The ABC special Jesus, Mary, and Da Vinci was a fair program about a silly idea, but it illustrates a key distinction Christians need to be mindful of in our efforts to engage this culture.

The recent special walked through the ludicrous idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that he had children that were shepherded off to the south of France, and that the church suppressed this information because it would undercut Jesus’ deity. Furthermore, Mary’s reputation as a prostitute was fabricated by church leaders to undercut her influence, and that of women in general, in the early church. The real story was kept by a secret society called “The Priory of Sion,” to which many famous Europeans, such as Leonardo da Vinci, belonged. The entire theory is strung out in a novel known as The Da Vinci Code. What caused the stir, at least in part, was the author’s claim that the backdrop to his fictitious story is based on the truth.

Anyone familiar with the Bible knows that three facts are clear. First, Mary indeed was not a prostitute. The effort to connect her to the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7:36–50 or to Mary of Bethany in John 12 is fraught with difficulty. Second, Mary is introduced to us in Luke 8:1–3 as the beneficiary of an exorcism by Jesus. Third, her only other biblical role is that of witness to the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

The Apostle Mary
When some in the early church called Mary an “apostle to the apostles,” the point was not to promote women’s ordination (and thus pose a threat to early bishops). The title only meant that she was divinely chosen and sent to the Apostles as bearer of the good news that Jesus was raised. In an era when women were not counted as legal witnesses, this exalted Mary as a significant role model for women in the early church.

Regarding this business of her supposed marriage to Jesus: When Paul was defending his right to have a wife (as in 1 Cor. 9:5), a right he did not exercise, he mentioned that Cephas (Peter) and Barnabas had wives. Had Jesus been married, Paul would have certainly mentioned such an important detail; it would have clinched his argument. I mentioned this in my interview on the ABC special, and the program noted that most biblical scholars agreed with the point. This inclusion leads me to the next point.

Constructive engagement
Many Christians have become so worked up in the cultural war metaphor that they risk losing the ability to engage the culture at all. In this case, many believers have mocked not only The Da Vinci Code but also the TV special that discussed it. For reasons that will help us engage the culture in ways that help them understand us better, I believe this is a mistake.

ABC ran this special because over 4 million people had read the book and had been exposed to this revisionist view of Jesus. The special sought to investigate these claims journalistically. To do so, the producers had to walk through the theory in detail to give context for its assessment. The mass media are not an arm of the church, nor should Christians expect them to be. Their job is to report all sides of an issue, employing a variety of perspectives, the true and the false, not to mention the plausible and the fringe, especially when such ideas are making a cultural impact. That is what this special tried to do.

In watching such programs, we need to distinguish between those who advocate revisionist theories, who also get prime-time exposure, and the reporting that takes place, especially if there is a good-faith effort to present both sides. In this instance, I counted several times when a point made from the book was followed by scholars who said there was no evidence for the idea.

I have my quibbles with the special, and with the hype the network used to advertise it. But the popularity of both the book and the special points to our culture’s continuing fascination with Jesus. And even when that curiosity borders on the perverse, we need to be engaged in the conversation—if not on TV specials, certainly in our neighborhoods, schools, and offices, wherever the topic of conversation comes up—talking about the real Jesus in a constructive way.

Darrell Bock is research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of Jesus According to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels (Baker, 2002).

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Dan Brown is right about one thing (and not much more). In the course of Christian history, few events loom larger than the Council of Nicea in 325. When the newly converted Roman Emperor Constantine called bishops from around the world to present-day Turkey, the church had reached a theological crossroads.

Led by an Alexandrian theologian named Arius, one school of thought argued that Jesus had undoubtedly been a remarkable leader, but he was not God in flesh. Arius proved an expert logician and master of extracting biblical proof texts that seemingly illustrated differences between Jesus and God, such as John 14:28: “the Father is greater than I.” In essence, Arius argued that Jesus of Nazareth could not possibly share God the Father’s unique divinity.

In The Da Vinci Code, Brown apparently adopts Arius as his representative for all pre-Nicene Christianity. Referring to the Council of Nicea, Brown claims that “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.”

In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as their risen Savior and Lord. Before the church adopted comprehensive doctrinal creeds, early Christian leaders developed a set of instructional summaries of belief, termed the “Rule” or “Canon” of Faith, which affirmed this truth. To take one example, the canon of prominent second-century bishop Irenaeus took its cue from 1 Corinthians 8:6: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.”

