Sermon Illustrations for Easter Day (2025)
Illustration
Isaiah 65:17-25
The vision of Isaiah, the new heaven and new earth, a world we cannot begin to imagine, moves us from the sorrow of Good Friday and the waiting of Saturday, into the joy of the resurrection. Isaiah proclaims from God, “no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it or the cry of distress.” What a moment, what a time that will be. What hope there is in this prophecy? God’s promises are laid out before us. God’s promises are proclaimed to us.
The world as we know will cease to exist. There will be no hate, no want, no loss. There will be only plenty, hope, joy and love. There will be rejoicing in the presence of God. This is the resurrection promise. This is the pledge of our God. This is the hope we have in faith, in grace, and in the forgiveness of God. This is our blessing. Praise God! The world as we know it has been washed away and replaced with a new heaven and a new earth — a new world of joy.
Bonnie B.
* * *
Isaiah 65:17-25
Alas, Easter is not a big deal for most American Christians. A 2010 Barna research group poll found that only 2% of Christians think Easter is the most important religious holiday. Our Christian forebears shake their heads from the grave. No wonder we fail to recognize that everything is new since Easter. As the prophet promised a new start by God, Jesus has already done that on the cross on Good Friday. Martin Luther made that clear while lecturing on this text:
[In v. 17] He [God] is not speaking only of the spiritual heaven, but he makes all things new, spiritual and physical, although I do not see and a new heaven and a new body in us, but only the one born of our parents. Yet we believe it. We must turn the sack inside out, and then they will appear. (Luther’s Works, Vol.17, p.388)
In this new reality, Luther notes our prayers will be answered. As he put it:
We can say this not because of ourselves but because of the most far-reaching promises, for the sake of which we are certain that we shall be heard. In the presence of God, our prayers are regarded in such a way that they are answered before we call. (Luther’s Works, Vol.17, p.392)
Mark E.
* * *
Acts 10:34-43
Our lesson reminds us that the resurrection of our Lord makes us one. American Christians certainly are not acting like we know this. Witness our denominational divisions, divisions over politics, and divisions between the religious right and mainline churches. We remain divided by race and ethnicity in our churches. What Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 continues to right true: “We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers [and sisters].”
Famed 20th-century Roman Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin nicely explained how Christ brings us together. He wrote:
The principle of unity which saves our guilty world, where all is in process of returning to dust, is Christ. Through the force of his magnetism…, Jesus establishes again at the heart of the world the harmony of all endeavors and the convergence of all being. (Hymn of the Universe, p.147)
Chardin’s comments connect with the Complexity Theory of modern physics, the idea that the universe is governed by a principle of driving for more complexity, ever seeking to unite multiplicities into harmony. The heroine of the Holocaust, Corrie Ten Boom, put it well. She urged the faithful:
Be united with other Christians. A wall with loose bricks is not good. The bricks must be cemented together.
Mark E.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
To the ancients dead was dead. What little they knew of an afterlife was the grey shadowy Hades we encounter in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid is no treat. And it is certainly no resurrection. No coming back to anything like a semblance of life.
No. Dead is dead. That is the response of skeptics in Corinth to Paul, evidently. Remember, we are only hearing Paul’s half of the phone conversation, but in this crucial section of Paul’s resurrection chapter we have come to the logical argument being made by some of Paul’s opponents, who may or may not have been a part of the faith community. Regardless, they were either talking to or among the believers in the house churches of Corinth. And this is what they are saying:
The Roman records showed that Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate. (The historian Tacitus was probably drawing from these records when he wrote of the Christians: “Their founder, one Chrestus, had been put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilae in the reign of Tiberius.” The Annals of Tacitus: A Modern New Translation by Donald R. Dudley, New American Library, 1966, pp. 353-4.) Therefore he was dead. Dead people stay dead. Christ is dead. Therefore Christ did not rise from the dead. He is still dead. There is no resurrection of the dead.
But Paul knows differently, and the list of witnesses he draws upon at the beginning of this chapter know this, including five hundred at one time, which is a pretty overwhelming number. Therefore one should reason just the opposite: Christ died. Christ rose from the dead. Therefore, though we die, we too shall rise from the dead.
We have the witnesses. We have the assurance that Christ is risen. Therefore, we have the faith.
