Eastertide 2026: Protestia: N.T. Wright Says Jesus’ Bodily Resurrection is an Optional Christian Belief, Not Needed for Salvation

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I posted this last year, but it is worth a second look during this Eastertide because it deals with the non-negotiable article of Faith that all Christians must believe if they are to call themselves “Christian” in any meaningful sense of the term: Namely the belief that Christ arose bodily from the dead in its full, plain, and historical sense. To believe otherwise is to believe falsely and heretically.

From Protestia:

Speaking on a recent episode of the Premiere Unbelievable? podcast, N.T. Wright addresses controversial comments he made to The Australian in 2006. At the time he said: 

I have friends who I am quite sure are Christians who do not believe in the bodily resurrection. But the view I take of them – and they know this – is that they are very, very muddled. They would probably return the compliment.

Marcus Borg really does not believe Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead. But I know Marcus well: he loves Jesus and believes in him passionately. The philosophical and cultural world he has lived in has made it very, very difficult for him to believe in the bodily resurrection. I actually think that’s a major problem and it affects most of whatever else he does, and I think that it means he has all sorts of flaws as a teacher, but I don’t want to say he isn’t a Christian.

I do think, however, that churches that lose their grip on the bodily resurrection are in deep trouble and that for healthy Christian life individually and corporately, belief in the bodily resurrection is foundational.

Read it all.

N.T. (Tom) Wright is one of my heroes. Of all the theologians, teachers, and scholars who have had a positive impact on my spiritual and professional life as a Christian man and priest—and that list is kinda long—Wright stands at the top of the list. You can imagine, then, my shock and dismay when I read the article’s title from above. To say that I am heartbroken over this is massive understatement, especially because Wright is almost singlehandedly responsible for clearing up my own muddled (and heretical) views on Christ’s Resurrection, thinking that resulted from teachers who really didn’t believe in the bodily Resurrection of Christ because it is too unbelievable from a human perspective. The irony is palpable.

As I read the article I realized the situation is a bit more nuanced than its title would have us believe, but it is still catastrophic, nuance notwithstanding. Why? Because to believe in Christ and his saving/healing power, is to believe in his Death, Resurrection, and Ascension as I explain below. Simply put, if you take away Christ’s Resurrection, you take away every other single claim the New Testament (NT) writers made about him. No Resurrection, no Christ, no salvation for humans. Period. End of story.

Having met Bishop Wright once and having read almost everything he has published, I know that Wright has a huge and generous pastor’s heart and I appreciate greatly that he does; would that every priest and bishop have such a heart! I can also relate to his agonizing over his friend Marcus Borg, a well-known heretic who was part of the Jesus Seminar (Seminar: From the Latin semi and arse, meaning any half-assed discussion, a name that truly fit that particular “Seminar”). I have family and friends who are not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word and I fear for the eternal destiny of their souls; it is heartbreaking and an ongoing heavy burden for me. I think they are terribly misguided and foolish not to believe in Christ, and I pray daily that God will change their minds and hearts and heal them from their foolishness because I do not want to see them headed toward eternal destruction. How could I claim to love them and remain silent about their unbelief? I even pray for friends who have died without knowing and/or believing in Christ and it grieves me to the core. Yet I still ask God to be merciful to them and to remember them for good, not for judgment because I know first-hand that God is a merciful, gracious, loving, and just God and I believe in the saving and forgiving power of the Cross of Jesus Christ. There is no biblical warrant for me praying in this manner for the dead but I can do no other; I loved them in this mortal life and because I loved them, I must pray for them. So to repeat, I get where Wright is coming from and like him, I believe our ultimate salvation is for God alone to decide, not us. But I also believe that salvation without a saving faith in Christ, a saving faith grounded in his Resurrection, is very unlikely, if not impossible.

That is why I have never, ever once thought that belief in the Resurrection was optional for Christians because the Resurrection is at the very heart and soul of the Christian Faith and is entirely non-negotiable. I am not the only one who thinks this way. Consider what Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthian Church a decade or two after Christ’s Death and Resurrection:

I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him.

But tell me this—since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world (1 Corinthians 15.3-9, 12-19).


Saint Paul pulls no punches and makes no bones about this matter: Belief in the Resurrection is not optional for Christians. No Resurrection, no Christian Faith, no forgiveness of sins, no conquering of Death, no hope for a future bodily existence living in the direct Presence of God the Father in his new world, the new heavens and earth (see, e.g., Revelation 21.1-8). Elsewhere Saint Paul demonstrated that he too had a huge and generous pastoral heart and cared about the welfare of his people (see, e.g., here). But in Saint Paul’s view their welfare demanded that they believe the Faith once delivered to the saints by the apostles who had been eyewitnesses to Christ’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. If Christ isn’t raised, then his Death on the Cross did not take care of our sins and reconcile us to God once and for all, and if we are not reconciled to God then we have no hope and chance of living with him forever because our God is a Holy and just God who cannot allow any kind of sin (or sinner) to be in his Presence, and for our own good—who in his/her right mind would want to live with Evil forever? The stakes couldn’t be higher and by claiming that a belief in the Resurrection is optional for his friend (and therefore others like him), Wright is sadly prevaricating about this Truth out of a misguided sense of love, loyalty, and friendship for his wayward friend. I cannot imagine Saint Paul ever doing such a thing under any circumstance. That did not seem to deter Wright from quoting Saint Paul in Romans 10.9 in defending his opinion about Borg and Borg’s rejection of Christ’s Resurrection: “If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” But this is cherry picking Saint Paul’s entire body of work and is quite uncharacteristic of Wright as a theologian and scholar. Moreover, if one does not believe in bodily resurrection, one cannot really believe that Christ was raised from the dead as Saint Paul and countless orthodox Christians have understood resurrection.

Borg, of course, didn’t believe in the bodily Resurrection of Christ, mistakenly believing that Christ was raised in some spiritual sense. This isn’t a new way of thinking. It’s an old heresy that has been with us in various forms from almost the beginning. But as Wright brilliantly explains and defends in his books—The Resurrection of the Son of God, Surprised by Hope (a book of which I keep extra copies on hand to give to others who struggle with their faith and/or the Resurrection), and most recently (and not so brilliantly except for the last chapter), God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal—resurrection for the first Christians (and ever since) meant and means bodily resurrection. We see this belief manifesting itself in the gospel writers’ narrative of Christ’s Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Here, for example, is Saint Luke recounting a scene from the Last Supper:

Then [Jesus] took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. Then he said, “Take this and share it among yourselves. For I will not drink wine again until the Kingdom of God has come.” (Luke 22.17-18).

