. The laws of every country were against the teachings of his disciples. The interests and passions of all the rulers and great men in the world were against them. The fashion of the world was against them. Propagating this new faith, even in the most inoffensive and peaceful manner, they could expect nothing but contempt, opposition, revilings, bitter persecutions, stripes, imprisonments, torments and cruel deaths. Yet this faith they zealously did propagate; and all these [pg 026]miseries they endured undismayed, nay, rejoicing. As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigour and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience and unblenching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact.

And first, as to their honesty. Here they are entitled to the benefit of the general course of human experience, that men ordinarily speak the truth, when they have no prevailing motive or inducement to the contrary. This presumption, to which we have before alluded, is applied in courts of justice, even to witnesses whose integrity is not wholly free from suspicion; much more is it applicable to the evangelists, whose testimony went against all their worldly interests. The great truths which the apostles declared, were, that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in him, could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling terrors that can be presented to the mind of man. Their master had recently perished as a malefactor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. His religion sought to overthrow the religions of the whole world. The laws of every country were against the teachings of his disciples. The interests and passions of all the rulers and great men in the world were against them. The fashion of the world was against them. Propagating this new faith, even in the most inoffensive and peaceful manner, they could expect nothing but contempt, opposition, revilings, bitter persecutions, stripes, imprisonments, torments and cruel deaths. Yet this faith they zealously did propagate; and all these miseries they endured undismayed, nay, rejoicing. As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigour and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience and unblenching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact.

My groggy disbelief is but a fraction of the weariness and soul heaviness that was felt by the women who arrived at a certain tomb before dawn and were not expecting to behold the risen Son. But because Jesus did rise from the dead, every glorious sunrise (even the early ones) marches forward and points us to look ahead to the day that is coming, which will be the end of darkness forever.

Matthew records that at the moment Jesus died, when the temple curtain was torn in two, ‘The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.’ When the power of heaven flooded out through the tear in dimensions, it came in such a sudden rush that people were raised from the dead, right there and then. But Matthew clearly states that they were raised with physical bodies, not just as souls, and that they went into Jerusalem and ‘appeared to many people’ (Matthew 27: 51–53). Furthermore, when the disciples encountered the risen Christ for themselves, they met a physical Jesus who had a body that could be touched and that could eat food. Death had begun to work backwards. The power of heaven was coming to earth not to take the disciples away to a ‘spiritual’ bliss but, just as in the healing miracles of Jesus, it had come to undo all the disintegrating effects of evil and sin that were the result of humanity’s rebellion against God, even the ‘chain of death’ itself.

The new Christians in Corinth also had such questions, asking the apostle Paul, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of a body will they come?’ (1 Corinthians 15: 35). To answer their question, Paul uses the analogy of a seed. When you sow you do not place the mature plant in the ground but a tiny ‘simple’ seed. Yet God has created the seed so that it grows into a plant that is far more complex and glorious than the seed. I have a small vegetable patch where I plant a few seeds every spring. To me all the seeds look roughly the same, so I always find it amazing, even miraculous, that these tiny identical dry, black specks grow into delicious lettuce, rocket, spinach or carrots. Paul says that our earthly bodies and resurrected bodies are like the relationship of seeds to plants. There is a continuity between seed and plant, just as there is a continuity between our body here on earth and our bodies in the new creation. Yet there is also a difference: ‘The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body’ (1 Corinthians 15: 42–44). Our resurrected bodies will not be less than our earthly bodies, just as a plant is not less than the seed it comes from. Our risen bodies will not be physicality-minus, but physicality-plus, just as Jesus’ resurrected body was physicality-plus. When Jesus unites heaven and earth, we will not just have earthly bodies but bodies that are also part of the eternal, imperishable, glorious dimension of heaven. They will not just be natural bodies, but ‘spiritual’ bodies; not because they are made of some non-material ‘spirit’ matter, but because they are filled with the empowering Spirit of God, the same Spirit that was given at Pentecost as the firstfruits of the new creation. So we don’t need to worry about what happens to the specific atoms of our bodies after we have died. The God who not only transforms seeds into plants, but who in the beginning created from nothing every atom of the entire material universe, is more than capable of recreating our bodies at the resurrection of the dead. It is his power that holds every molecule of the universe together so that it does not disintegrate into chaos (Colossians 1: 17) and on the last day will bring every molecule together to ‘transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’ (Philippians 3: 21). But what happens if I am alive on earth on the day that Jesus returns? What kind of a body will I have then?

The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus’ death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out. (Pensées, 310; in Pascal 1670/1995,

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.

I am risen from the dead

I don’t believe that the big men are guilty of the war, oh no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind without exception undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and disfigured, and mankind will have to begin all over again.

Keep your attention on Jesus Christ as risen from the dead and descended from David. This is according to my gospel. I suffer for it to the point of being bound like a criminal, but God’s message is not bound... For if we have died with Him, we will also live with Him; if we endure, we will also reign with him. If we deny Him, He will also deny us.” She closed the Bible and placed it back inside

Keep your attention on Jesus Christ as risen from the dead and descended from David. This is according to my gospel. I suffer for it to the point of being bound like a criminal, but God’s message is not bound... For if we have died with Him, we will also live with Him; if we endure, we will also reign with him. If we deny Him, He will also deny us.

wasn’t something Esther and I had to do to become Christians but was something we wanted to do because we were Christians. Colossians 2:12 says that we are Buried with Him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with Him through the faith of the operation of God, Who hath raised him from the dead.

Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

self-examination is surely in order. Am I, perhaps, the kind of Christian who is quick to be caught up in a controversy (which may indeed have its place) while ignoring the call to world evangelism? Then let me remember Boniface, the Sigan-Fu Stone, and most of all, let me remember Jesus Christ crucified and risen from the dead that He might be my Lord.

Let us not fail to ask ourselves, as we leave this passage, whether we have risen with Christ and been made partakers spiritually of His resurrection. This, after all, is the one thing needful. To know the facts of Christianity with the head and to be able to argue for them with the tongue will not save our souls. We must yield ourselves to God as those alive from the dead (Romans 6:13). We must be raised from the death of sin and walk in newness of life. This and this only is saving Christianity.

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.

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. 2And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. 3And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. 4The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. 5The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. 6He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying. 7Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you.” 8 And they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to report it to His disciples.

Now after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to look at the grave. 2And behold, a severe earthquake had occurred, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled away the stone and sat upon it. 3And his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing as white as snow. 4The guards shook for fear of him and became like dead men. 5The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. 6He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying. 7Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you.

Therefore every morning, present yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead. He will maintain the life He gave, and bestow the grace to live as risen ones.

5The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.

If Jesus Christ had only risen from the dead as a spirit, as a ghost, then His only victory and His only saving power would be limited to the world of the spirit. It would mean that He would be helpless to answer prayers concerning material things, because His power would extend only to things spiritual. It would mean that His people would be helpless against the powers of this world and without a law or a recourse in this world. But, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead, He is Lord over all lords, King over all kings, the lawgiver and supreme governor of all things, material and spiritual.

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