Easter Monday – Another UK Holy Day

Twice a year the UK comes to a stop for a string of holidays. We often forget that the very word holiday comes from holy days. Without the concept of the need to stop our activities to devote ourselves to worship, the regular pause on Sundays would never have happened, let alone the prolonged time off of Christmas and Easter.  Good Friday and Easter Monday are both national holidays, and on Easter Sunday most shops are required to be totally closed. Huge temples to the god of Mammon are shuttered up and their car parks lie empty.  The irony is of course we consume huge amounts of food on holidays and they have become commercialized.

But it is worth thinking about why the Monday after Resurrection Sunday was considered a Holy Day. Most believe that it was chosen so we could celebrate the road to Emmaus, one of the first appearances of the risen Jesus.  The story is found in Luke 24.  We see two of the wider group of disciples (neither of them one of the twelve) walking away from Jerusalem in despair.  A man joins them, they are prevented from recognizing him, but their hearts burn within them as he takes them through some of the OT Scriptures about Jesus.  No doubt some of the passages I highlight in a chapter in my book Raised With Christ would have been addressed by Jesus.  Wouldn’t it have been amazing though to hear HIM explain them himself?

Their eyes are open when they eat with him, and they hurry back to Jerusalem where the news is breaking that despite the despair they all felt on Easter Saturday, Jesus has risen!

Paul tells us Jesus “was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:4), obviously referring to the Jewish Bible, which Christians know as the Old Testament . . . The defeat of Satan by the “offspring” of Eve is predicted in Genesis 3:15. This word was translated “seed” in the King James, and as Paul points out it is singular and refers to Christ (Galatians 3:16). Although the Messiah will be wounded on the cross, the Devil will be killed. “Beware, Lucifer,” says God, for “Jesus Christ shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (see Genesis 3:15). In light of later prophecies predicting the death of the Messiah, this description of a minor injury implies that Jesus will be resurrected. Here the fact that God speaks to Adam and Eve about events far in the future suggests that they will somehow survive the grave. If this were not the case, why would he tell them?

. . . In Exodus 3:6. God is regularly described as being the God of people who have died. Jesus uses this phrase to make an incisive point in an argument with the Sadducees over whether there is such a thing as resurrection. He says, “That the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him” (Luke 20:37–38).

. . .Isaiah makes a glorious promise. There is a clear expectation of a return from the very dust that our bodies will one day become. Once a feast for worms, we will be resurrected to life:

Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead. (Isaiah 26:19).

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Some Free Chapters

Resurrection in the Old Testament: Glimpses of Future Hope

Resurrection: Fact or Fiction? Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

A Relationship with the Risen Jesus: Christian Experience