Here’s something they don’t always tell you in seminary: Easter is hard to follow up.
Christmas has a whole season of buildup. Lent is forty days of preparation. But Easter? Easter Sunday arrives in a blaze of lilies and alleluias and brass instruments, and then — Monday happens. The decorations are still up. The leftover ham is in the fridge. And life, with its very ordinary demands, resumes more or less on schedule.
As Lutherans, we actually have something to say about this moment.
The resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a historical event we celebrate once a year and then file away until next spring. It’s the ground beneath everything — the thing that changes the shape of every ordinary Monday that follows. Martin Luther was famously fond of reminding people that in baptism, we die and rise with Christ. Not once. Daily. Which means Easter isn’t really over. It’s just getting started.
The theological phrase for this is “already but not yet” — and I’ll admit it sounds like something you’d say when someone asks if dinner is ready. But it captures something true about the Christian life. The resurrection has already happened. Death has already lost. And yet here we are, still living in a world that hasn’t fully caught up to that news. We still grieve. We still struggle. We still occasionally burn the Easter ham.
And into all of that, the risen Christ keeps showing up anyway — in the breaking of bread, in the faces of neighbors, in the quiet moments when grace sneaks up on us sideways.
So what do we do with Easter now that the Sunday is behind us? We live it. We carry the alleluia into the week. We let the resurrection be not just something we believe but something we practice — in how we love, how we serve, how we show up for one another and for this community we call home.
And here’s the good news — there’s more runway than you might think. The Easter season runs fifty days, all the way to Pentecost. But it goes even deeper than that. I actually did learn something in seminary: every Sunday is a “little Easter” — a weekly remembrance that the tomb is empty and grace has the last word. The early church didn’t wait once a year to celebrate the resurrection. They celebrated it every time they gathered.
Which means the alleluias aren’t fading. They’re just echoing forward — from that empty tomb, into this Sunday, and the next one, and the one after that.
Alleluia! Christ is risen. Still. Always.
Now let’s go live like it.