Frank R.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
In 1979, Kenny Rogers released a song called “Coward of the County.” The song tells the story of a man named Tommy, who had been raised to be a pacifist, and whose father had died in prison. It’s never disclosed why his father was in prison, but you get the feeling that he was jailed for violent crimes and had since repented. His father had urged him to not do the things he’d done. He wanted him to walk away from trouble and turn the other cheek. His final words were “you don’t have to fight to be a man.” Tommy lived by this and earned the nickname in the title of the song until the day his bride Becky was accosted by the Gatlin boys. Outraged, he goes to fight them and shocks everyone as he avenges his wife. The chorus concludes with the words, “he said, ‘This one's for Becky,’ as he watched the last one fall.”
That last line, “This one’s for Becky as he watched the last one fall” resonated with me as I read this text. At the cross, Jesus took the full force of sin. He endured all that sin and death could hurl at him. At the resurrection, Jesus defeated all his and our enemies. All enemies will be put under his feet. Nothing can stand up against him. Verse 26 proclaims, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” I like to envision Jesus standing over death and saying, “This one’s for you, as he watched the last one fall.” Daniel Thorton writes in the hymn “Up From the Grave He Arose:”
Death cannot keep his prey
Jesus, my Savior!
He tore the bars away
Jesus my Lord!
Bill T.
* * *
John 20:1-18
I am a fan of the Little House on the Prairie television show. On the episode where Mary marries Adam (The Wedding), there is an interesting scene. Mary is having second thoughts about marriage because she and Adam are blind. She wonders how she will ever be able to raise a child without being able to see. A dust storm hits the town of Winoka and a blind girl, Susan, gets lost. Caroline gets hurt, leaving Adam and Mary to find her alone. Susan is terrified and hiding under a porch. She is calling out “Help me,” and “Here I am.” We get to experience her fear and stress. Then, Mary hears her and makes her way to her. She calls out to her, “I hear you.” “I’m coming.” Hearing Mary’s voice is a light that penetrates the darkness of fear and worry.
I am convinced that something like that happened to Mary Magdalene on the first Easter. Mary is at the tomb, alone. Everyone else is gone. She sees two angels who want to know why she is weeping. She tells them “they’ve taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him.” She then turns around to see a man she perceives to be the gardener. In the darkness of her worry, stress and pain, she asks him the same question. The man, however, speaks to her. He says her name. “Mary.” At that, the darkness and despair dissipate. She sees who he is and cries out “Rabboni.”
Darkness and doubt still ride together today, and many are engulfed in them. Will you hear the voice of the resurrected Lord? Will you see him for who he is as he calls your name?
Bill T.
* * *
John 20:1-18
I grew up in the Roman Catholic faith — a faith that is decidedly masculine, but which also honors and elevates the faith of Mary the mother of Jesus. It is a denomination that also, inaccurately, proclaimed Mary Magdelene as a prostitute and doesn’t really see her as the first proclaimer of the resurrection. This reading from John allows us to see Mary Magdelene in her wonder, in her grief, and in her faith. We see her confusion. We see her pain and grief, her fear that the body of Jesus has been stolen. And we see the wonder of her joy when she recognizes the risen Christ.
Mary proclaims the risen Christ to the others, to the gathered apostles. Mary spread the good news, shares the words of Jesus. Mary lives into the resurrection by having the confidence to tell the others, the men, what she has seen. I do not want to seem like I am emphasizing one gender over the other. Rather, I want us to honor both the men and the women, both the apostles often named in scripture and seen as leaders, and the women rarely seen in those roles. We are created, all of us, as the beloved of God, in God’s image. This Easter Sunday, I proclaim with Mary, “He is Risen!”
Bonnie B.
* * *
John 20:1-18
John Calvin addressed Mary’s initial failure to recognize Jesus in this account of the resurrection. He wrote:
In Mary, we have an example of the mistakes into which the human mind frequently falls. Though Christ presents himself to our view, yet we imagine that he assumes various shapes so that our senses conceive of anything rather than of the true Christ; for not only are our powers of understanding liable to be deceived, but they are also bewitched by the world. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XVIII/1, p.257)
But in Calvin’s view, Mary gives us clues about how faith works. He notes:
Thus in Mary we have a lively image of our calling, for the only way in which we are admitted to the true knowledge of Christ is, when he first knows us. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XVIII/1, p.258)
In an Easter sermon, Martin Luther compellingly witnesses to the comfort and meaning the resurrection affords us. As the first reformer put it:
We should be confident that through Christ’s resurrection and victory we have the firm assurance that no sin, not even death, may frighten us… He has surmounted all excruciating suffering, and wishes to be our comfort, greater than our sin and death, yes, greater than heaven and earth. (Complete Sermons, Vol.6, p.16)
Mark E.
