On this Easter observance, we imagine what it was like, the lingering euphoria of these women who were the first to see the empty tomb, the first to see the resurrected Jesus, the first to tell the glorious good news that Christ Is Risen! How chivalrous of a risen Savior to have appeared first to those unequal, to those who were seen as discredited in society with the most important event that has ever occurred in the history of mankind. These few women then telling the good news did indeed become a large romantic army. (Psalm 68:11)
“It is this splendour of the hopeless hope; sometimes called the forlorn hope, which has made the peculiar chivalry of Christendom, which has given to us alone the true idea of romance; for the real romance was a combination of fidelity to the quest as a task, with perpetual and enormous inequality to the task. And if anyone really wishes to know what is really rooted in our religion, and typical of our culture, he will find it in those late flowers and fruits which have quite recently grown upon trees that were counted utterly stricken and dead through long winters of recent centuries. He will see it in a flash if he thinks for one moment of how short a time separates the Irish Free State from the Irish Famine; and when I went to Poland and heard again the national march of the Poles, I told them that through those words I heard words that were old when all our songs were new, and shall be new when all our songs are old: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”
– G. K. Chesterton, Resurrection, Published April 9, 1936, found in the Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. V
image source: The Holy Women At The Tomb – Resurrection by William Adolphe Bouguereau