If resurrection means some kind of continuing spiritual existence in a disembodied state as Borg and the other Platonists/heretics believe (and I used to think before I truly understood the nature of resurrection and the New Testament’s proclamation of the new creation), how will Jesus and his followers be able to drink wine and eat bread together? Does not compute. No, as Wright and others have brilliantly defended, Christ’s Resurrection points to the promise of God’s new creation, the new heavens and earth, a new bodily form of existence. God had to become human in Jesus to deal with the sins of the body, body being defined as body, mind, and spirit—the whole human package—not just our physical bodies. We see the NT writers affirm this in various places (cf. Luke 24.35-43). Consider, for example, this from the writer of the letter to the Hebrews:

14 Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. 15 Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying (Hebrews 2.14-15).

Our first ancestors sinned in the body, in their flesh and blood, in their body and mind and spirit—the whole human package—the way God created them and us, and were expelled from Paradise, from living in God’s direct Presence, the very definition of Paradise (Genesis 3). And because they had sinned in the body, Christ had to take on a human body to deal with and conquer Sin for all time. Saint Paul likewise affirms this when he wrote to the Church at Rome:

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8.1-8).

Did you catch that? On the cross, God condemned our sin in the flesh (body), not Jesus the Son, so that God would not have to condemn us as we rightfully deserve; hence, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ (Romans 8.1). In other words, Christ bore the terrible brunt of God’s wrath and anger on all human sin willingly and in cooperation with the Father to spare us individually from having to bear that wrath forever in Hell. The body is important to God because we are important to God as creatures who bear his Image. And so God rescued the body as well as our souls because humans are comprised of body and soul, not just soul or not just body. This has been the consistent story of Scripture from beginning to end. None of this would be true if Christ were not raised from the dead as Saint Paul asserts above. The Resurrection validated Christ’s saving Death for us.

Moreover, without the bodily Resurrection of Christ, his Ascension becomes nonsensical. If Christ were nothing but a disembodied spirit, his body would not need to ascend into heaven, into God’s realm. But from the very beginning the Church has proclaimed that Christ’s resurrected body has gone to be with the Father in heaven, not just his spirit. Again, no Resurrection, no Ascension, no promised new creation, no Christian Faith.

And after the apostles had died, the Church has consistently maintained this Resurrection hope and faith (and not without a struggle!). Hear Irenaeus, a spiritual grandson of the apostles:

If our flesh is not saved, then the Lord has not redeemed us with his blood, the eucharistic chalice does not make us sharers in his blood, and the bread we break does not make us sharers in his body. There can be no blood without veins, flesh and the rest of the human substance, and this the Word of God actually became: it was with his own blood that he redeemed us. As the Apostle says: “In him, through his blood, we have been redeemed, our sins have been forgiven.” (Read more.)

Consider also the Creeds of the Church, statements of faith that sprang in part from the various heresies that threatened the Church’s teaching about resurrection and new creation. In the Apostles’ Creed, the creed usually recited at Christian funerals, we affirm explicitly the “resurrection of the body” as we do implicitly in the Nicene Creed (“we look forward to the resurrection of the dead”). Again, as the NT writers, the Apostles, the Church, and Wright himself all maintain, when we are talking resurrection we are talking about bodies. Creation matters to God because God created it and us to be good, not for evil and rebellion, and God has promised to restore his good but corrupted and cursed creation one day. That’s the overarching story of Holy Scripture.

I have already gone on longer than I intended, but this matter is critically important. The Church and world need Christian leaders to be clear and bold in their thinking, teaching, and preaching about the Faith because it is the Story of God’s power to save us from Sin and Death by intervening on our behalf personally in the man Jesus Christ. We have suffered too long from muddled and heretical Christian teachers who really don’t believe their own Story, the Story of Christ and God’s plan of salvation as laid out in the Old and New Testaments. This has led to Christians becoming timid in (and often dismissive of) their faith because they have been taught a watered down, toothless, and false version of the Christian Faith, and we certainly don’t need one of the best of the Christian thinkers heretofore to be giving damaging mixed and muddled messages like he did in the above interview, well-intentioned as it might be. The Resurrection is absolutely critical to having a saving faith in Christ. It is what makes Christianity the only real game in town. Without it, we are lost and without hope. With it, we have the hope and promise of the fulfillment of God’s promise to finally and completely deal with the problems of Evil and Sin, problems that inevitably lead to our death and destruction without God’s intervention on our behalf in and through Christ. I pray and hope Bishop Wright will recant this nonsense and repent of this grave error. Resurrection—bodily resurrection—is not an optional belief for Christians. I pray and hope he will once again speak boldly and clearly about Christ’s Death and Resurrection. Otherwise he ceases to be a credible witness to Christ and that would be a true shame and loss for the Church. Lord have mercy.

For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

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Eastertide 2026: Rev’d Fleming Rutledge Muses on Low Sunday

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All good questions, especially for anyone who calls himself/herself “Christian,” and it is very hard to argue with her conclusion. Holy Mother Church has dropped the ball on this and God’s people suffer as a result. Lord have mercy. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Why is it that so many people flock to the churches on Easter Day, listen to the message that Jesus has been raised from the dead, receive their Easter Communion, and then don’t return? If you were invited to dinner with someone who had risen from the dead and they asked you to come again the following week, wouldn’t you want to go? Especially if you were assured of participation in that new and risen life, wouldn’t you want to come back more than anything else you might be invited to do? Who would lie in bed and watch Meet the Press if they could receive eternal life? As I thought about this, it occurred to me that the reason people don’t come back on the Sunday after Easter is that they don’t really believe that anything unusual has taken place. Something nice, maybe; something cheerful and up-lifting; but not an honest-to-God resurrection from the dead. 

—Fleming Rutledge, The Undoing of Death, 300

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Eastertide 2026: An Ancient Commentator Muses on the Eucharist and Resurrection

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If our flesh is not saved, then the Lord has not redeemed us with his blood, the eucharistic chalice does not make us sharers in his blood, and the bread we break does not make us sharers in his body. There can be no blood without veins, flesh and the rest of the human substance, and this the Word of God actually became: it was with his own blood that he redeemed us. As the Apostle says: “In him, through his blood, we have been redeemed, our sins have been forgiven.”