* * *
Luke 24:1-12
A 2024 Rasmussen National Survey found that 73% of Americans believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead. But how come that many will not be in church today, and an even smaller percentage will give thanks to God in the weeks ahead. In an Easter sermon, Martin Luther told us why:
If we could truly recognize what a great treasure it is, our hearts would rejoice and leap for joy. But because we look for you elsewhere — in money, goods, fame, and pleasures — we’re like… other unbelievers, namely, that when a specific sin surfaces and grabs us, it becomes greater in our eyes than twenty Christs. (Complete Sermons, Vol.6, p.16)
Pope Benedict XVI provides some thoughtful reflections on how Christ’s resurrection is not easily ignored. It is all about love, he claims:
… love is the foundation of immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone… He [Christ] rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by chemical and biological laws, and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love. (Introduction To Christianity, pp.306-308)
Mark E.
* * *
Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. (v. 1)
We know how the story is told. The women come to the tomb (in various combinations depending on which evangelist is telling the story), receive the good news of the resurrection, and take off, to tell the incredible and unbelieved news.
But notice in this first verse from Luke 24 that they are “taking the spices they had prepared.” Working around whatever sabbath restrictions they chose to observe during the long day between the crucifixion and the resurrection, burdened with grief, traumatized by having witnessed the method of execution preferred by the Romans, they poured their energies into obtaining and preparing the spices they would need on the first day of the week when they returned to the tomb where they had seen him buried.
They did something.
I’m not suggesting that having something to do heals the wounds of grief and loss. I am suggesting that doing something at least fills the time. If any healing happens it will take time, sometimes a lot of time. But these women had invested a great deal of time and treasure in the ministry of Jesus. Heart and soul. Note that Mark 15:41 states clearly that these several women “:… followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” They were there all along helping, and despite the shock of his death they found it was important to continue to do stuff.
Without question for some of us the only response to consuming grief is to do nothing, frozen in shock. But others coping, if not healing, is found in activity.
Frank R.
The vision of Isaiah, the new heaven and new earth, a world we cannot begin to imagine, moves us from the sorrow of Good Friday and the waiting of Saturday, into the joy of the resurrection. Isaiah proclaims from God, “no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it or the cry of distress.” What a moment, what a time that will be. What hope there is in this prophecy? God’s promises are laid out before us. God’s promises are proclaimed to us.
The world as we know will cease to exist. There will be no hate, no want, no loss. There will be only plenty, hope, joy and love. There will be rejoicing in the presence of God. This is the resurrection promise. This is the pledge of our God. This is the hope we have in faith, in grace, and in the forgiveness of God. This is our blessing. Praise God! The world as we know it has been washed away and replaced with a new heaven and a new earth — a new world of joy.
Bonnie B.
* * *
Isaiah 65:17-25
Alas, Easter is not a big deal for most American Christians. A 2010 Barna research group poll found that only 2% of Christians think Easter is the most important religious holiday. Our Christian forebears shake their heads from the grave. No wonder we fail to recognize that everything is new since Easter. As the prophet promised a new start by God, Jesus has already done that on the cross on Good Friday. Martin Luther made that clear while lecturing on this text:
[In v. 17] He [God] is not speaking only of the spiritual heaven, but he makes all things new, spiritual and physical, although I do not see and a new heaven and a new body in us, but only the one born of our parents. Yet we believe it. We must turn the sack inside out, and then they will appear. (Luther’s Works, Vol.17, p.388)
In this new reality, Luther notes our prayers will be answered. As he put it:
We can say this not because of ourselves but because of the most far-reaching promises, for the sake of which we are certain that we shall be heard. In the presence of God, our prayers are regarded in such a way that they are answered before we call. (Luther’s Works, Vol.17, p.392)
Mark E.
* * *
Acts 10:34-43
Our lesson reminds us that the resurrection of our Lord makes us one. American Christians certainly are not acting like we know this. Witness our denominational divisions, divisions over politics, and divisions between the religious right and mainline churches. We remain divided by race and ethnicity in our churches. What Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1963 continues to right true: “We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers [and sisters].”
