Easter Sunday: Washington’s Resurrection Prayer
Χριστός ανεστη! Христос воскрес! Christus surrexit! Christ is risen! Indeed He is risen this Easter Sunday, conquering sin and death and opening the gates of heaven for us through His death on the cross. And just like George Washington, we can look forward to our own resurrection one day, if we stay faithful to Christ and His Church.
The following prayer was found in the journal of George Washington, the commander of the Revolutionary Army, the first U.S. president, and the “Father of his country”:
“Oh, eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the Lamb and purge my heart by thy Holy Spirit. Daily, frame me more and more in the likeness of thy son, Jesus Christ, that living in thy fear, and dying in thy favor, I may in thy appointed time obtain the resurrection of the justified unto eternal life. Bless, O Lord, the whole race of mankind and let the world be filled with the knowledge of thee and thy son, Jesus Christ.”
It is a beautiful prayer, one which all of us could join in saying, expressing our faith and asking for mercy just as Washington did hundreds of years ago.
Ven. Fulton Sheen once observed, “Unless there is a Good Friday in our lives, there will never be an Easter Sunday. The Cross is the condition of the empty tomb, and the crown of thorns is the preface to the halo of light.” Washington would have agreed with that sentiment. He sacrificed a great deal and risked everything to win the Revolution, and then to create and lead a new nation. Furthermore, while Jesus promised spiritual liberty and equality of all men before God, Washington and his fellow revolutionaries applied that principle to the political sphere, fighting and suffering so that liberty and equality could be the foundational principles of a new nation. But Washington also knew that liberty and equality will never truly exist in politics and society unless there is a strong religious foundation, a Judeo-Christian people. If we would be free, that freedom must be spiritual as well as material.
The Bible verse (John 11:25-26) inscribed in Washington’s tomb, over the sarcophagi of George and Martha, is Christ’s promise of eternal life to His followers. Jesus said we would all rise again if we believed in Him, if we took up our crosses and followed Him (Matt. 16:24). And so with faith and trust in Christ let us repeat the words that were the first president’s affirmation of his belief in the Resurrection: “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
Have a blessed Easter!