We are his members and we are nourished by creation, which is his gift to us, for it is he who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall, He declared that the chalice, which comes from his creation, was his blood, and he makes it the nourishment of our blood. He affirmed that the bread, which comes from his creation, was his body, and he makes it the nourishment of our body. When the chalice we mix and the bread we bake receive the word of God, the eucharistic elements become the body and blood of Christ, by which our bodies live and grow. How then can it be said that flesh belonging to the Lord’s own body and nourished by his body and blood is incapable of receiving God’s gift of eternal life? Saint Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians that “we are members of his body,” of his flesh and bones. He is not speaking of some spiritual and incorporeal kind of person, “for spirits do not have flesh and bones.” He is speaking of a real human body composed of flesh, sinews and bones, nourished by the chalice of Christ’s blood and receiving growth from the bread which is his body.

The slip of a vine planted in the ground bears fruit at the proper time. The grain of wheat falls into the ground and decays only to be raised up again and multiplied by the Spirit of God who sustains all things. The Wisdom of God places these things at the service of human beings and when they receive God’s word they become the eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ. In the same way our bodies, which have been nourished by the eucharist, will be buried in the earth and will decay, but they will rise again at the appointed time, for the Word of God will raise them up to the glory of God the Father. Then the Father will clothe our mortal nature in immortality and freely endow our corruptible nature with incorruptibility, for God’s power is shown most perfectly in weakness.

Against Heresies 5, 2, 2-3: SC 153, 30-38

Saint Irenaeus, a late second-century Christian commentator and apologist, was bishop of Lyons and a spiritual grandson of the Apostles, having studied under Polycarp who in turn had studied under the Apostle John, one of the original twelve Apostles of Christ. So we can have great confidence that he received the real teachings of the Lord. Here he speaks of the relationship between Holy Eucharist and the Resurrection of the body that Christ’s Resurrection signals.

Resurrection, as Saint Irenaeus reminds us, is about new bodily existence, not living forever as a spirit without a body. His logic above is straightforward: The Eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ after it has been consecrated, signals a new created order in which our mortal bodies are raised from the dead and reanimated by the Holy Spirit to live forever in God’s direct presence (1 Corinthians 15.35-50; Revelation 21.1-7). If the Eucharist consists of created elements (bread and wine) that are Christ’s body and blood after they are consecrated, it makes no sense that they would point to a state of existence (eternal life) that is spiritual rather than physical in nature. Just as consecrated bread and wine signal a new creation, Resurrection signals a new created order, one that is entirely consistent with God’s original good intentions for his creation. We get to live in that new order only by having a relationship with the crucified and risen Lord Jesus because only Christ’s Death can cleanse us of the sin and filth that prevent us from living in the Presence of a Holy God. Every time we come to Christ’s Holy Table to feed on his body and blood, we are strengthened in our living relationship with Christ and reminded of our glorious future because of his great love and sacrifice for us. What could possibly be better and more hopeful?

If you are a Christian, the next time you are beaten down by the news and events of today (they are legion) and start to lose hope, do as Saint Irenaeus and countless other Christians have done: Remember what Christ has done for you in his saving Death and the future awaiting you that his Resurrection proclaims. If you are not a Christian, consider how much better this hope and future is than the one of your own making, and choose to follow Christ.

For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

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Eastertide 2026: On Not Being Ashamed of the Gospel

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Below is a sermon from Rev’d Fleming Rutledge in which she addresses the elephant in the room for many Christians, especially those who live in the West, who are ashamed of the gospel. Maddeningly, many of the Church’s teachers, preachers, and leaders are likewise ashamed of the gospel, especially when it comes to preaching and teaching about Christ’s Resurrection! Rev’d Rutledge is not one of those teachers, preachers, and leaders, thanks be to Christ. Christians have the best game in town, the ONLY game in town, and yet many do not realize the pearl of greatest value that is theirs for the taking (because it is offered freely to them by God their Father.

Lord Jesus Christ, be pleased to bless your Body, the Church, with a new generation of teachers preachers, and leaders, especially bishops, who are not ashamed of the gospel and who are willing and able to preach and teach the gospel faithfully with all boldness, that your people too may become bold for the gospel in their speaking, thinking, and living. Forgive those leaders, teachers, and preachers, who are ashamed of the gospel and who have led your people likewise to be ashamed of the gospel. Forgive them, risen Savior. Heal them. Bring them to true repentance for their wickedness, for your tender mercy’s sake, and for the sake of your beloved Body, the Church. In your Powerful Name we pray, and for your sake. Amen.

For those with ears to hear, listen and understand (and then pick up the book and read the rest of it).

Beyond Possibility

With God, all things are possible. (Saint Mark 10:27)

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven. Going to the tomb, he rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he is risen.…” (Saint Matthew 28:2–6)

The Easter greeting that we have just exchanged is very ancient. It goes back to the first centuries of the Christian church. As I’m sure you know, the Greek Orthodox people, to this day, say Christos anesti! Alethos anesti! (“Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”) to each other during Easter Week. What a wonderful custom.

Well, we have said it. Now let me ask you a question. Do you believe what you have said?

A great many churchgoers have gotten the idea that you can’t believe in the Resurrection if you want to be a sophisticated person. In the midst of all the articles about the mass suicide of cult members in Rancho Santa Fe, there have been many sneering comments about religion. One writer said that religion led to bizarre cultic behavior because it thrived on “repression, exclusion, and control.” These messages, heard over and over, have their effect. The cumulative result is to make Christians feel sheepish about their faith. St. Paul was not immune to this effect in his own time; that’s why he wrote to the Roman Christians, “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Romans 1:16).

It is a feature of our time that preachers in the mainline churches, if not ashamed exactly, are embarrassed to say anything straightforward about the Resurrection. I went to hear a sermon preached in an Ivy League chapel by a Ph.D. student whom I knew to be a believer. You wouldn’t have known it from his sermon. I asked him afterward why he had been so timid, and he murmured something about the congregation being “very skeptical and urbane.” Well, indeed: the “uneducated, common men” (Acts 4:13) who became apostles after the Resurrection might have been similarly intimidated. If they had, however, you and I would never have heard the name of Jesus Christ.

I have heard and read many Easter sermons in my day and I have a lot of them in my files. Here are some actual quotes:

“On Easter Day, the world takes a turn for the better.”

“The Resurrection is the divine inspiration for us, giving us the strength and courage to emulate Jesus.”

“Peter is a symbol of human weakness; his discovery of acceptance and forgiveness is personified in the idea of the risen Jesus.”

“In their table fellowship after the Crucifixion, the heartbroken disciples gradually came to sense that Jesus was still with them.”

“The early Christians came to believe that love is stronger than death.”

“The disciples came to believe that Jesus lives forever in the faith of those who trust his message.”