Famed 20th-century Roman Catholic theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin nicely explained how Christ brings us together. He wrote:
The principle of unity which saves our guilty world, where all is in process of returning to dust, is Christ. Through the force of his magnetism…, Jesus establishes again at the heart of the world the harmony of all endeavors and the convergence of all being. (Hymn of the Universe, p.147)
Chardin’s comments connect with the Complexity Theory of modern physics, the idea that the universe is governed by a principle of driving for more complexity, ever seeking to unite multiplicities into harmony. The heroine of the Holocaust, Corrie Ten Boom, put it well. She urged the faithful:
Be united with other Christians. A wall with loose bricks is not good. The bricks must be cemented together.
Mark E.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
To the ancients dead was dead. What little they knew of an afterlife was the grey shadowy Hades we encounter in both the Odyssey and the Aeneid is no treat. And it is certainly no resurrection. No coming back to anything like a semblance of life.
No. Dead is dead. That is the response of skeptics in Corinth to Paul, evidently. Remember, we are only hearing Paul’s half of the phone conversation, but in this crucial section of Paul’s resurrection chapter we have come to the logical argument being made by some of Paul’s opponents, who may or may not have been a part of the faith community. Regardless, they were either talking to or among the believers in the house churches of Corinth. And this is what they are saying:
The Roman records showed that Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate. (The historian Tacitus was probably drawing from these records when he wrote of the Christians: “Their founder, one Chrestus, had been put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilae in the reign of Tiberius.” The Annals of Tacitus: A Modern New Translation by Donald R. Dudley, New American Library, 1966, pp. 353-4.) Therefore he was dead. Dead people stay dead. Christ is dead. Therefore Christ did not rise from the dead. He is still dead. There is no resurrection of the dead.
But Paul knows differently, and the list of witnesses he draws upon at the beginning of this chapter know this, including five hundred at one time, which is a pretty overwhelming number. Therefore one should reason just the opposite: Christ died. Christ rose from the dead. Therefore, though we die, we too shall rise from the dead.
We have the witnesses. We have the assurance that Christ is risen. Therefore, we have the faith.
Frank R.
* * *
1 Corinthians 15:19-26
In 1979, Kenny Rogers released a song called “Coward of the County.” The song tells the story of a man named Tommy, who had been raised to be a pacifist, and whose father had died in prison. It’s never disclosed why his father was in prison, but you get the feeling that he was jailed for violent crimes and had since repented. His father had urged him to not do the things he’d done. He wanted him to walk away from trouble and turn the other cheek. His final words were “you don’t have to fight to be a man.” Tommy lived by this and earned the nickname in the title of the song until the day his bride Becky was accosted by the Gatlin boys. Outraged, he goes to fight them and shocks everyone as he avenges his wife. The chorus concludes with the words, “he said, ‘This one's for Becky,’ as he watched the last one fall.”
That last line, “This one’s for Becky as he watched the last one fall” resonated with me as I read this text. At the cross, Jesus took the full force of sin. He endured all that sin and death could hurl at him. At the resurrection, Jesus defeated all his and our enemies. All enemies will be put under his feet. Nothing can stand up against him. Verse 26 proclaims, “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” I like to envision Jesus standing over death and saying, “This one’s for you, as he watched the last one fall.” Daniel Thorton writes in the hymn “Up From the Grave He Arose:”
Death cannot keep his prey
Jesus, my Savior!
He tore the bars away
Jesus my Lord!
Bill T.
* * *
John 20:1-18
I am a fan of the Little House on the Prairie television show. On the episode where Mary marries Adam (The Wedding), there is an interesting scene. Mary is having second thoughts about marriage because she and Adam are blind. She wonders how she will ever be able to raise a child without being able to see. A dust storm hits the town of Winoka and a blind girl, Susan, gets lost. Caroline gets hurt, leaving Adam and Mary to find her alone. Susan is terrified and hiding under a porch. She is calling out “Help me,” and “Here I am.” We get to experience her fear and stress. Then, Mary hears her and makes her way to her. She calls out to her, “I hear you.” “I’m coming.” Hearing Mary’s voice is a light that penetrates the darkness of fear and worry.
I am convinced that something like that happened to Mary Magdalene on the first Easter. Mary is at the tomb, alone. Everyone else is gone. She sees two angels who want to know why she is weeping. She tells them “they’ve taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have laid him.” She then turns around to see a man she perceives to be the gardener. In the darkness of her worry, stress and pain, she asks him the same question. The man, however, speaks to her. He says her name. “Mary.” At that, the darkness and despair dissipate. She sees who he is and cries out “Rabboni.”
