Sponsor spotlight: But Easter’s over, isn’t it?

For Christians, Easter is the day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

It’s rather a shocking claim: that a Jewish carpenter-rabbi died and then rose from the dead, never to die again. It’s understandable that people find it incredible, and impossible to believe. Even for Christians, Resurrection is baffling and mind-bending and mind-blowing.

And that is why in the church year, the celebration of Resurrection is not one day long. It’s 50 days long — the longest season in the church calendar. Resurrection is so wild and so crazy and so absolutely utterly extraordinary that we need seven whole weeks to even begin to comprehend it.

In liturgical churches, for the whole of the Easter season, the Easter acclamation is repeated every week:

Christ is risen!

Alleluia! He is risen indeed!

We repeat these words week after week to remind ourselves that from the moment Jesus rose from the dead, everything has changed: Easter casts its bright shadow back over the cross on which Jesus died, and turns the most wretched Friday humanity has ever known into Good Friday.

We all know days, weeks, seasons when it seems that death has won, and we feel bereft and lost and despairing—and Easter casts its bright shadow over all who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death and proclaims that death is defeated.

When we are faced with the reality of our own inner ugliness, Easter casts its bright shadow over us and promises forgiveness and absolution and no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

And Easter casts its bright shadow over the ordinary days of our lives, transfiguring them with its own glory, the glory of death defeated, sins forgiven, and life without end. The Apostle John beheld the Easter vision of God wiping every tear from our eyes and he declared that death was no more, neither mourning nor crying nor pain anymore.

During the Great Fifty Days of Easter we celebrate all of this, all of what it means that Jesus rose from the dead: his glorious triumph over the powers of evil and destruction and death, and the resurrection life he imparts to those who follow him.

— By K.C. Ireton, author, The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year
parishioner, Holy Trinity Edmonds

  1. Thank you, K.C., for your strong witness of sacred glory beyond anything secular beliefs provide.

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