Thoughts on Easter

It is Easter 2018.  I must admit that I did not attend a church service as we used to in years past, but we’ll get back to the reasons for that later.

A lot of people don’t stop to think about the Christian meaning of this day I would guess.  It used to be a day to celebrate spring for many people.  They would get new coats, suits and hats in summery colours and styles and proudly wear them to Easter Sunday church services.  They would have family together for an Easter meal; after all it was the end of Lent.  It was also a day of reflection:  about Christianity; about renewal; about sacrifice; and about resurrection.  Oh, we had things like Easter egg hunts for kids and sometimes country hikes for older kids, but it was all built around church and family.

Today you get the feeling that the Easter egg hunts, complete with giant chocolate rabbits, and the big dinners are the only part of the day for most folks.  The dinners must certainly be popular considering the number of people I saw shopping at the liquor store yesterday.  But the other things, particularly the church services and the reflection, don’t seem to be as prevalent.  Oh, I’m sure that there are still the people who only come to church at Christmas and Easter.  They have always been with us.

I wrote a short piece a few years ago about how holidays had become associated with sports events, particularly the years that the Masters Golf tournament coincides with Easter (The Easter Celebration.doc).  This weekend it is another golf tournament, but it is also the time of the countdown to both the hockey and basketball playoffs, with teams involved in both sports vying for a position into those playoffs.  And Maundy Thursday was the start of the major league baseball season. Oh, what did we do before there were so many distractions to keep our minds off things that are really important?

Easter is the remembrance of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the philosopher and preacher that spawned the Christian religion.  I say he was a philosopher because what he really gave us was a philosophy to live a good life.  The messages were often subtle, but they were clear.  The parable of the Good Samaritan was a lesson in tolerance of people of different ethnic or religious groups.  The example of feeding the crowd with five loafs and two fishes was the power of sharing.  It wasn’t that he magically transformed that meager fare into a feast; it was that by sharing the little that he and his disciples had caused other people who had food to share it with their neighbours.  Jesus wasn’t a magician; he just understood the human condition. 

Jesus also did not set out to start a new religion.  Jesus set out to reform the Jewish faith.  The Jewish faith at this time was in a state of discord, and had become fixated on rules and ceremony, factions and friction.  Jesus tried to break his fellow Jews of this obsession and make the religion more understandable and accessible to the common person.  To try and make it relevant.  Jesus was born a Jew and he died a Jew.  Nothing he said was meant to convene a new religion.  Christianity owes its founding to Paul.  He is the one who brought the Jesus message beyond the Jews and introduced it to the gentiles, in particular the Greek and Roman worlds.  Perhaps we should call it ‘Paulism’.