On Jesus and Jellybeans
Easter comes early this year. It’s only March and already I’m considering the themes of the Easter sunrise sermon. In a few short weeks Christians around the world will gather together in their cathedrals and churches, on hilltops, and in local parks to celebrate Jesus’ glorious victory over death and hell. Preachers will lift up the memory of Christ and His first disciples; they will proclaim the miracle and invite their hearers to live in the glorious light of this all-informing event. God will be honored, believers will be uplifted, and sinners will be saved.
But in addition to the overtly religious elements of Easter, many of us will also participate in other events which are less inherently spiritual: the giving of baskets filled with candy and stuffed bunnies, feverish hunts for colorful eggs (both real and plastic) hidden among bushes and lawn chairs, and so on. And in the midst of this pastel-hued fun the overwhelming majority of revelers will sally forth completely lost in the moment, both unconcerned and unaware of the history of the less Christocentric elements of the holiday. But for a number of families the bliss of ignorance will be impossible. For these informed and unfortunate few (think Ecclesiastes 1:18) the dubious realities of the past will intrude in on the merriment and cast an uncomfortable shadow over the day.
Just as we inherit of our ancestors’ genes, so too have we inherited elements of our ancestors’ culture and this unavoidable principle can be seen quite clearly in Easter. The very word “Easter” comes from “Eostre”, a pagan fertility goddess worshipped by the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons. What’s more, eggs and rabbits (symbols of fertility for obvious reasons) were associated with the goddess in ancient times. It is precisely this history which makes some Christians uncomfortable with the marginalia of Easter Sunday.
Here at First Baptist, we’re currently working through a study on the Book of Judges and we recently focused on a passage which seems apropos here. In the story of Gideon one finds that the Lord called His servant to a particularly provocative task: “Take your father’s bull and a second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal which belongs to your father, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it; and build an altar to the LORD your God on the top of this stronghold in an orderly manner, and take a second bull and offer a burnt offering with the wood of the Asherah which you shall cut down” (Judges 6:25-26). God essentially told Gideon to utterly destroy the sacred site of Baalism in his community and then to use the rubble to facilitate the worship the one true God. Think of that, Gideon, at God’s command, used stones and wood once consecrated to spiritual error in the construction of an altar dedicated to the Lord. The wood and the stones were not contaminated by their former use, they weren’t made somehow “unclean”; they were simply raw material, raw material which was recycled and used to glorify God.
Now if God can be glorified with rocks and wood once associated with a false god, why not eggs and rabbits? For while Eostre may have had a lock on these things in the first few centuries of the Christian era in the English speaking world, the same simply cannot be said today. When Westerners see the Cadbury Bunny on TV hocking its delicious cream-filled chocolate eggs we think of Easter, and when we think of Easter we think of Jesus’ triumphant rise from the grave. And thus, these potent symbols of fertility and life have come, in a sense, to be symbols of the resurrection and the new life that we can receive through that event. For however much a sham goddess may have represented vitality to the ancient English, her claims were as nothing compared against the Savior that St. Augustine and his companions preached—that One who came that we may have life, and have it abundantly.