Rightly the lily is the flower of Easter. It lies buried in the ooze of pond or stream. There is nothing in the grave of the dead lily that appeals to nostril or eye. But silently the forces of life are working in the dark and the damp to prepare a glorious resurrection. A shaft of green shoots upward toward the sun. This is followed by a cluster of tiny buds. One day the sun smiles with special warmth upon the dank, black ooze, and there leaps into the light a creature of light and beauty; it is the lily, an angel of the earth, whose look is light. 

–  Fuel for the Fire

Crucifixion - Maybe it was on a Thursday

A scientist, using new tables of dating figures on a computer, has concluded that the crucifixion of Jesus occurred on the fifth day of the week, a Thursday, April 6, A.D. 30 and not on Friday as commonly assumed. “Up to now, we didn’t have the hard facts to fasten to, but now we have them,” says Roger Rusk, a Knoxville, Tennessee, physicist.

His deductions also would mean that Jesus lay in the tomb a full three days as he had foreseen—instead of the 36 hours supposed in church tradition.

“But the movements of the moon don’t provide the occasion for it then,” Rusk said in a telephone interview. “Putting together what we now know, it’s evident the day was Thursday.” He also concludes that the year—not previously fixed precisely—was A.D. 30.

In making his assessments, he used newly-calculated tables of new and full moons from 1001 B.C. to A.D. 1651, as determined on a sophisticated computer by Herman H. Goldstine at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey.

“It had never been done before,” Rusk said, adding that the new tables provide the first exact sequence of new moons by which dates were set in ancient Judaism in the time of Jesus.

“They kept a lunar calendar and went entirely by the moon,” he said. Since Jesus died on an afternoon before the sunset beginning of Passover, just what day it was hinges on when Passover started that year and that, in turn, depends on the time of the new moon—the added key applied by Rusk.

Rusk, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Tennessee where he taught for 28 years, details his findings in an issue of the Evangelical weekly, Christianity Today, published in Washington, DC.  

—  New York (AP)

Sources: The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, William Gentz | The Bible Almanac, White
| Easter a Pictorial Pilgrimage - Pierre Benoit |

Easter Quotations

Resurrection Living

When the strong torture the weak, when the poor cry for bread, when the innocent languish in dungeons, when mothers go insane because they see their children die when the outcasts roam in the wilderness, when the soldiers go to battle, when those who sit in darkness pray for light, the Cross returns, and the head of the Man on the Cross sinks deeper on the tired breast"

       — PIERRE VAN PAASEN That Day Alone, 1941
   

Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead.  

Acts 26:8

My flesh shall rest in hope.

New Testament: Acts 2: 26