Easter 2014

It's that time of year again: Easter! (or, for this year specifically, the 239th anniversary of the British licking their wounds in Boston and colonial militias gathering around the peninsula town at the beginning of what would be a very long siege). I've never been head-over-heels for Easter (probably because of a recurrent nightmare from my childhood that involved the Easter bunny sucking the blood from my neck in a dark and misty gymnasium), but I've been so inundated with "Easter-esque" traditions over social media that I've felt prompted to suspend the usual "sunday meditations" and sketch out a few thoughts:

This time of the season is marked by two things: Easter-bashing and "new takes on the resurrection of Jesus and what it means for us today." NPR (with whom I'm in a sort of radio love affair) has been flooded with material praising skepticism, pondering the evolution of religion, and questioning every aspect of the Easter story (funny how they tend not to do this for Islamic or Jewish holy days). That kind of material sells well about this time of year, a sort of drug for those whose nerves bristle against Christianity. I find such discussions interesting and thought-provoking, but I don't fear a "shaking of my faith," nor do I find my own nerves bristling at such talk. My nerves bristle when those who are so hostile to anything related to religion have done no real, hard thinking about the matter; my nerves bristle when people soak in whatever teaching suits their fancy and then wear it like a badge of maturity; my nerves bristle at the western messiah complex elevating a brand of naturalistic, materialistic philosophy as the be-all and end-all of sane and rational thought. 

What I find most comical is how Instagram and Facebook are flooded with declarations about Easter originally being a pagan holiday celebrating Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of sex and fertility. Or was it a Germanic celebration of the goddess Ostara? Or was it a celebration of the goddess of sex and fertility, in whatever outfit she wore? Probably the latter. Early Christians didn't have a set day for the celebration of Easter; the earliest church shows no signs of celebrating an "official Easter:. By the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. (from whom we received The Nicene Creed), Christians had started celebrating Easter. Note that it'd been two hundred years since the birth of the early church, roughly the same amount of time that's passed since the end of the War of 1812, and who nowadays even remembers that world war? Early Christian practice evolved over that time, and many Christians had somewhere and at some time started celebrating the "Christian Easter" according to the Jewish calendar. The First Council of Nicaea sought to break from the Jewish calendar because of technical difficulties, and the Council chose a certain date for Easter to be universally celebrated by Christians. By pointing out (quite correctly) that Easter (with all the trimmings of bunnies and eggs that we have now) was originally celebrated by pagans, it's assumed that Constantine was seeking to bend one knee to pagan religion and another knee to Christianity. We may question Constantine's devotion, but we have the facts, too: the Council of Nicaea chose the date to overcome hurdles with a defunct Jewish calendar and to streamline Christian celebrations of the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is nothing whatsoever in this decision that is bending the knee to paganism. One can argue that the Christians sought to "de-paganize" pagan festivities to make Christianity more suitable to those who didn't want to abandon tradition. I'm a firm believer that Christ makes all things new, and he redeems everything, pagan festivals included. Those who use this tidbit of history against Christianity make the logical fallacy of taking a correlation between Christian Easter and a pagan holiday as a causation of belief, which falls flat on its face because (a) correlation simply does not have any bearing on causation, and (b) how would a two-century-old belief be generated by an Easter holiday officialized two hundred years after its inception? Let's not forget the assumption that any of this whatsoever has any bearing on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. The thought seems to go, "Easter was a pagan holiday! Jesus never rose from the dead!" It just doesn't make sense. It proves nothing. All it does is shed a little historical light on something we experience today; and an avid fan of history, I love that.

