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The Evolution of Easter

From Church to Crème Eggs

It seemed the post-Christmas sales were barely over before the shops started hawking Easter goods: sickeningly sweet candy, stuffed, fluffy chickadees, hollow chocolate bunnies.

I grew up Jewish, not Christian, so I don't have any sentimental associations with these bunnies and chicks; maybe it's perfectly wonderful to celebrate Easter with a visit from a giant rabbit. But as someone who doesn't have rapturous childhood associations with the Easter Bunny, I wonder about it now.

The year Griff and I were dating, he left a small Easter basket outside my apartment door on Easter morning. In it, I found a super-cool pair of earrings embedded in a bunch of that plastic, green grass. It was really neat. But I wasn't sure what it had to do with Easter. (Actually, I was also slightly disappointed, because I was kind of hoping that the jewelry box nestled down in that plastic grass held an engagement ring, which, in fact, didn't appear for another few months.)

Bunnies and all the other trappings of Easter — greeting cards, huge floral arrangements in church, the crunchy, green, plastic grass, Easter parades — all of it is relatively new. In the 18th and 19th centuries, American Christians didn't much celebrate Easter at all. Sometimes they went to church, maybe had a nice lunch afterward. But it wasn't until the mid-1800s that people started decorating for Easter.

New York churches started the trend in the 1850s, deciding that Easter called for huge — and expensive — arrangements of lilies and other spring flowers on the altar. Around the same time, hatmakers managed to persuade ladies that they needed a new bonnet to wear to church on Easter Sunday. By the 1870s, savvy producers were marketing Easter toys, cards and candy. The New York Herald noted in 1881 that egg aficionados could now buy "paper eggs, wooden eggs, satin and silk eggs, plush eggs, tin eggs, silver eggs, gilt eggs, gold eggs, glass and china eggs and sugar eggs."¹

Of course, one can paint those plush, tin and gilt eggs with a holy veneer. The spiritualized explanation of the bunny-and-chick thing is this: Easter is about new life, bunnies and chicks symbolize new life, hence we decorate with bunnies and chicks at Easter. Fair enough, though I don't usually find myself reflecting on the Resurrection as I bite into a scrumptious Cadbury Creme Egg.

Reality of the Resurrection

What is the real meaning of Easter? I didn't get it until my mother was diagnosed with cancer. Oh, I had been a Christian for several years at that point, and I certainly believed in Easter. I believed in the Resurrection. I knew that, Easter cards from Hallmark notwithstanding, the holiday was not about the triumph of daffodils over winter; it was about the triumph of Jesus over death.

About ten days before my mother died, Griff and I were taking a walk through the neighborhood. "This is where the rubber hits the road," I said. "This is where Christianity really, really matters. This is where we have to say something more than 'Jesus was a good teacher,' or 'Christianity is a good story to organize my life around.' This is where I need to hear Christianity proclaimed as true: Either my mother is going to die and be dead forever, or she is going to die and then be raised in the General Resurrection and live eternally."

A 1995 study found that 35 percent of self-identified born-again Christians don't believe that Jesus experienced a bodily resurrection from the dead. (The recently discovered "Gospel of Judas," written in the mid-second century by Gnostics, takes the same view — it ends before Jesus even dies, let alone is resurrected.)

I'm not sure why one would bother with Christianity without the Resurrection. If Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, I'd rather spend my Sunday mornings at the mall. As Paul wrote, if Jesus was not raised from the dead, we Christians pretty much look foolish (1 Corinthians 15). Easter is, among other things, the church's assurance to me that my mother won't be dead forever.

The Promise of Passover

Easter, of course, always falls on a Sunday, but our journey to Easter began on Ash Wednesday and continued through Lent. It really picks up steam the Thursday before Easter — Maundy Thursday. Maundy Thursday is the day the church sets aside for remembering Jesus' Last Supper. The word "maundy" (which I think is a little silly-sounding, and is sometimes hard for me to say without blushing) comes from the Latin word mandatum, "to command." We call the day Maundy Thursday because it was at the Last Supper that Christ commanded the disciples to love one another. In some churches, folks take off their shoes and socks, fill up basins with warm water, and wash one another's feet. They reenact Jesus washing His disciples' feet — fulfilling, in one small, smelly, embodied way, His command to love.

As you may remember from some dusty Sunday School lesson eons ago, that Last Supper wasn't just any old dinner party. It was a Passover seder, the special holy meal that Jewish communities share at the beginning of Passover. It is the celebration during which the Jewish community commemorates God's saving them from slavery in Egypt. On the first night — the holiday lasts a week — Jewish families sit down to a seder. At the seder they read through a book called a Haggadah, which literally means "the story" or "the narrative." The Haggadah retells the story of Israel's bondage in Egypt, and of God's liberating them.

At the Passover seder, Jewish communities are enjoined to practice a very special time of remembering, a kind of memory scholars called anamnesis, which is a fancy way to say that you remember not only with your mind; you remember as though you were there, as though you yourself had experienced the thing you are recalling. So at the Passover seder, you are enjoined to remember the Exodus from Egypt as though you had personally experienced it. And when, at the Communion table, we say we are taking bread and wine in memory of Christ's last supper — we are invited to remember as though we were there.

Bread of Life

This year, on the very same day that we, the church, are celebrating Maundy Thursday, Jewish communities will be celebrating Passover. (I say "this year," because the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, and from the perspective of our Gregorian calendar, Jewish holidays seem to float, sometimes arriving "early" and sometimes "late.") While Christians are commemorating the Last Supper, which itself commemorated the Exodus from Egypt, our Jewish neighbors will be undertaking their own sedarim, their own commemorations of the Exodus.

Because of the different calendars, Jewish holidays and Christian holidays don't always overlap like this — sometimes Maundy Thursday and Passover fall weeks and weeks apart — but it always gives me chills when they intersect. There is something very special about the overlapping of these different moments in sacred time.

This year, I will go to my aunt's house and join all my relatives, most of whom are Jewish, for the Winner family's annual Passover seder. Near the beginning of the celebration, the leader uncovers a plate with three matzot, three pieces of unleavened bread that symbolize the unleavened bread the Israelites ate as they were fleeing Egypt (they were hurrying to get out, and were so rushed that their bread did not have time to rise). The leader of the seder designates the middle piece of matzah and says Ha lachma anya, this is the bread of affliction. And then he or she breaks the piece of matzah in two.

This is always a very moving part of the seder: The bread of affliction inevitably recalls to me the Bread of Life.

And as a Jew who became a Christian, still invited to my family's seder but perhaps now sitting on the edges, I find another layer of profound meaning in the breaking of the matzah. You look at those three pieces of matzot and can't help thinking about the Trinity. And then you look at the second piece of matzah and you can't help thinking about Christ's body, broken upon the cross.

Broken for you, that your body might one day be raised whole and sinless and new, raised in the General Resurrection to new and everlasting life.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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What is the significance of Easter for you?

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That, and not the springtime fecundity of bunnies, is what Easter is about. And the truest taste of Easter is not Cadbury's creamy chocolate eggs, but the bread of affliction transformed into the Bread of Life.