Some Easter thoughts
When we served at the Hill Cumorah Visitor Center (10/2018-3/2020), I gained a greater knowledge and appreciation for this Christus statue by Bertel Thorvaldsen. In 1820, the same year God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, appeared to Joseph Smith, God inspired Thorvaldsen, a Danish artist, to create a unique Christus statue. At a time when most renditions of Christ portrayed Christ suffering on the cross Bertel is inspired to portray a living Christ who gained victory over death and, with arms wide open, invites all to come unto Him. Only the wound marks in his hands and feet testify of the indescribable agony He endured to save all mankind. ("A Living Witness of the Living Christ," by Bishop Gerald Causse, Liahona, May 2020)
I think that because C.S. Lewis’s spiritual search for truth took him on a journey from his childhood belief in God, to atheism, to agnosticism, to theism, and then finally to belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, he was able to articulate key distinctions between Christianity and other religions. In an essay entitled ‘The Grand Miracle,’ He observed that "if one takes away the miracles attributed to Buddhism, there would be ‘no loss’ to the religion. If all miracles were eliminated from Islam, nothing essential would be altered. But it is impossible to do that with Christianity. The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion that Christ came into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing Nature up with Him is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away, there is nothing specifically Christian left.”(C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a British writer, literary scholar, and lay theologian - cslewisinstitute.org).
We have been invited to celebrate Easter as our greatest Christian festival. "Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms [we] lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and [we] don’t have a New Testament; [we] don’t have a Christianity.” (N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (2008), 256
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