The term used here—Lord, Kyrios—deserves a bit more attention. Kyrios was used by the Greeks to denote divinity (though sometimes also, it is true, as a simple honorific). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, pre-dating Christ), this term became the preferred substitution for “Jahweh,” the holy name of God. The Romans also used it to denote the divinity of their emperor, and the first-century Jewish writer Josephus tells us that the Jews refused to use it of the emperor for precisely this reason: only God himself was kyrios.

The Christians took over this usage of kyrios and applied it to Jesus, from the earliest days of the church. They did so not only in Scripture itself (which Brown argues was doctored after Nicea), but in the earliest extra-canonical Christian book, the Didache, which scholars agree was written no later than the late100s. In this book, the earliest Aramaic-speaking Christians refer to Jesus as Lord.

In addition, pre-Nicene Christians acknowledged Jesus’s divinity by petitioning God the Father in Christ’s name. Church leaders, including Justin Martyr, a second-century luminary and the first great church apologist, baptized in the name of the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—thereby acknowledging the equality of the one Lord’s three distinct persons.

The Council of Nicea did not entirely end the controversy over Arius’s teachings, nor did the gathering impose a foreign doctrine of Christ’s divinity on the church. The participating bishops merely affirmed the historic and standard Christian beliefs, erecting a united front against future efforts to dilute Christ’s gift of salvation.

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In Christian mythology, the Holy Grail was the dish, plate, cup or vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper, said to possess miraculous powers. The connection of Joseph of Arimathea with the Grail legend dates from Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie (late twelfth century) in which Joseph receives the Grail from an apparition of Jesus and sends it with his followers to Great Britain; building upon this theme, later writers recounted how Joseph used the Grail to catch Christ’s blood while interring him and that in Britain he founded a line of guardians to keep it safe. The quest for the Holy Grail makes up an important segment of the Arthurian cycle, appearing first in works by Chrétien de Troyes (Loomis 1961). The legend may combine Christian lore with a Celtic myth of a cauldron endowed with special powers.

The development of the Grail legend has been traced in detail by cultural historians: It is a gothic legend, which first came together in the form of written romances, deriving perhaps from some pre-Christian folklore hints, in the later 12th and early 13th centuries. The early Grail romances centered on Percival and were woven into the more general Arthurian fabric. The Grail romances started in France and were translated into other European vernaculars; only a handful of non-French romances added any essential new elements.

There are two schools of thought concerning the Grail’s origin. The first, championed by Roger Sherman Loomis, Alfred Nutt, and Jessie Weston, holds that it derived from early Celtic myth and folklore. Loomis traced a number of parallels between Medieval Welsh literature and Irish material and the Grail romances, including similarities between the Mabinogion’s Bran the Blessed and the Arthurian Fisher King, and between Bran’s life-restoring cauldron and the Grail. Other legends featured magical platters or dishes that symbolize otherworldly power or test the hero’s worth. Sometimes the items generate a never-ending supply of food, sometimes they can raise the dead. Sometimes they decide who the next king should be, as only the true sovereign could hold them.

On the other hand, some scholars believe the Grail began as a purely Christian symbol. For example, Joseph Goering of the University of Toronto (Goering 2005) has identified sources for Grail imagery in 12th-century wall paintings from churches in the Catalan Pyrenees (now mostly removed to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), which present unique iconic images of the Virgin Mary holding a bowl that radiates tongues of fire, images that predate the first literary account by Chrétien de Troyes. Goering argues that they were the original inspiration for the Grail legend.[1]

Another recent theory holds that the earliest stories that cast the Grail in a Christian light were meant to promote the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Holy Communion. Although the practice of Holy Communion was first alluded to in the Christian Bible and defined by theologians in the first centuries A.D., it was around the time of the appearance of the first Christianized Grail literature that the Roman church was beginning to add more ceremony and mysticism around this particular sacrament. Thus, the first Grail stories may have been celebrations of a renewal in this traditional sacrament (Barber, 2004).[2] This theory has some backing by the fact that Grail legends are almost entirely a phenomenon of the Western church (see below).

Most scholars today accept that both Christian and Celtic traditions contributed to the legend’s development, though many of the early Celtic-based arguments are largely discredited (Loomis himself came to reject much of Weston and Nutt’s work). The general view is that the central theme of the Grail is Christian, even when not explicitly religious, but that much of the setting and imagery of the early romances is drawn from Celtic material.

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Between 1961 and 1984 Plantard contrived a mythical pedigree of the Priory of Sion claiming that it was the offshoot of the “Order of Sion” (its correct historical title being the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion) which had been founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the First Crusade.

