EASTER DAY 2020

CHRIST is RISEN
​HAPPY EASTER!

El Greco - The Resurrection

• Acts 10:34-43 or Jeremiah 31:1-6  • 
• Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24  • 
• Colossians 3:1-4 or Acts 10:34-43  • 
• John 20:1-18 or Matthew 28:1-10

​Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
didst make thy triumph over death and sin,
and having harrowed hell, didst bring away
captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
and grant that we for whom thou diddest die,
being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin,
may live for ever in felicity:
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
may likewise love thee for the same again;
and for thy sake, who dost all grace supply,
with love may one another entertain;
So let us love, dear Love, like as we ought;
love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

Edmund Spenser

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Meister Francke -- The Resurrection

Seven Stanzas at Easter
Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

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Titian -- The Resurrection

​The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

​Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

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Rembrandt - Christ Resurrected

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.
​

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Otto Dix -- The Resurrection

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike

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