Over and over in these sermons, the same words appear: the disciples “came to believe” something about Jesus. In other words, the impulse for belief arose out of themselves. The New Testament says something quite different. The words of the angel announce something completely foreign to human possibility: “He is not here. He is risen.” On the road to Emmaus, the two disciples did not recognize Jesus until “their eyes were opened.” The syntax clearly indicates that their recognition of the risen Christ was initiated by God. Think about this: in the quotations from the sermons I just read, God is not the acting subject of any of the sentences. A large number of Easter sermons today seem timid because the speakers do not seem confident that God can, or that God did, do anything outside of human capacity.

In one sermon that I heard myself, the preacher said that Easter is about “the enduring symbols of ultimate truth.” But you could hear that message anywhere; it is no different from any number of sayings having only the most tenuous connection, or no connection, to the Christian faith. It does not seem likely to me that anything so abstract as an enduring symbol of ultimate truth could have galvanized, virtually overnight, a tiny band of scruffy fishermen and other assorted nonentities, all of them completely discredited in the eyes of the world because they were disciples of a man who had been gruesomely and publicly executed by the highest authorities of church and state. Do you think that commonly held but nature-bound ideas about life after death could have been the motivating force that took hold of those men and women and transformed them into an unstoppable force that within a few years was setting the whole Mediterranean world ablaze?

A world-famous figure of our own day, a woman nurtured in the church, was widely quoted at the time of her husband’s death; she said, “All the world’s religions teach that there is some sort of life after death. I cling to that hope.”

Many people are comforted by thoughts such as this. Apparently it was enough for her. Maybe it is enough for you. I confess that it is not enough for me. More important, such reflections fall far short of the New Testament message. In my ministry I have learned to recognize the look, the feel, and the smell of death. I have been present with people at the time of death many times and I have never become immune to the change that comes over the body. The New Testament refers to death as an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Even in the case of what we call a merciful death, there is still a horrible indignity, a fearsome intrusiveness about death that causes us to feel its presence as a hostile, invading Power that robs the human being of everything it was ever meant to be. I keep thinking about an inconsolably bereaved husband I knew, a prominent and vigorous man in his early sixties who was looking forward to a happy twenty-year retirement in a new house he and his wife had just built. A hit-and-run driver has robbed him of his companion. Death has destroyed their hopes. He is one who can testify that nothing can ever replace a uniquely loved person. Nebulous messages about some sort of religious hope for an afterlife simply do not have the power to stare down the stark ugliness of death. Such messages sound too much like wishful thinking to me. We cannot seriously imagine that, after watching their Master pinned up to die like an insect, an object of utmost contempt and public disgust, the disciples would suddenly be transformed by being reminded that there was always a hope for some sort of life after death.

We owe it to those first Christian disciples to do our very best to understand the utter hopelessness of their situation after the Crucifixion. They had invested their whole lives in what appeared to be a diabolical joke. They had seen their beloved Master scourged almost to death, dragged through the streets, nailed to a cross and abandoned to suffer public agony in the face of the obscene mockery of everybody in Jerusalem. Once they had basked in the reflected status of a celebrity who had been mobbed by large crowds; now he had been judged a nonperson, fit only for the most degrading and sadistic death that the human mind was capable of devising. If there had been any solidarity among his followers, it had vanished; not one person had dared to come forward in the Master’s defense, and their supposed leader, Peter, had cravenly denied Jesus three times. There was nothing left. It is preposterous to think of them pulling themselves together with the sorts of thoughts available to them from the mystery religions surrounding them. Frankly, their Jewish faith, based in the utterly realistic and unromantic Hebrew scriptures, would not have allowed any such vague and generic hopes. The Messiah was supposed to usher in the kingdom of God; for those disciples who had staked their lives on Jesus being that Messiah, it cannot be stated too strongly: there was no hope.

Everyone who has studied the New Testament agrees that something happened to change the situation. Even the skeptics who seem determined to demystify the Resurrection into something bland and predictable will agree that something happened.

But what was it? If it wasn’t an experience of personal forgiveness or renewed hopefulness or positive thinking, what was it?

Imagine that you are one of the women going to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. We do have a way of going to visit graves, don’t we? But why do we go? Isn’t it because we want to try to hold on to some kind of shred of closeness to the dead person? There were flowers here in our local cemetery on Easter Day; this is a way we have of saying we haven’t forgotten, we miss you, we love you, we wish you had not gone away. We most definitely do not visit a grave because we expect to see somebody rise out of it.

The women were not going to Jesus’ grave with any sort of expectation whatsoever. The New Testament is quite clear about that. They set out for the tomb because they felt a longing to have some sort of contact with what was left of their dead Master. They were hoping for no miracle. Dead people don’t come back. In fact, so little did they expect a miracle that the sole subject of discussion was who was going to roll away the stone. If they didn’t think that the power of God could roll away the stone, they most assuredly did not think the power of God would raise Jesus from the grave.

St. Matthew explains that the tomb of Jesus had been sealed by an express order of Pontius Pilate, and that a guard of Roman soldiers had been posted. At dawn on the first day of the week, the women came to the tomb. As they approached, St. Matthew tells us,

There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven. Going to the tomb, he rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he is risen.…”

If that doesn’t make your hair stand on end, I have not read it right. Matthew means for it to strike us with utter, dumbfounded, stupefied awe. Perhaps this retelling gives you at least some sense of the unprecedented, unlooked-for, unimaginable nature of the event. Note the action of the angel. Why does he roll away the stone? To let Jesus out? No indeed; Jesus is already gone. Why does the angel roll away the stone then? He does it to let the women look in, to see that the tomb is empty. Jesus was raised out of death into life during the night, before the women got there.

I can feel the goosebumps on the back of my neck as I say this. Yes, I know all the objections: I know that the Gospel accounts seem to contradict each other; I know that the Roman soldiers never wrote up a report; I know that medical science scoffs at this; I know that none of it can be proved; I know it isn’t possible as we understand possibility. But I also know that this is a message that would explain everything that happened afterward. He is not here; he is risen. That, truly, is a piece of news to shake the foundations of the Roman Empire and the stronghold of death itself.

“Go quickly,” said the angel to the women in Matthew’s account, “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ ” What other message on earth or in heaven could reverse the effect of a crucifixion? I do not believe that there is any news ever uttered by human tongue equal to the announcement that the citadel of Death had been stormed by the only Power capable of bearing away its standard.

