Dear Friends,
We continue to celebrate the Easter Season. The Easter Season is fifty days, not forty days, like Lent, or four weeks or slightly less, like Advent. The Easter Season extends from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. It is sometimes known as the “Festival of Weeks,” seven weeks of seven days (49 days), plus one, the fiftieth day, Pentecost.
The foremost symbol of Easter is the Christ Candle, also known as the Easter Candle or the Paschal Candle. It represents the Risen Christ who is the Light of the World (Jn 8:12; see also 1:4-5,9 and 12:46). The candle is given a prominent location during the Easter Season, usually in the sanctuary or somewhere in the front of the church, and after Pentecost it is moved back to its usual place.
Bill Ritter, a great Christian preacher writes, “Resurrection means the worst thing that happens is not necessarily the last thing that happens. The resurrection is God’s 'yes' to life and God’s 'yes' to us.” “But the ultimate argument for resurrection,” says Ritter, “always consists in the change the resurrection produces in the lives of those who believe it.”
On Monday after Easter, the world will still be pretty much the way it was on Friday—the homeless will still be homeless, mean-spirited and fear-mongering political rhetoric will still fill the air waves and war will still ravage our world. But because of Easter, on Monday the people who believe in resurrection will go back to work to change all that. Would you go out there to change the world?
