Easter The Promise of Tomorrow – Sunday, March 30, 1986
Each spring the gray soil is turned over by green shoots of new life springing from what once seemed lifeless and dead. It is the fulfillment of our planning and our hope—an appropriate symbol of a greater promise, a poignant longing of the human spirit. Spring is the hope that, beyond the joy and struggles of this mortal life, there is a life that has been promised us—a life even more abundant, an immortal life of eternal spring to which no winter comes.
This is the promise of Easter. This is the hope that springs in each of us and is confirmed by each flower that died into its bulb last fall and is now reborn.
Henry Ward Beecher wrote of the Easter season:
“Those who are agreed in nothing else, have met together in this common joy—the coming of Christ from the dead. It is the opening of the door of the future…
and the gladness of the whole human family….
It is the first step in the life of immortality.”1
But man does not reach out to Christ at this time of year merely because the fields are filling with flowers. The hope and evidence of Christ’s resurrection is not only in the fields or the budding trees. It lives in each of us.
It is the hope that binds the brotherhood of man, that brings us together as families, that commits us as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. At the very center of our feeling is this assurance: We are not temporary; we are not will-o’-the-wisp moments; our lives are not tentative, our loves not bounded by time.
On that first Easter morning, nearly 2,000 years ago, Mary Magdalene and Mary, the Mother of James, went to the sepulcher where the body of Jesus had lain. But they did not find him there. Rather, an angel of God appeared to them and said: “Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here but is risen.”2
And so, He is.
And, although there may be those who still “seek the living among the dead”—who do not accept the witness of their own hearts, who do not understand the evidence of spring—yet we do worship Him, do celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ in every act of love, in every plan for the future, in every reaching of our souls towards the promise of tomorrow.
And, because Christ died for us, suffered for our sins, made possible our repentance and—through His resurrection—made certain we would live again… because of Easter, tomorrow shall surely come.
1 Beecher, Henry Ward, The Religious Life
2 New Testament, Luke 23:5-6
March 30, 1986
Broadcast Number 2,954