The battle imagery is right. The New Testament is pervaded by battle imagery. In the words of the well-loved Easter hymn: “The strife is o’er, the battle done; the victory of life is won.… The powers of death have done their worst; but Christ their legions hath dispersed.” Can there be anyone who has not thrilled to a victory parade? Well, this is the greatest triumphal parade of all time; Jesus has beaten down death, routed the hosts of Satan, and driven the enemy into full flight. As we read in Colossians: “He [God the Father] disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in him [Jesus]” (Colossians 2:15). This is no time for wishy-washy sentiments about springtime in the heart; this is a time for fanfares and drum rolls and choruses from the book of Revelation:

Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. (19:6)

The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. (11:15)

We give thanks to thee, Lord God Almighty, who art and who wast, that thou hast taken thy great power and begun to reign. (11:17)

The salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down.… Rejoice then, O heaven and you that dwell therein! (12:10, 12)

I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself … and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses.… On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords. (19:11–16)

Now that is dynamite; dynamite enough to strengthen these apostles that you see around you in stained glass to defy the Roman Empire and go to exile, prison, or death so that you and I might say to one another two thousand years later, “The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!”

May we all rejoice together on this snowy New England day, knowing that his Resurrection is not dependent on the weather. “O ye ice and snow, O ye frost and cold, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.” Spring will come. Spring will come, not because it is in nature, but because God has raised his Son from the dead. May God confirm this miracle in our lives, now and in the hour of our death, so that we may remember the angel who descends like lightning from heaven, who rolls the stone of doubt and fear from our hearts, who invites us into the very bastion of Death to show us that the tomb is empty, that the Enemy has been routed, that the unthinkable and the impossible has happened: He is risen; he goes before us; we will see him. May this incredible message give you joy today and always, and may the God of Jesus Christ our Lord be praised for ever and ever.

Fleming Rutledge, “Beyond Possibility (Monday in Easter Week),” in The Undoing of Death: Sermons for Holy Week and Easter (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 251–259.

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Eastertide 2026: A Letter to Diognetus—The Christian in the World

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Christians are indistinguishable from others either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of human beings. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them [to the elements to die]. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law.

Christians love all people, but all people persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments.

Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the lofty and divinely appointed function of Christians, from which they are not permitted to excuse themselves.

Chapters 5-6: Funk 1, 397-401

This remains as true today as it did in the early 2nd-century. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

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Easter Sunday 2026: A Family Easter Tradition

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My dad owned a shoe store when I was growing up and one of the Easter traditions that developed in our home was that the Easter Bunny would leave a colored hard-boiled egg in my shoe on Easter morning. I would wake up and find it there and when I was older, my dad and I would share an Easter egg together for breakfast before going to worship.

Of course, Easter Bunnies come and Easter Bunnies go, if you catch my drift, and after I went away to college the EB seemed not to be able to find me on Easter Sunday because for many years I would wake up on Easter Sunday morning with no egg in my shoe. Understandable. Then I married a fantastic woman who, among other things, works really hard at honoring family traditions, and low and behold the Easter Bunny has found where I live and started laying an Easter egg in my shoe on Easter Sunday morning just like when I was a kid! Strange how that works.

I am thankful for thoughtful Easter Bunnies who love me and the egg they lay. That EB. What a pip (as my mama would say). Happy Easter to you and yours! Christ is risen! Alleluia!! The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!! Now there’s an Easter tradition worth really embracing and preserving!

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Eastertide 2026: Dr. Ben Witherington: Will Our Heavenly Bodies be Immaterial?

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A very good lesson on the Resurrection—specifically what Saint Paul meant by “spiritual bodies” (1 Corinthians 15.44)—and quite appropriate for Eastertide since the Resurrection is all about new bodies! By all means be refreshed and strengthened by your Resurrection hope, but by all means also know what that hope really is all about!

For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

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Eastertide 2026: N.T. Wright: Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?

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Wonderful stuff. The video is over an hour but you don’t have over an hour to watch it. Do yourself a favor and watch it anyway.

And if you are the reading type rather than the viewing type, pick up Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope, and read chapter 4 because it essentially contains the contents of this lecture.

For those with ears to hear, listen—PLEASE—and understand.

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Easter Sunday 2026: From the Sermon Archives: Our Easter Hope: We Need it Now More than Ever

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Sermon originally preached on Easter Sunday, April 4, 2021. As usual, it will be helpful for you to read the assigned lectionary texts below by clicking on or tapping their links before you read the sermon. For those with ears to hear, listen and understand.

Lectionary texts: Acts 10.34-43; 1 Corinthians 15.1-11; St. John 20.1-18.

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

Today we celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Sadly there is a lot of muddled thinking about the Resurrection and I blame the Church primarily for that because it capitulated to the forces of secularization and so-called “enlightened” thinking, thinking that dismisses Christ’s resurrection as made-up fantasy. To put it bluntly, the Church for the most part, at least in the West, has lost her bold voice and failed to proclaim and live out her resurrection hope, and we suffer because of it. We can’t expect the people of God to proclaim and live their Easter Faith if Holy Mother Church doesn’t teach them what that faith is and what it is supposed to look like! So this morning I want us to look at exactly what the first Christians proclaimed when they proclaimed Christ’s Resurrection. Why? Because without the Spirit-filled power of an informed and robust Easter Faith, given the crazy state of our world today and the patients who are trying to run the asylum, we as Christians will inevitably succumb to the destructive Zeitgeist of this age and in doing so bring harm to ourselves and dishonor the Name of the One we profess to follow.

On Friday we looked at what was so “good” about Good Friday and saw that the cross of Christ is a tangible sign of God’s great love for us and his desire to offer us forgiveness, irrespective of who we are or what we have done or failed to do, thereby establishing the necessary conditions for our reconciliation with God, a message echoed in today’s reading from Acts. This is quite necessary if we ever hope to find real healing and peace. Without the healing and forgiveness of Christ found only in having faith in him, no matter how imperfect that faith, it is impossible to be a faithful disciple of Jesus where we can love and serve him in joyful obedience, especially in the face of the suffering we must inevitably endure for his sake. Simply put, we cannot love and serve Christ and others if we are distracted by our guilt, failure, and fears. And so forgiveness is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to be a a follower of Christ and the cross is God’s everlasting promise to us that we have that forgiveness. How do I know this is true? How can you know this is true so that you can stake your very life on it? Is it because I’m a smart guy? Well yes I am (good looking too), but that’s not why I know it’s true. We all can have great confidence that this is true because Jesus Christ is raised from the dead! Without the Resurrection, we never would have heard the name of Jesus let alone worship him, and without the cross, the Resurrection would not be possible because we would still be dead in our sins, alienated and hostile to God the Father, and deprived of any real hope. Simply put, the new heavens and earth will not be open to those who are still sin-stained. More about that anon. As St. Paul took pains to remind us in our epistle lesson, Christ’s death and resurrection were historical events, the crucified and risen Christ being witnessed and experienced by hundreds of people, and with it the turning point of history had arrived, the very essence of NEWS, Good News. The old order was done for; God’s new order had arrived, and with it God’s healing love and forgiveness. So the first thing we need to say about Christ’s Resurrection is that it is an historical event inextricably tied to his saving death on the cross. This is critical for a vibrant Easter Faith.

