Today’s Devotional: “Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!”

America is one of the few countries where the customary greeting for Easter has absolutely no connection to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What we hear is “Happy Easter.” But this is not how the church has greeted one another in times past. The early church would greet one another saying, “Christ is risen,” and the response was, “He has risen indeed.”

In the first couple of centuries, the church would also say, “He lives.”

And, this should be our greeting, because this is our hope and the hope of the world.

You see, Easter has absolutely no connection to the empty tomb and the resurrection miracle. Originally, Easter was a pagan celebration of renewal and rebirth and was celebrated around this same time in England. It honored the Saxon goddess ‘Eastre.’

But when Christian missionaries converted the Saxons to Christianity, this pagan celebration was merged into the Christian holy day.

While it never used to be this way, America soon went the way of the pagan holiday, where today it’s about an Easter Bunny that lays eggs. And so, Easter, or the day we are supposed to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ has gotten a little bit fuzzy.

And so, instead of greeting one another with Happy Easter, we need to resurrect the traditional Christian greeting, “Christ is Risen! He is Risen Indeed!”

And even more, our conversations need to move from Easter brunch, and Easter hats, and all the holiday programing, and instead we should be promoting that Jesus Christ is no longer dead, that He lives, that He has risen, and that He is alive.

And this is not only what we need to hear, but it is also something we need to be saying. And this greeting means that Jesus is God’s Son and the world’s Savior, and He has defeated sin and death for all time.

“Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4b)