So Easter Day was the proclamation of Christ’s victory over evil and over death.  And from that day onwards the spiritual and moral power of the Crucified Christ has been bestowed by the Risen Christ on those who are his own, enabling them to resist the evil in the world around them and to overcome the evil within their own hearts.

Indeed, the Christian life itself is described in Holy Scripture as a re-enactment within one’s own heart of Good Friday and Easter Day; of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ.  That is to say, each individual Christian is called to die to self and to live instead to God in Christ Jesus.

In other words I have to cease to be the selfish and un-Christlike person that my lower self wants me to be; and instead to become my true self that God wants me to be.  I have to kill off that false and unpleasant self by resisting and overcoming and finally destroying all its self-centred and unpleasant manifestations, whether they show themselves in my thinking, my speaking or my acting.

It is a process which St Peter calls dying to sin and living to righteousness (King James Bible, 1 Peter 2:24), and it can be achieved only by the grace and power of the Risen Christ on the one hand and a determined struggle by us on the other.