What Easter really means
Published:Saturday | March 30, 2013 | 12:00 AM
THE EDITOR, Sir:
Every year at this time, our anti-Christian friends take the opportunity to share with us what Easter means to them. Please allow me to share with them what Easter means to us Christians, in response to a letter by Claude Wilson on Page A8 of The Gleaner, Monday, March 25, 2013.
Easter is the principal feast of the ecclesiastical year, commemorating the slaying of the true Lamb of God, the resurrection of Christ, the foundation stone on which the Christian faith is built, and the birth of the Christian Church.
Easter is the connecting link between the Old and New Testament, the connection between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Eucharistic worship, and the relationship between the type and the reality.
JEWISH FEAST ADOPTED
Christ's death and resurrection have their types and figures in the Old Law, particularly the Paschal Lamb which was eaten on the 14th day of Nisan. This Jewish feast was taken over into the Easter celebrations. St Paul, in his first recorded Easter homily, said, "Our Passover Lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed, therefore, let us celebrate the feast." (1 Cor 5:7-8)
The Easter liturgy sings of the passing of Israel through the Red Sea, the Paschal Lamb, the column of fire, etc. So the Old Testament era was not an end in itself, but a prefiguring of Christianity. The key to understand Easter is to understand how salvation history evolved.
A. JAMES
Kingston 10