Where my own eloquence fails me, others will fill the gap. Here are some quotes that I find meaningful on this holiest of weekends. Happy Easter, all!
1
“For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ’s snow-white seal.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
2
“On the third day the friends of Christ, coming at daybreak to the place, found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”
– G. K. Chesterton
3
“It cost God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.”
– C. S. Lewis
4
“And with childlike, credulous affection
We behold their tender buds expand;
Emblems of our own great resurrection,
Emblems of the bright and better land.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Flowers
5
“The world…is full of resurrections… Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it – the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.”
– George MacDonald
6
“We are an Easter people. Alleluia is our song.”
– Pope John Paul II
7
“Christianity didn’t start the belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The belief in the resurrection of Jesus started Christianity.”
– Mike Winger
8
“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.’”
– Phillips Brooks
9
“Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful, with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained… This, of course, is what the Cross signifies. And it is the Cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.”
– Malcolm Muggeridge
10
“If the Lord’s bearing our sin for us is not the gospel, I have no gospel to preach.”
– Charles Spurgeon
11
“The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story — and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
12
“If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.”
– Philip Yancey
13
“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer
14
“Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;
“Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;
And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.”
– Claude McKay, The Easter Flower
15
“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.”
– Billy Graham
16
“For me the most radical demand of Christian faith lies in summoning the courage to say yes to the present risenness of Jesus Christ.”
– Brennan Manning
17
“Good Friday and Easter free us to think about other things far beyond our own personal fate, about the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and events; and we lay hold of a great hope.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer
18
“Because I adamantly refuse to embrace an ideology that life is solely a trajectory to death, I can do no other than adamantly embrace the ideology of the cross and the trajectory of the resurrection.”
– Craig D. Lounsbrough
19
“Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.”
– N.T. Wright
20
“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Happy Easter, friends! Here’s a bonus for you that is more than a mere quotation could ever be. Be blessed this weekend!
Bonus
“Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
– John 11:25
Thanks for reading, and don't forget to Click here to Subscribe!About the Author
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Jackie Chea is a blogger from San Antonio, Texas who holds a B.A. in Psychology and an M.A. in Community Counseling from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She writes on political and cultural issues from a conservative, religious standpoint. She lives in the Lone Star State with her husband Nick, her 5-year-old son Lincoln, and her rescue dogs. |
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