Darkness and doubt still ride together today, and many are engulfed in them. Will you hear the voice of the resurrected Lord? Will you see him for who he is as he calls your name?
Bill T.
* * *
John 20:1-18
I grew up in the Roman Catholic faith — a faith that is decidedly masculine, but which also honors and elevates the faith of Mary the mother of Jesus. It is a denomination that also, inaccurately, proclaimed Mary Magdelene as a prostitute and doesn’t really see her as the first proclaimer of the resurrection. This reading from John allows us to see Mary Magdelene in her wonder, in her grief, and in her faith. We see her confusion. We see her pain and grief, her fear that the body of Jesus has been stolen. And we see the wonder of her joy when she recognizes the risen Christ.
Mary proclaims the risen Christ to the others, to the gathered apostles. Mary spread the good news, shares the words of Jesus. Mary lives into the resurrection by having the confidence to tell the others, the men, what she has seen. I do not want to seem like I am emphasizing one gender over the other. Rather, I want us to honor both the men and the women, both the apostles often named in scripture and seen as leaders, and the women rarely seen in those roles. We are created, all of us, as the beloved of God, in God’s image. This Easter Sunday, I proclaim with Mary, “He is Risen!”
Bonnie B.
* * *
John 20:1-18
John Calvin addressed Mary’s initial failure to recognize Jesus in this account of the resurrection. He wrote:
In Mary, we have an example of the mistakes into which the human mind frequently falls. Though Christ presents himself to our view, yet we imagine that he assumes various shapes so that our senses conceive of anything rather than of the true Christ; for not only are our powers of understanding liable to be deceived, but they are also bewitched by the world. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XVIII/1, p.257)
But in Calvin’s view, Mary gives us clues about how faith works. He notes:
Thus in Mary we have a lively image of our calling, for the only way in which we are admitted to the true knowledge of Christ is, when he first knows us. (Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol.XVIII/1, p.258)
In an Easter sermon, Martin Luther compellingly witnesses to the comfort and meaning the resurrection affords us. As the first reformer put it:
We should be confident that through Christ’s resurrection and victory we have the firm assurance that no sin, not even death, may frighten us… He has surmounted all excruciating suffering, and wishes to be our comfort, greater than our sin and death, yes, greater than heaven and earth. (Complete Sermons, Vol.6, p.16)
Mark E.
* * *
Luke 24:1-12
A 2024 Rasmussen National Survey found that 73% of Americans believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead. But how come that many will not be in church today, and an even smaller percentage will give thanks to God in the weeks ahead. In an Easter sermon, Martin Luther told us why:
If we could truly recognize what a great treasure it is, our hearts would rejoice and leap for joy. But because we look for you elsewhere — in money, goods, fame, and pleasures — we’re like… other unbelievers, namely, that when a specific sin surfaces and grabs us, it becomes greater in our eyes than twenty Christs. (Complete Sermons, Vol.6, p.16)
Pope Benedict XVI provides some thoughtful reflections on how Christ’s resurrection is not easily ignored. It is all about love, he claims:
… love is the foundation of immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone… He [Christ] rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by chemical and biological laws, and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love. (Introduction To Christianity, pp.306-308)
Mark E.
* * *
Luke 24:1-12
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. (v. 1)
We know how the story is told. The women come to the tomb (in various combinations depending on which evangelist is telling the story), receive the good news of the resurrection, and take off, to tell the incredible and unbelieved news.
But notice in this first verse from Luke 24 that they are “taking the spices they had prepared.” Working around whatever sabbath restrictions they chose to observe during the long day between the crucifixion and the resurrection, burdened with grief, traumatized by having witnessed the method of execution preferred by the Romans, they poured their energies into obtaining and preparing the spices they would need on the first day of the week when they returned to the tomb where they had seen him buried.
They did something.
I’m not suggesting that having something to do heals the wounds of grief and loss. I am suggesting that doing something at least fills the time. If any healing happens it will take time, sometimes a lot of time. But these women had invested a great deal of time and treasure in the ministry of Jesus. Heart and soul. Note that Mark 15:41 states clearly that these several women “:… followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.” They were there all along helping, and despite the shock of his death they found it was important to continue to do stuff.
Without question for some of us the only response to consuming grief is to do nothing, frozen in shock. But others coping, if not healing, is found in activity.
Frank R.
