What Is Easter?
“Jesus Christ is our Redeemer and our Lord, and that through belief in Him we are assured of eternal fellowship with a loving God. For us, the foundation of Christian belief–and the greatest event in all history–is the drama of the first Easter week: the death of Christ, in which He took upon Himself all the sins of the world, and the Resurrection, which offers glorious proof of His teaching and His triumph over sin and death.”
American Baptist Churches
“The Easter Season begins on Easter Sunday and extends to Pentecost Sunday, a fifty-day celebration of the risen Christ. On Easter Sunday the church tells the story of the empty tomb and the charge by the messenger to “go and tell.” For the next several weeks Christians tell and retell stories of Jesus’ first followers who encountered him against all hope. Amidst their doubt, fear, and longing, suddenly he was present–risen from the dead, and encountering them in a locked room, by the lakeshore, on the road to Emmaus.
The church combines these resurrection stories with stories from Acts of the Apostles: the efforts of the first Christian communities to spread the gospel through the world.
The early church celebrated these weeks after Easter and gave them the name Mystagogia. They instructed newly baptized Christians during this time, and encouraged them to explore, in their new community, the joyful mystery of the encounter of the risen Christ with their lives.
Today the church wears celebratory colors during Eastertide; in western cultures this has often been white and gold. As we celebrate, we learn again to recognize the risen Jesus where he is to be found: in our midst, in our stories, in the breaking of the bread–and as we faithfully bear witness to the reality of Christ’s presence to the world. “
United Church of Christ