Another book on the Priory of Sion, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail [claims] the Priory of Sion has a long history starting with the creation of the Knights Templar as its military and financial front; it is sworn to returning the Merovingian dynasty, that ruled the Frankish kingdom from 447 to 751 C.E., to the thrones of Europe and Jerusalem; the order protects these royal claimants because they think they are the literal descendants of Jesus and his alleged wife Mary Magdalene or, at the very least, of king David and high priest Aaron; and the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, during the Inquisition, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene.

Recently, due to Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, there has been a new level of public interest in the Priory of Sion. In a short preface, Brown lists a series of “facts” underlying the fiction of the novel. He declares that “the Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.”
If this is not a mere marketing trick, it would seem that Dan Brown takes the fantastic claims of the Secret Dossiers more or less at face value, like the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail did before him. In the body of the novel itself (chapter 48), it is said that “the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed” that the famous people listed were indeed former Priory leaders - something “historians had suspected for a long time.” It should be understood that this fictionalized treatment completely reverses the judgment of real-world researchers, who (with the exception of dedicated conspiracy theorists) have rather dismissed the Dossiers as obvious forgeries. Nor had any “historians” ever suspected that Newton, Botticelli etc. were members of any “Priory of Sion”; this claim first appeared in the Dossiers themselves
…
In the novel, the Priory is portrayed as more of a Goddess mystery religion, something that is hardly true to the character of Plantard’s original Priory (he had no particular interest in goddesses). On the other hand, the organizational structure of Brown’s version of the Priory is as described in the Dossiers (it has a Nautonnier or Grand Master who has three Sénéchaux below him; as part of the plot, all four are murdered).

In February of 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed suit against Brown’s publishers, Random House, alleging that significant portions of The Da Vinci Code were taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and are copyright violations. It is in any case obvious that most of what Dan Brown “knows” about the Priory is based on that book, which in turn is inspired by the Secret Dossiers that Plantard and his companions salted into the French National Archive.

Brown also worked into his plot Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh’s theories regarding the ultimate “secret” of the Priory: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, their descendants intermarried with the Merovingians, and the sacred bloodline survives into modern times. In the universe of the novel, unlike our own, this scenario seems to be widely accepted among historians and academics while the general public remains ignorant because of the influence of the Bible and the Church. In short, The Da Vinci Code describes a world where Pierre Plantard’s hoax was the truth, where the Secret Dossiers were genuine and not forgeries, and where people who support such ideas are reputable historians rather than conspiracy theorists and fringe researchers.

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Mary Magdalene is mentioned in precisely three of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The “Gospel of Mary” is the report of a vision which sets the material world against the nonmaterial, seeing Mind as the intermediary of Soul and Spirit. This is fairly standard Platonic idealism; it is hard to see what it’s got to do with the sacred feminine, but it’s easy to see that it has nothing to do with a first-century Jewish prophetic movement such as that of Jesus.

The “Gospel of Philip” is the one where Jesus kisses Mary— but the idea that a kiss was a key gesture of romantic attachment won’t survive two minutes when we move away from Hollywood and into the real world of late antiquity. There is not the slightest sign of Jesus being married to Mary and having a child by her. The “Gospel of Thomas” has one saying about Mary (51:19), in which “Jesus” states that “Mary will be saved if she makes herself male, because every female who makes herself male will become fit for the kingdom of God.”

That is hardly a ringing endorsement for the sacred feminine. If it’s sacred femininity you want, you must look elsewhere, to various forms of paganism ancient and modern. These have become enormously popular in some strands of New Age and postmodern thinking. They have found their way into some revisionist versions of western Christianity. But they have nothing to do with Nag Hammadi and nothing whatever to do with early Christianity.

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Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous-that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
 
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s [God’s] own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below [Satan]. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.

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There is no historical evidence to support any of these contentions. The only significant compositional difference between the two versions (excluding the later addition of attributes) is the fact that Uriel no longer points. However this difference may well be explained by the possibility that the distinction between Jesus and John was thought to be insufficiently clear in the earlier picture because John is with the Madonna, and that the pointing gesture directed too much attention to John.

Indeed far from the painting being “too scandalous” to show in a church, Leonardo and de Predises actually wanted more money from the church than had been originally agreed. The church agreed to pay a substantial bonus but not as much as they wanted. So they sold it to a private collector and then made a second copy (arguably a superior one as it turned out). So popular (not scandalous) did these paintings prove that it is believed that they painted a third version which is now lost.

It should be noted that in The Da Vinci Code this painting is said to be on canvas. This is incorrect, as Da Vinci painted almost exclusively on poplar panels, this painting being no exception to that rule.