Second, and equally crucial for us to have a meaningful Easter Faith is to have a clear understanding of what resurrection means. When the NT writers and early Church proclaimed Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, they didn’t mean that Jesus had gone to heaven to be with God. It didn’t mean that Jesus was somehow available to them in a new spiritual way so that they could commune with him. That’s an ancient gnostic heresy that is still the darling of many today, including sadly many Christians. In both instances, our Lord would still have been dead and gone, his body presumably moldering somewhere, but certainly still a corpse. This focus on spirituality and life after death is emphatically not what the NT writers meant when they proclaimed Christ was raised from the dead. If Christ was merely available to his first followers in some mystical or spiritual sense, what difference would that really have made to them? Think about it. When our own beloved die, we might draw some comfort and solace if we think there really is life after death. But the fact is, they’re still dead. We can’t see them, touch them, talk with them, hear them, smell them, or interact with them in any meaningful human way. Neither does our hope that our dead loved ones somehow survive after their mortal death generally have the power to change our lives much. We must adjust to life without them, and if we had any meaningful relationship with them in this mortal life, our lives going forward are always poorer because they are no longer available to us as they were in this mortal life. No, if Christ’s Resurrection was simply about a new kind of spirituality, the first disciples wouldn’t have been running all over the place that first Easter Sunday, full of wonder, excitement, and fear. I know I don’t have that kind of reaction when I visit the graves of my loved ones. They’re  dead and gone and my life is the poorer for it, forgetting for the moment my Easter Faith. So to repeat, resurrection is not about dying and going to heaven or life after death or spirituality.

So what is resurrection? When the first followers of Christ proclaimed that he was raised from the dead, they were talking about new bodily existence and this is where the brilliance of St. John as a theologian and storyteller shines brightly. As we read last night at the Easter Vigil, creation has always mattered to God. Scripture proclaims that before God created there was nothing but darkness and chaos, but that God created goodness and order to replace that. Genesis declares very clearly that God’s original creation was good and God’s creation of his human image-bearers to run his good creation made the whole enterprise very good. Here we see a good God speak into existence a good created order, complete with his image-bearers to run the whole thing. 

But then came human sin and rebellion, and that allowed the powers of Evil and Death to enter God’s good creation to corrupt and disorder it. The whole story of Scripture, then, is about how God is rescuing his good created order (us included) from our bondage to the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death. Fast forward now to St. John’s gospel, which as we saw at Christmas, purposely mirrors the creation narratives of Genesis 1-2, but with the focus specifically on the Son of God, Jesus Christ. As we saw Friday night, Good Friday represented the culmination of God’s redemptive work in Christ, the sixth day of God’s (re)creative process, mirroring the sixth day of the original creation narratives that represented the pinnacle of God’s creative activity as he created humans. On the cross, Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures as St. Paul declares in our epistle lesson, and his dying words were, “It is finished.” But what was finished? As we saw above and on Good Friday, what was finished is God’s redemptive work to reconcile us to him through the blood of the Lamb so that we could once again take our rightful place as God’s good and wise image-bearers to run God’s new creation, the new heavens and earth. This was always God’s creative intent. And then on the seventh day, Christ rested in his tomb, paralleling the seventh day of creation when God rested from his creative work. Now here we are, the first day of the new week, the eighth day. St. John clearly wants us to see that when God raised Jesus from the dead on that day, God ushered in the new world, the new heavens and earth. It’s so important that the evangelist repeats it later in this chapter as we will see next week. Christ died to make all things new and break the powers of Evil, Sin, and Death so that we would no longer be enslaved by them. Why? Because creation matters to God. We matter to God, and Scripture testifies consistently that it has always been God the Father’s intent to heal and restore his good but corrupted created order, us included. 

And so this is what the first followers meant when they talked about Christ’s Resurrection. New bodily life, a new created order. As we saw in our gospel lesson, Mary tried to grab hold of Jesus. You don’t do that with a ghost or disembodied spirit. Christ’s new body had both similarities to our mortal bodies as well as new characteristics. His followers could see him, hear him, touch him, converse with him, and eat and drink with him, just like they could in his mortal life. Yet his body was different. He could mask his identity as he did initially with Mary in the garden and with his disciples at the Sea of Tiberius. He could appear and disappear behind locked doors. All of this would certainly have produced the kind of commotion and fear the gospel writers all report happening that first Easter Sunday because it was something totally unexpected. And let’s be clear about that too. The women didn’t come to Christ’s tomb expecting to see him risen from the dead. They knew, as we do, that dead people don’t come out of their graves. They came instead to mourn his death and anoint his body to slow down the inevitable decomposition that accompanies death. 

So why is this all critical to us and our Easter Faith? Well, if, as Revelation promises in its closing chapters, God’s new world is a-coming, the day when the dimensions of heaven and earth are joined together in a new created order, we will need new bodies to inhabit it. Why? Because the new creation will be a material order, but also something entirely new, a world devoid of all the evils and hurts and heartaches we must endure in this mortal life, and it will last forever because Death will be abolished forever. Therefore we need bodies that will last forever, the kind of bodies that are patterned after our risen Lord’s body, suitable to live in God’s new world. St. Paul spells this out in detail later in 1 Cor 15 but that will have to wait for another day. The critical point here is that when the first Christians spoke of Christ’s Resurrection they were proclaiming new bodily life, and that is so much more satisfactory than some disembodied spiritual existence. 