You see the same thing in all those "ancient gospels" that somehow seem to pop up around Easter or Christmas. This Easter's gospel is the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" papyrus from Egypt, purportedly written sometime between 300 and 600 A.D. This fragment has a line that reads Jesus said to them, My wife... she is able to be my disciple. The big question is, "Did Jesus have a wife?" and "Is this a forgery?" Christians, of course, are quick to call it a forgery, despite any knowledge pertaining to how one would ascertain such confidence in a document of this nature, simply because we don't like it. If it's a forgery, no surprise there: there's lots of them going around. If it's the "real deal," why do we automatically assume its statement is true? I'm the "real deal," but I'm so full of shit all the time. "Authenticity" means nothing. If it's real, all it tells us is that some ancient Egyptians wrote a document suggesting Jesus was married. It doesn't tell us why the piece was written, if the writers were even Christian, or if people really believed this. At the least, the document is 270 years removed from the events it's retelling, and 230 years removed from the writing of the canonical gospels, which were well circulating by the time this Egyptian papyrus claims to have originated. It's both sad and funny when people seek to discredit four intact gospel narratives written very near the reported events in light of a miniscule fragment of a document that could either be a forgery or close to three centuries removed from the "life and times of Christ." Again: it just doesn't make sense. More historical validity is presented to documents that fail to meet the most secular criterion for "historical authenticity" than the gospels, even though the gospels meet each and every secular criterion, and do so with colors flying and drums beating. But because Christian-bashing and religion-whacking are so in vogue, the logical validity of an argument is more of a guideline than a requirement.

That's what you have on Easter on one side of the coin. On the other you have "new revelations about Jesus' resurrection." There's always some new take on the resurrection, and that's not surprising. Preachers have a lot of weight on their shoulders to get the Sunday message right: not only is this THE Christian holiday (besides Christmas) when non-believers flock to churches, but you'd better make the resurrection palatable and enticing to woo the nonbelievers back and make sure the committed congregation is appeased, since they expect so much out of you that day. There's a fear that if we aren't original in our preaching, original in our takes on scripture, original in the way we present the gospel, we're not doing our job. Creativity rather than content becomes the goal. Our capitalistic culture thrives on originality and entrepreneurship, and those tendencies sink into the church. We're taught in bible college that originality is what makes good churches, what makes good sermons, and what makes good preachers. I'm all about looking at scripture from different angles, reinvesting doctrine with a keen eye on the text, and presenting the gospel in such a manner that people really can see what Easter is all about. I just tend to fall on the side of orthodoxy, I think. I'm "old school", and this worship of "originality" concerns me for many reasons, not least because (a) "the faith once for all entrusted to the saints" isn't to be upgraded, revised, and redone in order to palate the masses of our culture (have we forgotten that our culture, like every culture, is godless?), and (b) originality is so often driven by a desire to appease. Originality helps a product prosper, and when we subject the gospel and Christian teachings to "originality" not because the text demands it but because our culture demands it, we are turning Christianity into a product to be sold in a fashion more suitable to our target audience. So often we're bothered by the obvious friction between the demands of the gospel and the atmosphere of our culture. Such friction is to be expected in the declaration of God's words to a godless society that seeks to suppress the truth of God and make man nothing more than an animal. Such friction has been the necessary norm since 33 A.D.; we in the western world have become so inebriated by popular philosophy and the ideals of relativism and postmodernism that we let culture infect our reading of scripture rather than seeking to redeem culture through Christ. 

Around this time of year you also start hearing from the ultra-fundamentalists who declare any Christian who celebrates Easter is being seduced by Satan and is really worshipping pagan gods without knowing it. This is no less a knee-jerk reaction than those who discover Easter's pagan origins and declare that the resurrection MUST therefore be nothing less than a myth. Culture is to be redeemed by the gospel, and those who celebrate Easter as a day commemorating Jesus' resurrection and meditating on all that he accomplished are doing precisely that. Now, if only we could do away with compartmentalizing the resurrection of Jesus and start living each day as if it were Easter, since each day really is Easter. Christ is risen. A new era has dawned. The age of grace, mercy, and irresistible forgiveness has broken forth. As Christ is risen, so we can raise with him in part in the present, and we can look forward to the day when we receive resurrection bodies like his when God makes all things new. 

Tomorrow I'll be celebrating Easter with my family in New Carlisle.

Grilling out, playing volleyball in the lawn, and catching up. 

I'll probably eat a lot of cream-filled chocolates in the shapes of bunnies.

I'll probably eat some hollow ones, too!

(they're kind of a rip-off, but they're really in vogue this time of year)

#resurrectionchocolates #exorbantpriceforahollowpieceofchocolate #marketing