Dear GFC Community,

In most modern streams of the church, Easter is a day. But throughout a lot of church history, Easter was viewed as a season – 50 days from Easter to Pentecost Sunday, called Eastertide, where believers soaked in and celebrated the reality of Jesus’ resurrection.

St. Augustine (4th century) remarked, “The season before Easter (Lent) signifies the troubles in which we live here and now, while the time after Easter (Eastertide) signifies the happiness that will be ours in the future. What we commemorate before Easter is what we experience in this life; what we celebrate after Easter points to something we do not yet possess. This is why we keep the first season with fasting and prayer; but now the fast is over, and we devote the present season to praise.”

When you look at it this way, how sad would it be to only celebrate for a single day!

It’s almost like the early church fathers and mothers of the faith understood the human proclivity (and certainly Western tendency) to move on “to the next thing,” and they said, “no, wait, linger in the wonder of the resurrection; it’s too wonderful to behold in one day.” And if the very first disciples’ journey is any indicator, we NEED this time of purposeful pondering. They couldn’t “get it all” in one encounter with the resurrected Jesus. They needed days, weeks even, to sit with the reality of the risen Jesus and let it transform them before the church was launched at Pentecost.

I’m so looking forward to diving deeper into the implications of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians over the coming weeks! Don’t miss this Sunday as we jump into part 2 of our new teaching series, “Eastertide.”

He is Risen!

P. S. If you haven’t subscribed to the GFC podcast, it is a great time to do so! We’re continuing to answer questions and dive deeper into Sunday messages through that medium.