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Dan Brown has reproduced in fictionalized form some of the great myths of the postmodern world. His achievement, in fact, is so spectacular that it is hard to begrudge him his newfound millions. He has taken a set of ideas and speculative historical reconstructions, each of which is highly implausible in itself, and by weaving them together has not only created an exciting plot, but has also made the several implausible elements appear for a moment as though they just might be true.

All the books of this type seem to be convinced that mainstream Christianity thinks of Jesus as divine, sustaining the church’s political power, whereas the secret traditions see him as just human. They fail to notice that if they are right it is hard to explain the rise of Christianity in the first place. If Jesus’ body is buried under a hill in France, why should anyone think he was divine?

We may safely conclude that The Da Vinci Code is fiction in its characters and plot and in most of its other details as well. But its real importance lies elsewhere: in its reinforcement of the “myth of Christian origins.” This myth is well known and widespread. I have met it at Harvard, in Baptist churches in the South, all over the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature— this myth is anything but scientific or historical.

This is the myth: First, there were dozens if not hundreds of other documents about Jesus. Some of these have now come to light, not least in the books discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt 60 years ago. These focus on Jesus more as a human being, a great religious teacher, than as a divine being. And it is these books which give us the real truth about Jesus.

Second, the four Gospels in the New Testament were later products aimed at divinizing Jesus and claiming power and prestige for the church. They were selected, for these reasons, at the time of Constantine in the fourth century, and the multiple alternative voices were ruthlessly suppressed.

Third, therefore, Jesus himself wasn’t at all like the four canonical Gospels describe him. He didn’t think he was God’s son, or that we would die for the sins of the world; he didn’t come to found a new religion. He was a human being pure and simple, who gave some wonderful moral and spiritual teaching, that’s all. Oh, and he may well have been married, perhaps even with a child on the way, when his career was cut short by death.

Fourth, therefore: Christianity as we know it is based on a mistake. Mainstream Christianity is sexist, especially anti-women and anti-sex itself. It has aimed at, and in some places achieved, considerable social power and prestige, enabling it to be politically quietist and conformist. This, I find, goes down especially well with those who are escaping from either fundamentalism or certain types of Roman Catholicism.

Fifth, the real pay-off: It is time to give up, as historically unwarranted, theologically unjustified, and spiritually and socially damaging, the picture of Jesus and Christian origins which the church has put about for so long, and to return to the supposedly original vision of Jesus himself, not least in terms of getting in touch with a different form of spirituality based on metaphor rather than literal truth, of feeling rather than structure, of discovering whatever faith you find you can believe in. This will revive the truth for which Jesus lived, and perhaps for which he died.

He includes the Dead Sea Scrolls as documents about Jesus. They are nothing of the sort. Neither Jesus nor early Christianity is mentioned anywhere in the scrolls. But the question of the Nag Hammadi codices is far more significant. Are they serious alternative sources for Christian origins? I have looked carefully at these codices alongside everything else. They represent what is loosely called “Gnosticism,” a spiritual movement from the late second to fourth century. They believe that the present world of space, time, and matter is essentially evil, and that salvation will consist of escaping from it into a different sphere altogether. Gnosticism teaches that some humans have within them a divine spark which needs to be uncovered, giving its initiates a secret “knowledge.” This enables the initiate to effect his escape (it’s normally a “he”) into a spiritual world.

The Nag Hammadi books include the now well known so-called “Gospel of Thomas,” and other collections of sayings like the “Gospel of Philip.” Despite the current fashion for preferring and even privileging them as giving us access to Jesus himself, I believe they are demonstrably late second century at the earliest, derived from the earlier, now canonical, material; and obviously different in theology from that earlier material.

“Thomas” is written in Coptic, an Egyptian language of the time and is simply a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. In the Coptic version, they are in no particular order. But if we translate the Coptic back into the original language of the collection, Syriac, we discover that the sayings of Jesus have been patterned with connecting words linking them together. This is the language and style of writers known to us from the late second century church— 200 years after the time of Jesus and not earlier. The sayings in “Thomas” are similar to the canonical gospels, but the differences can be shown to be consistent with “Thomas” having modified the material in a manner which demonstrates a large step away from the world of first-century Judaism, and towards the world of second- and third-century syncretism.

The myth-makers insist that Nag Hammadi preserves the original theology, while the canonical gospels represent a shift towards the divinizing of Jesus and, with that, a move towards socially acceptable orthodoxy over against the exciting, dynamic, semi-Gnostic religion of the codices. But the differences all indicate that it is the Nag Hammadi codices, not the canonical gospels, which have shifted away from an early to a later viewpoint. They involve a massive step away from the Jewish context of Jesus’ ministry and towards some kind of Platonic viewpoint. The Jesus of “Thomas” is at best non-Jewish, at worst anti-Jewish.