Why? Because as we’ve seen, without a body, human relationships as we know and value them would be impossible. Take St. Peter’s restoration for instance. When our Lord restored St. Peter after the latter’s disastrous denial of Christ, he had to be embodied for it to have a lasting impact on St. Peter. Our own spiritual struggles validate this. Unless we hear a tender voice speaking to us, unless we can look into another person’s eyes and hear the tone of his or her voice and feel the person’s gentle touch, we will never be quite sure if we are forgiven or restored. We ask forgiveness in prayer and we are assured that we receive it because Christ lives and intercedes for us. But we receive it by faith. Unless we hear his voice or receive a clear intimation from him, there is always the possibility of doubt. Are we really forgiven? I suspect St. Peter’s catastrophic denials were so severe that nothing less than an encounter with his risen embodied Lord would do it for him. God, of course, knows best what we need to receive his healing love and forgiveness, but the point remains that without bodies we do not have what it takes to be truly human. And if we are not truly human we are not God’s image-bearers and God’s original and eternal intent for us is destroyed. If we believe in an omnipotent God, a moment’s thought will confirm to us what a ridiculous proposition that is. What Christ’s resurrection announced to his first followers and to us is that the old world order of Sin, Evil, and Death is defeated, that a new day has dawned—God’s new day, the beginning of the new heavens and earth. That day is not yet consummated but the war has been won and we are the beneficiaries. The rest, as a cabbie once said to N.T. Wright, is basically rock and roll, isn’t it?

So how can our Easter Faith assist us in the living of our days in this increasingly mad and bizarre world? Time limits me to two basic ideas to get you jump-started in your own thinking and reflections. First, Christ’s Resurrection invites us to look at our present world and evaluate it using different criteria. Instead of looking at the past and present to assess our future prospects, what if we use our future hope of new creation to assess our present world? When we assess our future prospects using the past and present, how can there really be any hope? The human condition hasn’t changed. Science and technology, while making our lives so much better and easier in some ways, has not changed who we are. Human rapacity, sin, selfishness, pride, greed, and lust for power (to name just a few) continue unabated and unchanged by any of our scientific advancements, the Star Trek myth notwithstanding. In fact, if anything, technology has exposed human wickedness in unprecedented ways. We have instant access to an unending stream of bad news and human madness and evil. Death still reigns. People still suffer. Old age and infirmity still come. We are still alienated from each other and the God-ordained institutions of marriage and family are crumbling before our eyes. Our nation becomes increasingly divided and there are very few voices of reason out there these days. Based on this, what is our realistic hope for the future? This is the old world order at its finest and worst, and with it comes darkness, despair, sickness, and death. 

But what if we really believe Christ’s Resurrection announced the in-breaking of God’s new world, a world in which Evil, Sin, and Death are destroyed forever? A world in which there is no more sickness, sorrow, suffering, alienation, despair, or want of any kind? A world that is dominated by the love and goodness of God, a world about which St. Paul spoke in 1 Corinthians 13? To be sure, that world has not yet arrived, but it’s coming in full one day and we are called by Christ to so order our lives in ways that will announce to the powers of the old order that their day is through. We do this locally as the family of God. We love each other, care for each other, and suffer with and for each other. We bear each others quirks and pricklies. We grieve with those who grieve and rejoice with those who rejoice. We worship together our risen Lord and Savior and eagerly await his return to finish the work he started in his death and resurrection. We refuse to take revenge and are quick to forgive, especially those who hate Christ and us for being his followers. This will inevitably produce suffering for us, but we have a real hope and future. We know a new world is coming some day. It may be a million years from now. It may be tomorrow. But that doesn’t matter. We assess our present and imitate our crucified and risen Lord because we believe that his Resurrection announced a new world order, a world order run by God alone, a perfect world in which we have been invited to live forever because of the love of God poured out for us on the cross and vindicated that first Easter Sunday. As the great bishop of S. India, Lesslie Newbigin, once said, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.” Exactly.

And on a more personal and emotional note, Christ’s Resurrection promises us that Death will not have the final say. If you have ever watched a loved one suffer and die or are enduring a loved one’s infirmity or terminal disease, you know how heartbreaking that is. But your Easter hope can help mitigate the heartbreak. Why? Because we know that the ugliness and suffering we and our loved ones are enduring (or endured) will one day be redeemed. Broken, weak, ugly bodies on the verge of death will be restored to new beauty and vitality unknown in this mortal life. Suffering, sorrow, and separation will be no more. We will once again get to see, touch, hear, smell, and converse with our beloved as fully restored human beings, perfect and beautiful in unimaginable ways, our relationships with them healed and restored. Who would not want that? But that day has not yet arrived. Until it does we must be content that our dead loved ones are taking their rest in their Lord who claimed them from all eternity, safe in his loving care in heaven as they await their new bodies. In the meantime hope remains, the sure and certain expectation of things to come, because Jesus Christ is raised from the dead, announcing God’s promised new reality, helping us to endure the unendurable until that great and glorious day. The hope of resurrection fulfills our deepest longing for restored human relationships shattered by death.

If you are having a hard time imagining this, don’t worry. God’s power and love and beauty, which of course the Resurrection is all about, is hard for us mortal finite humans to imagine. But just because we cannot fully imagine it doesn’t mean it’s not true. This Eastertide, be living signs of God’s new world. Find ways to celebrate and imitate your crucified and risen Lord. And when the news of the day gets to be too much for you so that you find yourself despairing over the state of things in this country and/or your life, remember that Jesus is Lord and the powers of the present order are not (and that’s got nothing to do with politics, my beloved). I’m not talking about platitudes; I am talking about availing yourself to God’s power, a power that not even the darkest powers can overcome. But you can’t do this on your own because you will be overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of the madness of this world. So let us also resolve to remember and declare together that Jesus Christ is Lord and the dark powers that run this world are not. Their day is done, even if they are not fully vanquished. We know Jesus is Lord because he is raised from the dead and lives with God to intercede for us as his people. He calls us to be living signposts—tangible markers in this life pointing to our final destination, not the destination itself—of his healing love and redemption of the entire human race. So let us together as God’s people here at St. Augustine’s resolve anew to embody God’s great love and forgiveness, goodness and righteousness, to a world gone mad. As we do, let us resolve to worship God and the Lamb together in the power of the Holy Spirit and to rejoice in this gift of resurrection life. Let us come to Christ’s table and feed on him and so be strengthened for this arduous task. Let us have generous hearts with which to share the abundance of Christ’s love and blessings. Let us enjoy sweet fellowship together and take care of each other, always welcoming strangers and inviting others to join in the Paschal Feast. And let our worship and fellowship drive a renewed sense of service to a world that so desperately needs to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ. Everything has changed because Christ has died and risen from the dead. Stake your very life on it and be bold in your living and proclamation of this new reality. And let us find ways to announce this Good News to the world, especially during these next fifty days. After all, we have hope for the present, no matter how bleak things become, because we know our future is secure, and not even the gates of hell can rob us of that promise. To him be honor, praise, and glory forever and ever. Alleluia! Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!

