Easter Sunday
Reflection
The celebration of Easter marks the most incredible event in the history of the cosmos. Jesus rises from the dead and returns to empower his disciples with a new energy and a new direction. To live in the Risen Christ is not to be dogmatic, entrenched in static beliefs, or focused on sin. It is simply to express by one’s life that you have seen something new and you want to tell others what you have heard: that in the midst of the old creation there is a New Creation, and that this New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ. The resurrection of Jesus Christ anticipates the destiny of the cosmos. The resurrection happens in the present moment but it is a present moment bathed in future, a new relationship with God, a new union, a new wholeness for the deepening of life. Christianity is about new life. It is about the fulfillment of God’s promise and hope for new creation. We who say “yes” to the dying and rising of Jesus Christ say “yes” to our lives as the stuff out of which the New Creation can emerge. We are to give ourselves to Christ and to his cause and values, which means not losing the world but finding it in its deepest relation to God.
Adapted from Ilia Delio
Prayer
He is risen. Alleluia!
Action
What is your concept of the implications of the resurrection narratives? Where does that fit in with our present understandings? Reflect on resurrection as evidenced in nature as well as in scripture.
Suggested Reading
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb…When the looked they saw that the stone which was very large had been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man in a white robr sitting at the right side and they were alarmed. But he said, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised. He is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him.
Mark 16:1-8
I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.
John 11:25-26
Easter is the event that brought radical news for every human being, for history and for the world: the triumph of life over death; it is the feast of reawakening and of rebirth. Let us allow our lives to be conquered and transformed by the Resurrection!
Pope Francis
To believe in the resurrection is not to believe in a scientific miracle. It is to believe in God. It is an act of hope in the God who created you and everyone else and everything else, who has the love and the power still to recreate, even when death has taken away the only life that you know.
Elizabeth Johnson
He died for the vision of God’s forgiving, inclusive, nonjudgmental, nonviolent reign, and he rises in each of us over and over again every time we proclaim it with our lives.
Barbara Fiand
Evil is a result of the finite in and around us. It says nothing about the infinite. That is the whole point of the resurrection. The infinite draws out life from death, goodness from evil, restoration from devastation. In that fundamental reality is out hope
Angie O’Gorman
Christians of today encounter the risen Christ not only in the Word of God proclaimed in the Christian community, and not only through participation in the Eucharist, but also in words, persons, and events in the world. In the light of the Word of God, they meet the risen one in the experience of grace that occurs in the midst of life.
Denis Edwards
The message of Easter is that God’s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you’re now invited to belong to it.
N.T. Wright
Live in the awareness that Christ lives and that He lives in His people.
Julien B. Weil
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
Martin Luther
Easter says you can put truth in the grave but it won’t stay there.
Clarence W. Hall