How one is to attain to the joyful Easter day.

What this letter is. A short, radiant Easter letter — written on Holy Saturday, 12 April 1732, the still day between the cross and the rising, to Christiana Maria Griesenbeck (cf. Briefe 120 and 123). Its whole subject is the question its heading asks: how does one come to the joyful Easter day? Tersteegen's answer is that Easter is reached only through the tomb — inwardly, not merely as an outward festival. He opens with the great Easter cry: "Jesus lives, for the comfort and salvation of His wretched brethren." Let us share in "the glory and the victory of our Lord and Savior," he says — "but only after we have first had fellowship in His suffering and death." And crucially, all of this "is to be experienced inwardly within us; the outward images" — the pictures, the pageantry — "are not what it consists in."

From there comes the letter's beautiful central image: "Let our heart be His grave, wherein we shut ourselves up with Him." Withdraw into stillness and detachment "from all else," so that Paul's word may come true of us — "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." And then the counsel for Holy Saturday itself: "there, without our own willing, living, and stirring, let us hold out our three days in stillness," and Christ "will become our life, in a manner incomprehensible to reason but glorious." Go to the grave, he says, "in blind love and childlike faith," and do not fret "how this or that stone shall be rolled away" — for "the angels of the Lord serve us, without our knowing." It is a letter about resurrection that spends almost all its time in the tomb, on purpose: the joy of Easter is on the far side of a real dying. It closes with a very human, Holy-Saturday touch — "Remember me especially in these days, since I shall perhaps have a fair amount of company."

A few words and echoes.

• "Jesus lives." The Easter cry that opens everything — the risen Christ, "for the comfort of His wretched brethren"; His glory and victory are ours to share.
• Through the tomb to Easter. The letter's whole logic: one comes to "the joyful Easter day" only by first sharing Christ's death — "fellowship in His suffering and death" precedes beholding "His whole glory" (an echo of Jesus' prayer, John 17:24).
• "Let our heart be His grave." The central image — to make one's own heart the tomb where one is buried and hidden with Christ, in stillness and detachment.
• "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." Colossians 3:3 — the verse the whole letter is a meditation on; the hidden life with the risen Christ.
• "Hold out our three days in stillness." The Holy-Saturday counsel — to wait out the "three days" of the tomb "without our own willing, living, and stirring," letting Christ, not our effort, be the resurrection.
• "Not anxious how the stone shall be rolled away." An echo of the women at the tomb (Mark 16:3) — the removal of every obstacle is God's work, not our worry; "the angels of the Lord serve us, without our knowing."