Easter Day

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection. PH. 8:10 We celebrate on Easter day the rising of our Saviour from the tomb. For that the whole aspect of our thought and worship changes.

Our sober churches burst out into flowers, our hushed voices break out into songs of praise, our whole religiousness puts on another robe—exultation instead of sorrow, “the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.” And we go about with one another, heart saying to heart everywhere, “Christ is risen.” And what makes that such a glad greeting is the assurance that is hidden in under it and is heard up through it: “We too shall rise.” It is the assurance of our immortality bound up with Christ’s, the certainty that because he rose we shall rise also, that makes the resurrection such a message of gladness to us all.

But is that all? Is this simple assurance of continued existence, that we are to rise from the dead and go on in some future state of existence—is this what Paul means by “the power of the resurrection”? It seems certainly evident enough that Paul meant more than this—that it was some great powerful change to be worked in and on him himself. On him—not merely on things about him.

It was not simply that by Christ’s death and resurrection the tyranny of the old law of decay had been broken, so that instead of living seventy years his life was to stretch out into eternity and never to end. It was evidently that the quality of the life itself was to be changed, that he was to be something new and different, and not that he was just to be the same old thing a little or a good deal longer, when he should know the power of the resurrection.

This was what he prayed for... . The promise of resurrection finds its consummate sat- isfaction only in close union with the other promise of regeneration. The two must go together—the new world and the new man. Phillips Brooks 108