A Jesuit Catholic University
in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1878

[42] Acts 10:34a, 37-43 Ps 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23 Col 3:1-4 John 20:1-9

Weekly Guide for Daily Prayer The Daily Reflections

Easter Sunday:

“…Jesus went about doing good and curing all who had fallen into the power of the devil. Now we are witnesses to everything he did throughout the countryside of Judaea and in Jerusalem itself: and they killed him by hanging him on a tree, yet on the third day God RAISED him to life and allowed him to be seen.” Acts 10: 38-40

Our God is not dead…he is ALIVE. Jesus, who sacrificed himself and allowed men to nail him to a tree, has risen from the dead! He has completely triumphed over death, sin, the devil, and all of this worldly evil only 2,013 years ago. This thought is just incredible to me, and I am so grateful. He is the ultimate example of “agape”- the sacrificial and true love you demonstrate when you lay down your life for another. I can’t even imagine being out in a boat, fishing while still grieving for Jesus, and seeing my “dead” friend, master, and leader on the shoreline. The excitement would just be enormously overwhelming, and I get excited thinking about it as I’m sitting here in my apartment doing homework on this snowy, wintery day. I did NOT deserve this passionate showing of love at all, and yet he died for me. I am not worthy of this deed, but I am so grateful that I will be able to spend eternity with him because of what he did for us.
I would like to leave you with an excerpt from “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis, and I pray that we all remember the significance of this day while having a blessed Easter Sunday!

“I am trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”