In the name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

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Easter Sunday 2026: Saint John Chrysostom on Easter

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Everyone who is devout and a lover of God, let them enjoy this beautiful and radiant Feast of Feasts!

If anyone is a wise servant, rejoice and enter into the joy of the Lord
If anyone has been wearied in fasting, now receive your recompense.

If anyone has labored from the first hour, today receive your just reward. If anyone has come at the third hour, with thanksgiving keep the feast. If anyone has arrived at the sixth hour, have no misgivings; for you shall suffer no loss. If anyone has delayed until the ninth hour, draw near without hesitation. If anyone has arrived even at the eleventh hour, do not fear on account of your delay. For the Lord is gracious, and receives the last even as the first; He gives rest to the one that comes at the eleventh hour, just as to the one who has labored from the first. He has mercy upon the last, and cares for the first; to the one He gives, and to the other He is gracious. He both honors the work, and praises the intention.

Enter all of you, therefore, into the joy of our Lord, and whether first or last receive your reward. O rich and poor, one with another, dance for joy! O you ascetics and you negligent, celebrate the Day! You that have fasted and you that have disregarded the fast, rejoice today! The table is rich-laden; feast royally, all of you! The calf is fattened; let no one go forth hungry!

Let all partake of the Feast of Faith. Let all receive the riches of goodness.
Let none lament their poverty, for the Universal Kingdom has been revealed.
Let none mourn their transgressions, for Pardon has dawned from the Tomb!
Let no one fear Death, for the Savior’s death has set us free!
He that was taken by Death has annihilated it!
He descended into Hell, and took Hell captive!

He embittered it when it tasted of His Flesh! And anticipating this Isaiah exclaimed, “Hell was embittered when it encountered thee in the lower regions.” It was embittered, for it was abolished! It was embittered, for it was mocked! It was embittered, for it was purged! It was embittered, for it was despoiled! It was embittered, for it was bound in chains!
It took a body, and face to face met God! It took earth, and encountered Heaven! It took what it saw, but crumbled before what it had not nven!

“O Death, Where is your sting? O Hell, where is your victory?”
Christ is risen, and you are overthrown!
Christ is risen, and the demons are fallen!
Christ is risen, and the Angels rejoice!
Christ is risen, and Life reigns!
Christ is risen, and not one dead remains in the tombs!

For Christ being raised from the dead, has become the first-fruits of them that slept. To Him be glory and dominion through all the ages of ages!

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Easter Sunday 2026: An Ancient Account on How Those Who Were Baptized at Easter Were Instructed

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The season of Lent has always been a time when the Church prepared new converts to become full members by instructing them in matters of the faith and preparing them for baptism. Here is a description from how this was done in the 4th century in Jerusalem.

I must also describe how those who are baptized at Easter are instructed. Those who give their names do so the day before Lent, and the priest notes down all their names; and this is before those eight weeks during which, as I have said, Lent is observed here. When the priest has noted down everyone’s name, then on the following day, the first day of Lent, on which the eight weeks begin, a throne is set up for the bishop in the center of the major church, the Martyrium. The priests sit on stools on both sides, and all the clergy stand around. One by one the candidates are led forward, in such a Way that the men come with their godfathers and the women with their godmothers.

Then the bishop questions individually the neighbors of the one who has come up, inquiring; “Does this person lead a good life? Obey parents? Is this person a drunkard or a liar?” And the bishop seeks out in the candidate other vices which are more serious. If the person proves to be guiltless in all these matters concerning which the bishop has questioned the witnesses who are present, the bishop notes down the candidate’s name. If, however, the candidate is accused of anything, the bishop orders the person to go out and says: “Let such a one amend their life, and when this is done, then approach the baptismal font.” He makes the same inquiry of both men and women.  If, however, some are strangers, such people cannot easily receive baptism, unless they have witnesses who know them.

Ladies, my sisters, I must describe this, lest you think that it is done without explanation. It is the custom here, throughout the forty days on which there is fasting, for those who are preparing for baptism to be exorcised by the clergy early in the morning, as soon as the dismissal from the morning service has been given at the Anastasis. Immediately a throne is placed for the bishop in the major church, the Martyrium. All those who are to be baptized, both men and women, sit closely around the bishop, while the godmothers and godfathers stand there; and indeed all of the people who wish to listen may enter and sit down, provided they are of the faithful. A catechumen, however, may not enter at the time when the bishop is teaching them the law. The bishop does so in this way: beginning with Genesis and going through the whole of Scripture during these forty days, expounding first its literal meaning and then explaining the spiritual meaning.  In the course of these days everything is taught not only about the Resurrection but concerning the body of faith. This is called catechetics.

When five weeks or instruction have been completed, they then receive the Creed The bishop explains the meaning of each of the phrases of the Creed in the same way as Holy Scripture was explained, expounding first the literal and then the spiritual sense. ln this fashion the Creed is taught.

And thus it is that in these places all the faithful are able to follow the Scriptures when they are read in the churches, because all are taught through these forty days, that is, from the first to the third hours, for during the three hours instruction is given. God knows, ladies, my sisters,  that the voices of the faithful who have come to catechetics to hear instruction on those things being said or explained by the bishop are louder than when the bishop sits down in church to preach about each of those matters which are explained in this fashion. The dismissal from catechetics is given at the third hour, and immediately, singing hymns, they lead the bishop to the Anastasis [the cross], and the office of the third hour takes place. And thus they are taught for three hours a day for seven weeks. During the eighth week, the one which is called the Great Week, there remains no more time for them to be taught, because what has been mentioned above must be carried out.

Now when seven weeks have gone by and there remains only Holy Week, which is here called the Great Week, then the bishop comes in the morning to the major church, the Martyrium. To the rear, at the apse behind the altar, a throne is placed for the bishop, and one by one they come forth, the men with their godfathers, the women with their godmothers. And each one recites the Creed back to the bishop. After the Creed has been recited back to the bishop, the bishop delivers a homily to them all, and says: “During these seven weeks you have been instructed in the whole law of the Scriptures, and you have heard about the faith. You have also heard of the resurrection of the flesh. But as for the whole explanation of the Creed, you have heard only that which you are able to know while you are still catechumens. Because you are still catechumens, you are not able to the those things which belong to a higher mystery, that of baptism. But that you may not think that anything would be done without explanation, once you have been baptized in the name of God, you will hear of them during the eight days of Easter in the Anastasis following the dismissal from church. Because you are still catechumens, the most secret of the divine mysteries cannot be told to you.”

—Egeria, Abbess (late 4th century), The Pilgrimage of Egeria, 45-46

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