Happy Good Friday & A Blessed Easter

[Warph]

Happy Good Friday!

The music video tribute below for this holy Christian day, Jesus' crucifixion, and a prelude of Easter, His resurrection, is of a 2012 Easter Sunday performance by the Old South Choir in Boston. Under the direction of Harry L. Huff, the video performance below is of the magnificent "Easter Hymn" from the 1890 opera Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), with dramatic soprano soloist Rebecca O'Brien. The one-act opera, composed by young Italian composer Pietro Mascagni, is set in a 19th-century Sicilian village on Easter morning and was adapted from a play written by Giovanni Verga, based on his short story. The opera is considered Mascagni's masterpiece and was lauded for its realism.

[Warph]

I hope you had a blessed Good Friday, everybody, and a joyous Easter tomorrow.  Towards that end, I give you two remarkable texts from God's Word, which detail how Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, is OUR death, burial, and resurrection, and how each of us was and is intimately involved in His Cross and in His empty tomb.  From Colossians 2:

"...8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits[a] of the world, and not according to Christ. 9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him."


And as if that were not enough to tie us to Christ's Cross and Resurrection, here is  Romans 6:

"...3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life."

"...5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set freefrom sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus."

[Warph]

"He is not here; he has risen, just as he said."

- Matthew 28:6

~Paul Harvey's Easter Message~

Peace, love and good health to you and yours this season.  
This is one day we can take a break from the world of chaos
swirling around us and focus on a constant in our lives...
Jesus Christ...