Quotes About Jesus And Easter

“Jesus's use of the phrasing "a new commandment" is frequently scanted in light of its implicit ramifications. Because Jesus at the Last Supper has executed the "new covenant" with his disciples, the Great Commandment itself now acquires an unprecedented meaning. Its new meaning belongs to this sudden revelation not merely about who God is but also about what love is. Previously the Great Commandment bade us to love God and our neighbor. Now this love can be comprehended only in an incarnational situation. Its incarnate presence is the activation of profound rhizomic relations that explode from the center toward the ends of the earth. We are commanded to be incarnational in relation to one another just as God at the cross was incarnational in Christ ... We are no longer simply Christ's "followers" - the pre-Easter form of relation to a master-and-teacher that is conventionally called "disciple" - but also perpetual Christ incarnators ...”

— Carl Raschke

“Jesus is for life, not just for Easter.”

— Jarrid Wilson

“Adrian Mole's diary
Easter
Poor Jesus, it must have been dead awful for him. I wouldn't have the guts to do it myself.”

— Sue Townsend

“Forget, too, the lamb-y, metaphor-male, the groinless, bourgeois Jesus,
with his Easter-egg, candy-store-window eyes
ogling the cruciform crosspiece of his eyebrows.
If you meet such a Christ on the way,
kill him.
Do you wish to love? Do you wish to love?
Leave love. Love nothing.
Life is dark; life is dark at the no-place
of the shocked heart cut two by the bone-handled, thrice-bladed Word.”

— Tim Lilburn

“The resurrection completes the inauguration of God's kingdom ... It is the decisive event demonstrating thet God's kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven."
"The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it.”

— N.T. Wright

“The significance of the resurrection claim within "true" Christian descriptions of the self, world and God is that, despite how tragic and hopeless present situations and circumstances appear to be, there is a God who sits high and looks low, a God who came into this filthy, fallen world in the form of a common peasant in order to commence a new epoch, an epoch in which Easter focuses our attention on the decisive victory of Jesus Christ and hence the possibility of our victory over our creature hood, the old creation and this old world, with its history of oppression and exploitation. So to be a Christian is to have a joyful attitude toward the resurrection claim, to stake one's life on it and to rest one's hope upon its promise - the promise of a new heaven and a new earth.”

— Cornel West

“Anna's spiritual formation was relegated to cultural expressions of faith: the Christmas Baby Jesus and his gifts, the Easter risen Christ and his chocolate bunnies, and a copy of The Thorn Birds pulled from her mother's bookshelf.”

— Jill Alexander Essbaum

“There are times when I hear my name, turn, and recognize Jesus. There are times when faith feels like a friendship with God. But there are many other times when it feels more adversarial or even vacant. Yet none of that matters in the end. How we feel about Jesus or how close we feel to God is meaningless next to how God acts upon us. How God indeed enters into our messy lives and loves us through them, whether we want God's help or not. And how, even after we've experienced some sort of resurrection, it's never perfect or impressive like an Easter bonnet, because, like Jesus, resurrected bodies are always in rough shape.”

— Nadia Bolz-Weber

“To a Christian, Easter Sunday means everything, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

— Bernhard Langer

“That Christ ushered in this new era of life and liberation in the presence of women, and that he sent them out as the first witnesses of the complete gospel story, is perhaps the boldest, most overt affirmation of their equality in this kingdom that Jesus ever delivered. And yet too many Easter services begin with a man standing before a congregation shouting, "He is risen!" to a chorused response of "He is risen indeed!" Were we to honor the symbolic details of the text, that distinction would always belong to a woman.”

— Rachel Held Evans

“One Easter, when she heard the priest say He is risen, she found herself standing up from the pew and walking out the cathedral door. She left the order, dyed her hair pink, and hiked the Appalachian Trail. It was somewhere on the Presidential Range that Jesus appeared to her in a vision, and told her there were many souls to feed.”

— Jodi Picoult

“It is at Easter that Jesus is most human, and like all humans, he fails and is failed. His is not an all-powerful God, it is an all-vulnerable God.”

— Michael Leunig

“Many of our Churches are now proclaiming the vain philosophies of man and have reduced the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a seasonal message at Easter and Christmas. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation (Rom 1:16). It is for everyone, at all times. There is NO other Gospel (Gal 1:8). It is the ONLY truth that sets men free (john 8:32)”

— John Paul Warren

“During the first 13 centuries after the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, no one thought of setting up a creche to celebrate Christmas. The pre-eminent Christian holiday was Easter, not Christmas.”

— Nancy Pearcey

“Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.”

— Jay Parini

“Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.”

— Michael Leunig

“I was over in Australia during Easter, which was really interesting. You know, they celebrate Easter the exact same way we do, commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus by telling our children that a giant bunny rabbit ... left chocolate eggs in the night. Now ... I wonder why we're fucked up as a race. I've read the Bible. I can't find the word "bunny" or "chocolate" anywhere in the fucking book.”

— Bill Hicks

“My favorite Catholic holiday is Easter. For those of you that don't know, Easter is the day we celebrate Jesus rising from the grave and coming back to Earth as a rabbit that hides colored eggs.”

