Quotes about Easter

We walk through life as if we had swallowed an Easter candle, rigid and tense, always afraid that things will get out of hand. This reaction is just as harmful as open rebellion, or even more so, because it blocks our way to religious maturation.

Up and down our lives obedient Walk, dear Christ, with footsteps radiant, Till those garden lives shall be Fair with duties done for Thee; And our thankful spirits say, "Christ arose on Easter Day."

Each and all of us must summon to mind the words of Him whom we honor this Easter time: 'When a strong man, armed, keepeth his palace, his goods are in peace'.

Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

I like Easter. But let's remember that Christ's resurrection is not truer at Easter than at any other time of the year.

During my life I have heard many sermons on the Resurrection. I can recite the events of that first Easter Sunday. I have marked in my scriptures passages regarding the Resurrection.

God proved His love on the Cross. When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, 'I love you.'

There was one activity that Bonhoeffer would enjoy in Barcelona, but could never enjoy in Berlin. That was the arte taurina (bull fighting). Though an aesthete and an intellectual, Bonhoeffer was neither effete nor squeamish. His brother Klaus arrived for a visit on Easter Saturday, and on Easter afternoon—Bonhoeffer preached that morning—they were "dragged" by a German teacher, presumably Thumm, to the "great Easter corrida."

Easter is not about immortality but about resurrection from a death that is a real death with all its frightfulness and horrors, resurrection from a death of the body and the soul, of the whole person, resurrection by the power of God's mighty act. This is the Easter message.

Easter? Our attention falls more on dying than on death. How we deal with dying is more important to us than how we conquer death. Socrates overcame dying; Christ overcame death.

To live in the light of the resurrection - that is what Easter means.

Death cannot keep back love; love is stronger than death. The meaning of Good Friday and Easter Sunday is that God's path to human beings leads back to God.