The Nag Hammadi codices have taken a large step away from a narrative world and contain only isolated teachings. They show all the signs of having been abstracted from that setting, as though someone were to go through Shakespeare’s plays and extract all the great one-liners without any attempt to show where they belong within the dramas of which they form part. In particular, they have seen Jesus not as the one who died on the cross and rose again, but simply as a teacher. This is the heart of it all. They have made the message about Jesus not good news about something that has happened, but good advice as to how one might re-order one’s life. Actually, of course, the advice is not in fact that good.

By contrast, the canonical gospels — despite every effort to prove the contrary — are still regarded by the great majority of scholars as early, written within at the outside 50 years of Jesus’ lifetime, quite possibly much sooner. The gospels are dependent on traditions that are very early indeed. The Christian writers of the early second century know and revere the four canonical Gospels, but show no knowledge of traditions like the Gnostic writings. When the canon of the New Testament was finally decided upon, it was not a matter of selecting four books arbitrarily from a list of several dozen. It was a matter of noting that these four Gospels had been known from very early to have been the core testimony to Jesus.

More especially, the divinity of Jesus is already firmly established by Paul, within 20 or 30 years of Jesus’ death. John and Hebrews — and indeed Luke and Matthew, who are almost as explicit — are written by [A.D.] 90 or so at the latest, quite possibly much earlier. The idea that, in the words of one of Dan Brown’s characters, Jesus was “just a good man” who “walked the earth and inspired millions to live better lives” is a modern trivialization that, to do them justice, even the Nag Hammadi documents do not perpetrate. And the suggestion, which you meet constantly and not only in The Da Vinci Code, that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John omitted Jesus’ human characteristics and wrote the story up to make him divine, is a complete travesty of what they are about. The Jesus we meet in the four canonical Gospels is a flesh-and-blood human being who makes real decisions, who struggles in prayer to know his Father’s will and follow it to the end, who weeps at the tomb of his friend — and who, shockingly, embraces a vocation which meant that he was to do and be what, in Scripture, only Israel’s God gets to do and be. This represents a coming together of divine and human which makes no sense except as an account of the real life and mind of a first-century Jew called Jesus.

The resurrection of Jesus was central to early Christianity, though you’d never know that, either, from Dan Brown or from the many other writers who perpetrate the modern myth in its various forms. And Jesus’ death was consequently interpreted, from extremely early in the Christian movement, as the fulfillment of the Jewish scriptures, the defeat of all rival spiritual powers, and the means of forgiveness of sins. Early Christianity was not primarily a movement which taught how one might live a better life; it was the good news that something had happened through which the evil which had infected the world had been overthrown and a new creation launched, and that all human beings were invited to become part of that project by becoming renewed themselves.

If the canon was written, or read, to curry political favor, it was dramatically unsuccessful. Those who were thrown to the lions were not reading “Thomas” or Q or the “Gospel of Mary.” They were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the rest, and being sustained thereby in a subversive mode of faith and life which, growing out of apocalyptic Judaism, posed a far greater threat to Roman empire and pagan worldviews than Cynic philosophy or Gnostic spirituality ever could. In fact, the contemporary myth gets things exactly the wrong way round. Those who are advocating a new kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, and claiming that Jesus is somehow in or behind it all, cut no ice on the political front.

The challenge of Jesus, in the 21st century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The authentic Christian gospel, which is good news about something that has happened as a result of which the world is a different place — this gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and self-discoveries to be realigned in that light. God’s project, and God’s gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to Gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cosseting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which God will put all things to rights and wipe away all tears from all eyes; in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus, not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfillment of the Scriptural story of God’s people and rose as the fulfillment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God; and because, in that death and resurrection, we discover him to be the one at whose name every knee shall indeed bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, confessing Jesus Christ as Lord to the glory of God the Father.

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O God, our Father, as we rejoice in the anticipation of all the beauty of spring after the gray days of winter, we thank You for the first Easter.  We thank You that the dark tomb was empty in the silent early morning as the women looked in.  We thank you for their joy, so unexpected as they hurried away to tell the angel’s message. May we, in our hearts, accept this fact of life beyond the grave, and so share in some of the happiness of that first Easter morning.  In quietness, tranquility and peace let us rest in Your peaceful presence until all the doubts of life subside and the vision of your truth and beauty is all there is. 

God of mercy, you give us a new birth in the Spirit, and redeem us in the blood of Christ. As we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, increase our awareness of these blessings, and renew your gift of life within us. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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