Quotations from Scripture and Other Writings on Resurection
POEMS AND HYMNS
Now let the heavens be joyful,
Let earth her song begin:
Let the round world keep triumph
And all that is therein;
Invisible and visible,
Their notes let all things blend,
For Christ the Lord is risen
Our joy that hath no end.
In the bonds of Death He lay Who for our offence was slain;
But the Lord is risen to-day, Christ hath brought us life again,
Wherefore let us all rejoice,
Singing loud, with cheerful voice, Hallelujah!
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amid the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.
“Christ the Lord is risen to-day,’ Sons of men and angels say.
Raise your joys and triumphs high; Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply.
Come, ye saints, look here and wonder, See the place where Jesus lay;
He has burst His bands asunder; He has borne our sins away;
Joyful tidings, Yes, the Lord has risen to-day.
He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity.
Love is the Fellow of Resurrection
Scooping up the dust and chanting “Live.”
See the land, her Easter keeping,
Rises as her Maker rose.
Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,
Burst at last from winter snows.
Earth with heaven above rejoices.
Spring bursts to-day, For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.
Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart’s sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,
The singing Easter of the soul–
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach us to say: “I will arise.”
Once more to new creation Awake,
and death gainsay,
For death is swallowed up of life,
and Christ is risen today!
It is the hour to rend thy chains, the blossom time of souls.
QUOTES BY THEOLOGIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Christmas has a large and colorful cast of characters… With Easter it is entirely different….It’s not really even much of a story when you come right down to it, and that is of course the power of it. It doesn’t have the ring of great drama. It has the ring of truth.
The narrative is as fragmented, shadowy, incomplete as life itself. When it comes to just what happened, there can be no certainty. That something unimaginable happened, there can be no doubt.
Apart from the resurrection of Jesus, the eschatological orientation of the church…appears as the spoke of a wheel without a hub.
What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? That what has never been, should be, or that what has been, should be again? Is it more difficult to come into being than to return to it.
If Easter means anything to modern man it means that eternal truth is eternal. You may nail it to the tree, wrap it up in grave clothes, and seal it in a tomb; but truth crushed to earth, shall rise again. Truth does not perish; it cannot be destroyed. It may be distorted; it has been silenced temporarily; it has been compelled to carry its cross to Calvary’s brow or to drink the cup of poisoned hemlock in a Grecian jail, but with an inevitable certainty after every Black Friday dawns truth’s Easter Morn.
Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won’t stay there.
The (Christian) “doctrines” are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
The man in Christ rose again, not only the God.
The same power that brought Christ back from the dead is operative within those who are Christ’s. The resurrection is an ongoing thing.
Easter is not a time for groping through dusty, musty tomes or tombs to disprove spontaneous generation or even to prove life eternal. It is a day to fan the ashes of dead hope, a day to banish doubts and seek the slopes where the sun is rising, to revel in the faith which transports us out of ourselves and the dead past into the vast and inviting unknown.
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
Christ has turned all our sunsets into dawns.
And he departed from our sight that we might return to our heart, and there find Him. For He departed, and behold, He is here.
Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.
If the last words of Jesus in Matthew are that he will be with us to the end of time, the last words of Jesus in John may be affirming the final fruit of the resurrection: a believing community of Christians will remain until Jesus returns.
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
Live in the awareness that Christ lives and that He lives in His people.
The great gift of Easter is hope–Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake.
Easter is not a passport to another world; it is a quality of perception for this one.
On Easter Day, the veil between time and eternity thins to gossamer.
The joyful news that He is risen does not change the contemporary world. Still before us lie work, discipline, sacrifice. But the fact of Easter gives us the spiritual power to do the work, accept the discipline, and make the sacrifice.
Jesus risen – and only Jesus risen – trumpets an incredibly consoling truth, Whoever we are, whatever our pain or problem, anxiety or affliction, frustration or failure, we need never despair….the promise of Jesus can come true: “So you have affliction now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you.” (John 16:22)
Jesus lives, not in the sense that King Lear or Hamlet or Handel’s Messiah live on in the hearts and minds of the people, but in the sense that something totally new has happened and keeps happening. The resurrection is the ultimate breakthrough of God into our world that transcends all nature and history.
Easter has less to do with one person’s escape from the grave than with the victory of seemingly powerless love over loveless power.
The answer of Easter is not a necessity. In reality, there is no inevitable happy ending as there is in perverted and perverting cinemas. But the answer of Easter has become possible precisely because the Christ has been buried. The new life would not really be new life if it did not come from the complete end of the old life.
Easter focuses our attention on the decisive victory of Jesus Christ and hence the possibility of our victory over our creaturehood, the old creation and this old world, with its history of oppression and exploitation.
Then I met Martin Luther. He taught me that a Christian should be cheerful. Then I met Christ. He was even more shrewd, he whispered in my ear: Let them strike us dead on Black Friday, we will fool them on Easter Morning.
In every grave on earth’s green sward is a tiny seed of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ, and that seed cannot perish. It will germinate when the warm south wind of Christ’s return brings back the spring-tide to this cold sin-cursed earth of ours; and then they that are in their graves, and we who shall lie down in ours, will feel in our mortal bodies the power of His resurrection, and will come forth to life immortal.
Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, “Christ is risen,” but “I shall rise!”
God expects from men something more than at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.
Dating from Easter, life took on a newness which made it a different kind of life not known before–life that will not be content until all the world comes alive.
