Happy Bunny Day! My brother attends a church that does not celebrate Easter, so my wife and I were discussing the origins of the holiday with him yesterday at Cracker Barrel. Then we got home and lo and behold, Daniel and Heather posted a great article about this very issue. You have to see the picture, it’s priceless. Anyways, I began writing a comment and decided to turn it into a post.
Getting into the historical origins of Easter would be tedious, and anyone with a little motivation can do this him or herself. Suffice it to say that for quite some time in history Christians were competing with pagans over the Spring Equinox, with the former celebrating Christ’s resurrection and the latter awaiting the annual rebirth of Attis (one of many names used for Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, etc.).
From a cultural standpoint, Christians won. But the origin of the holiday was for the most part pagan.
Easter falls close to Passover (which falls on the Christian holiday ‘Maundy Thursday’ this year), so the Judeo-Christian connection is seen more clearly – but in many cases the connection is blurred. Of course historically the Church has understood that the Last Supper was a Passover (Seder) meal, and thus Christ would have been crucified the following day and rose again three days later. Whether this was a Sunday is irrelevant and could be argued in several directions for hours.
Christmas and Easter remain the two most celebrated Christian holidays, yet it is clear that they are really just cultural fads. Slavoj Zizek in his book The Puppet and the Dwarf points out:
When it comes to religion … we no longer “really believe” today, we just follow (some) religious rituals and mores as part of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition,” etc.). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” effectively seems to be the most predominant mode of the disavowed/displaced belief characteristic of our times. What is a cultural lifestyle, if not the fact that, although we don’t believe in Santa Claus, there is a Christmas tree in every house, and even in public places, every December? Perhaps, then, the “nonfundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned/impersonal beliefs – “culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.”
This holds true for a majority of Americans’ spirituality. They don’t really believe all of this Jesus stuff, they just go to church two days out of the year because it is a part of their culture. True beliefs alter our worldview, and worldview change results in new thinking patterns and behavioral modification. None of this occurs in most of the folks who attend a church service on Christmas and/or Easter.
Granted, some do genuinely celebrate Christ’s birth and resurrection on these days – but shouldn’t we thank God for His incarnation and resurrection daily? It seems to me that people are clinging to vain traditions of men and stubbornly attaching an ideal belief system to it. WAKE UP! This is a post-Christian culture and few really live out the reason for the seasons the other 363 days of the year!
My wife and I like Easter because it is fun watching kids get eggs, because we recognize that the pagan notions have been divorced from the cultural practices. We celebrate Christmas because it is a great time with family, and we try to avoid the true reasons for the season: materialism and greed. But to say we focus on the idealistic neo-Christian foci on these days would be lying. Maybe I’m a weak Christian, but it seems to me that this is a no-brainer: these holidays have hardly anything to do with Jesus Christ – just like they have hardly anything to do with fertility and pagan goddess worship. If you agree with the latter I cannot conceive how you can deny the former. Either way you celebrate it, you must divorce it from one of its main cultural contexts. It’s like drinking a strawberry-banana milkshake, but saying you are only focusing on the bananas so that’s all that you ingest. Of course you get both because they are blended, but naive folks for years have been trying to “have their cake and eat it too” when it comes to Easter and our post-Christian culture.
I have no problem celebrating it, but I do so for cultural reasons (and so do you if you’re honest). My wife and I won’t be trying to figure out how to reconcile bunnies with the cross – we can’t. We understand that the holiday is instituted by man and we enjoy it in the freedom we have in Christ. Of course we also celebrate Christ’s resurrection, but only because we try to do this EVERY day! So in conclusion, have a happy bunny day – and remember Christ’s miraculous incarnation and resurrection EVERY day of the year. And then, LIVE IN THOSE TRUTHS.
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A church that doesn’t celebrate Easter??? That’s just odd. Which brother?
We began our Easter celebration last night with the Great Vigil. We continue it this morning with a Divine Service with Communion.
I’m preaching on Mark 16:1-8.
http://chaz-lehmann.livejournal.com/758255.html
It’s Matt’s church in Indianapolis. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart_Freeman which is an article about the movement’s founder, Hobart Freeman. I’ve already warned him a little and shown him this article. He enjoys the church and has a lot of friends there, though, so he’ll be staying.
liked the quote in your article, that pretty much sums it all up, eh?
What we’re still wrestling with is this, how do we deal gently with sincere believers in Christ, who still find great significance in the day called Easter? Something else occured to me while reading your post, and that is, that it seems that lots of Christians and churches view Easter, (and the non-fundamentalist notion of culture attached to it) as one of those rare opportunities to be seized upon. The attractional-model church is in full-swing on days like Easter. I remember growing up how the church would prepare itself for all those once/twice-a-year church goers, hoping to rope a few of them in… This last Sunday, we were out driving and I saw a sign on a little church, “Free Easter breakfast 8:30 / Easter Celebration 10:00″, and I’m thinking, “wow, who could resist that?”…
Anyway, I think whatever point I originally had was completely lost in my rambling…
I just let it go for the most part, Daniel. Most people easily recognize that they only celebrate Easter for cultural reasons if they are honest with themselves. If they’re not honest with themselves, you won’t convince them of anything else anyways, so don’t bother. Yeah the “come and see” church model is absolutely in full force on Easter, it’s ridiculous. We decided not to go to church on Easter for that reason – it’s too crazy. Don’t even get me started on my theory of how churches use Easter and Christmas to balance their budgets (since they always spend beyond their means).
If you think of your original point, you are always free to comment!