Every year thousands of people climb a mountain in the Italian Alps, passing the "stations of the cross" to stand at an outdoor crucifix. One tourist noticed a little trail that led beyond the cross. He fought through the rough thicket and, to his surprise, came upon another shrine, a shrine that symbolized the empty tomb. It was neglected. The brush had grown up around it. Almost everyone had gone as far as the cross, but there they stopped. Far too many have gotten to the cross and have known the despair and the heart break. Far too few have moved beyond the cross to find the real message of Easter. That is the message of the empty tomb."

– Lavonn Brown, "The Other Half of of the Rainbow," submitted by Michael Adams, First Baptist Church, Union City, TN. Kennedy

Holy Week

Holy Week is the most sacred portion of the Christian liturgical year. Holy week is the week preceding Easter. It began in the third century A. D.. Originally it was a three day celebration of the Passover season and the institution of the Lord's Supper. By the forth century the commemoration was expanded to a full week. Holy or Maundy Thursday was especially honored.

Holy Week developed naturally out of the practice of Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem yearly, where they could celebrate the Lord's Supper and reenact the events of Jesus' last week in liturgical drama and solemn processions.

In the liturgical revival of the twentieth century, the observance of Holy Week, spread to embrace the free churches of Protestantism as well as the liturgical churches. Today it is almost universally celebrated in America.

Sources: The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, William Gentz | The Bible Almanac, White

Easter Quotations

The heavy, ponderous stone that sealed Jesus in the confines of that rock-walled tomb was but a pebble compared to the Rock of Ages inside.

Anonymous

What reason have atheists for saying that we cannot rise again? Which is the more difficult – to be born or to rise again? It is more difficult to come into being than to return to it?

Blaise Pascal

The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death – that is not the great thing – but that we are to be new here and now by the power of the Resurrection; not so much that we are to live forever, as that we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.

Phillips Brooks