— Adam Ferrara

“The entire holiday was a joke; Jesus had to share it with Santa. The only thing worse was that Jesus had to share Easter with a bunny. That was just creepy.”

— Tarryn Fisher

“You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring the problems of the material world. Take it away, and Sigmund Freud was probably right to say that Christianity is a wish-fulfillment religion. Take it away, and Friedrich Nietzsche was probably right to say that Christianity was a religion for wimps. Put it back, and you have a faith that can take on the postmodern world that looks to Marx, Freud and Nietzsche as its prophets, and you can beat them at their own game with the Easter news that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

— N.T. Wright

“Here, then, is the message of Easter, or at least the beginning of that message. The resurrection of Jesus doesn't mean, "It's all right. We're going to heaven now." No, the life of heaven has been born on this earth. It doesn't mean, "So there is a life after death." Well, there is, but Easter says much, much more than that. It speaks of a life that is neither ghostly nor unreal, but solid and definite and practical. The Easter stories come at the end of the four gospels, but they are not about an "end." They are about a beginning. The beginning of God's new world. The beginning of the kingdom. God is now in charge, on earth as in heaven. And God's "being-in-charge" is focused on Jesus himself being king and Lord. The title on the cross was true after all. The resurrection proves it.”

— N.T. Wright

“Love is the deepest mode of knowing, because it is love that, while completely engaging with reality other than itself, affirms and celebrates that other-than-self reality. This is the mode of knowing that is necessary if we are to live in the new public world, the world launched at Easter, the world in which Jesus is Lord and Caesar isn't.”

— N.T. Wright

“We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Piety, conscience, and ultimate happiness are important, but not nearly as important as Jesus himself.”

— N.T. Wright

“Despite a thousand Easter hymns and a million Easter sermons, the resurrection narratives in the gospels never, ever say anything like, "Jesus is raised, therefore there is a life after death," let alone, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall go to heaven when we die." Nor even, in a more authentic first-century Christian way, do they say, "Jesus is raised, therefore we shall be raised from the dead after the sleep of death." No. Insofar as the event is interpreted, Easter has a very this-worldly, present-age meaning: Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world's true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God's new creation has begun-and we, his followers, have a job to do! Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven! To be sure, as early as Paul the resurrection of Jesus is firmly linked to the final resurrection of all God's people.”

— N.T. Wright

“I would argue that the truth of Easter does not depend on whether there was an empty tomb, or whether anything happened to the body of Jesus ... I do not see the Christian tradition as exclusively true, or the Bible as the unique and infallible revelation of God ... It makes no historical sense to say, 'Jesus was killed for the sins of the world.' ... I am one of those Christians who does not believe in the virgin birth, nor in the star of Bethlehem, nor in the journeys of the wisemen, nor in the shepherds coming to the manger, as facts of history.”

— Marcus Borg

“If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.”

— Paul L. Maier

“The message of Easter is not that Jesus is alive, it is so much more. The message of Easter is that Jesus has risen!”

— Colin S. Smith

“I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event. If the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that Easter Sunday were a public event which had been made known ... not only to the 530 Jewish witnesses but to the entire population, all Jews would have become followers of Jesus.”

— Pinchas Lapide

“Happy Easter everyone! Jesus dies, comes back from the dead - and we get chocolate eggs. It's like turn-down service from God.”

— Denis Leary

“Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God's saving, sovereign kingdom ...”

— N.T. Wright

“A narcissist society, in which each person is busy looking out for number one, can build neither brotherhood nor community. Aren't we glad in this Easter season and in all seasons that Jesus did not selfishly look out for number one? No wonder we have been told, 'Thou shalt have no other gods
before me,' and this includes self-worship! (Ex. 20:3; emphasis added). One way or another, the grossly selfish will finally be shattered, whimpering, against the jagged, concrete consequences of their selfishness.”

— Neal A. Maxwell

“Faith in the resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being; the cry for unending life which is a part of the person is indeed answered ... God exists: that is the real message of Easter. Anyone who even begins to grasp what this means also knows what it means to be redeemed.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

“Lent is like a long 'retreat' during which we can turn back into ourselves and listen to the voice of God, in order to defeat the temptations of the Evil One. It is a period of spiritual 'combat' which we must experience alongside Jesus, not with pride and presumption, but using the arms of faith: prayer, listening to the word of God and penance. In this way we will be able to celebrate Easter in truth, ready to renew the promises of our Baptism.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

“The death, and the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus happened over three days. Friday was the day of suffering and pain and agony. Saturday was the day of doubt and confusion and misery. But Easter, that Sunday, was the day of hope and joy and victory.
You will face these three days over and over and over in your lifetime. And when you do, you'll find yourself asking, as I did, three fundamental questions: Number one, what do I do in my days of pain? Two, how do I get through my days of doubt and confusion? Three, how do I get to the days of joy and victory?
The answer is Easter.”

— Rick Warren

“For many people, the big feast of the year is Christmas, but for Christians, the truly great feast is Easter. Without Easter, without the Resurrection, we would not have the gift of salvation. Jesus had to rise from the dead or else he would have just been another failed Messiah and his birth would be a forgotten footnote of history.”

— Robert Barron