Peter Espeut THIS WEEK we celebrate the events of the Christian Passover, when we remember how Jesus, the Lamb of God, saved us from slavery to sin and death; it is the holiest season of the Christian year. Some persons who call themselves Christians, like my colleague Ian Boyne of the church founded on Herbert W. Armstrong, do not believe that Christians should celebrate Easter at all, but should rather continue to celebrate the Jewish Passover and the Jewish Feast of the Unleavened Bread. "Easter is a pagan feast", they say, and they debate with me on RJR this Sunday at 12:15 p.m. It always amazes me how normally intelligent people can become illogical when it comes to religion.
There is no dispute among scholars that the word "Easter" has pagan roots, relating to the god "Eastre", whose feast was celebrated at the vernal equinox around the same time as the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter. Those that seek to attack traditional Christianity have just discovered this, and every year at Easter they trot it out like a trump card to show that their denomination is the one true church and the rest of Christendom is false.
What traditional Christianity calls "Easter" has nothing to do with Eastre or Isis or Astarte or any pagan god or ceremony; for Christians, Easter is to the year what Sunday is to the course of the week: the great festival of salvation. At his Passover meal, Jesus said, "Do this as my memorial"; in other words, "before when you ate unleavened bread and drank the cup of thanksgiving, you did it in memory of your salvation from slavery and death by the blood of the Passover Lamb in Egypt; now you are to eat and drink in memory of your salvation from slavery to sin and death through the blood of the Lamb of God to eternal life". Easter is the Christian Passover.
EARLY CONNECTION
The early Christians made this theological connection, lost on some of us today. In Matthew, Mark and Luke the Last Supper is a Passover meal, which takes place on the
evening of the First Day of the Unleavened Bread, the Preparation Day, the same day when the Passover Lamb is killed. Jesus is then crucified on the next day, the day before the Sabbath, which is Friday (in Judeao-Christian tradition it is the same day, since the day runs from sunset to sunset).
THE LAST SUPPER
In the Gospel according to John, the connection is even stronger. The Last Supper takes place on the evening before Preparation Day (so it is not a Passover meal at all, or anticipates the Passover), so that Jesus dies on the cross on Preparation Day (the Friday) at the same hour as the Passover lambs are being sacrificed in the temple in time for the Passover meal that night. (In his search for deeper theological meaning, St. John will cause my fundamentalist brethren horrors, because this introduces a discrepancy between the accounts on the actual date).
For the first few years after the birth of the Church, Easter was celebrated on the same day as the Jewish Passover: the 14th day of the Jewish Month of Nisan - no matter on which day of the week it fell. Very early, the Church moved the celebration of Easter to the Sunday after the Passover, since the first Easter fell on a Sunday, which was the main reason the whole Church shifted away from the Jewish Sabbath to weekly Christian Sunday worship in the first place. The Armstrongite attack upon Easter is a necessary follow-on to the attack on the authentic Christian tradition of Sunday worship. The Armstrongites are neo-Israelites, and believe that, despite the New Covenant and warnings about Judaisers, Christian worship should not vary from its Jewish heritage.
The celebration of Easter has its roots in the Passover, which is not a pagan celebration; it is a Jewish celebration (Jews and Christians have the same God). But does this mean that Easter must be a Jewish celebration? No! Christian theology took this meaningful Jewish celebration and gave it new meaning - Christian meaning. Life is about death and rebirth, about new meanings given to old things, about redefining and reinterpreting symbols.
THE ARMSTRONGITE CLAIM
Another interesting aspect of our debate (which you can listen to on Sunday) is the Armstrongite claim that Jesus neither died on a Friday, nor rose from the dead on Sunday. I must confess that I was rather taken aback at this iconoclasm, and was ill-prepared for friend Ian's challenge for me "to quote one scripture passage which states that Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday". Their argument is that the women indeed went to the tomb on the Sunday to find him risen, but that he had, in fact, risen sometime before that (on the Sabbath). "Why do you, Espeut, continue to spread false propaganda that Jesus died on Good Friday and rose on Easter Sunday?" You will find our discussion interesting!
Well, of course, if Ian and the Armstrongites will look at Mark 16:9 they will see "Having risen in the morning of the first day of the week -" which deals with that point; and all four accounts of the Gospel state that Jesus died the day before the Sabbath (e.g. Mark 15:42) which is Friday. Now if you want to ask how that becomes three days, that is another debate.
I hardly think that my few words will stop those who seek to destroy traditional Christianity; they have their agenda. What I hope is that those who follow Christ will celebrate Easter with profound joy, without the doubts which these rascals seek to create.
Peter Espeut is a Sociologist and a deacon of the Roman Catholic Church.
