WHAT'S ALL THE CELEBRATING
ABOUT?
The baseball season
doesn't start till next week.
Of course I know of a
couple of college basketball teams and their fans who are beside
themselves with joy today. I love the NCAA tournament. In fact, it's
about the only basketball I watch. Football and baseball are my great
loves, and my wife deserves a little bit of my time once in a while,
so it's not really fair of me to spend a lot of time watching a sport
that I have a lot less appreciation for. But the tournament is
awesome! Wall to wall basketball, in a win-or-go-home format. I love
the emotion.
But this blog isn't
about basketball. Shockingly enough, it isn't about baseball either.
Although I could go on for days about my World Champion Royals.
No, this is about
rabbits, eggs, and Jesus Christ.
I'm not even sure exactly which branch of science this falls under, but I've read a few books and I know rabbits don't lay
eggs, nor did Jesus Christ hatch from one. So why are we even talking
about them all in the same context? OK, that's a rhetorical question.
We all know that today is Easter/Ishtar/Eostre/Astarte/Resurrection
Sunday/Whatever. What are we doing this for? We claim to be honoring
Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for our salvation, but are we really
honoring God by celebrating a Pagan holiday? Church goers know most
of those terms refer to some sort of Paganism or another, and Jesus
Christ didn't even rise on a Sunday.
I know that Jesus
Christ rising from the dead was a big deal. In fact, it's the biggest
deal in history. His dying on the cross for our sins, of course, was
the whole point of His being born. But that was just theoretical,
until He rose. His resurrection was the proof that He was the perfect
sacrifice and now our sins can be forgiven because of His death.
But this whole spring
ritual thing that we go through has absolutely nothing to do with
Jesus or His resurrection. In fact, I'm convinced we are insulting
God and what He did for us with all this carrying on about eggs and
rabbits and assorted hogwash.
This year we say He rose on
March 27th. Last year it was April 5th. Next
year, it will be on April 16th. How can you even plan for
a holiday when they move it around all the time? I've got problems
with Christmas, too, but at least it's on the same day every year.
Why can't they do that with the Spring holiday? (No, I'm not going
through all those names again)
The obvious answer is
that the holiday is tied to some celestial event. In this case, two
of them: The vernal equinox and the full moon. The first ecumenical
council, hosted by Constantine in the city of Nicaea (Nice) in AD 325
ruled unanimously that the Easter festival should be celebrated
throughout the Christian world on the first Sunday after the full
moon following the vernal equinox. But, if the full moon occurred on
a Sunday, thereby coinciding with the Passover festival, then Easter
should be commemorated on the following Sunday so as to make sure
that Easter and Passover would not be celebrated at the same time,
even by accident. I should point out here that there were a number of
churches who refused to even attend this conference and who would
not, under any circumstances, deviate from what had been passed down
to them from the Apostles. These people were branded as heretics,
hunted down and killed.
So now we're
stuck with this floating holiday that was put into place by people
who were more concerned with not being Jewish than anything else. The
more I learned about the details, the more it seemed to me that they
were not as interested in having Jesus save them from anything as
they were in saving the Name of Jesus from being associated with the
Jews. If you're curious about the details of how we ended up with
this mess, you can go to http://www.cogwriter.com/easter.htm.
It's a very well written, detailed, long and boring article that
explains where the name comes from, how it got into the Christian
lexicon, and how virtually every aspect of the celebration is an
attempt to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ while
denying that there is any connection whatsoever between Jesus and
those “depraved Jews.” Due to an incredible amount of unabashed
antisemitism on the part of Constantine (“...in order that we may
no more have any thing in common with those parricides and the
murderers of our Lord. ...no single point in common with the perjury
of the Jews.”), the official Christian doctrine, enforced on pain
of death, intentionally and maliciously, discounted the entire Word
of God because the scriptures were Jewish.
Consider this: The
early church grew to hate the Jews so much that they persecuted
anybody that practiced anything that was perceived as being Jewish.
Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, for crying out loud! The One they had
been waiting for. While most of them didn't recognize this fact,
there were an ever-growing number of believers working hard to get
their fellow Jews to understand that.
Now, here comes
Constantine and subsequent church leaders that hated the Jews and
persecuted them mercilessly... IN THE NAME OF CHRIST. So now, to Jews
the name of Christ, who they didn't really believe in anyway, becomes
synonymous with hate, persecution and death. The Jews have had their
Messiah STOLEN from them by people claiming Him as their Savior; who
took His life, death and resurrection – the greatest event in the
history of mankind – and turned it into a children's festival. I'm
not saying we should be adhering to Mosaic Law, but the church has
developed a law of its own that is a slap in the face of the God we
claim to be worshiping. Nowhere in the Bible does it say we are to
commemorate His resurrection. Yet we do, with pagan symbols, ham, and
the name of a pagan god to boot. God threw the Jews out of Jerusalem
because of their worship of other Gods. Just because you put the name
of Jesus on it, doesn't make it God ordained....and we don't even do
that. WE STILL CALL IT EASTER!
We don't even have the
basics down. We've got Him dying on a Friday and, “after three days
and three nights”, rising from the dead on a Sunday morning. I
didn't take calculus, or logarithms, or any of the other higher math
for geniuses, so I may be missing something. But I cannot, for the
life of me, figure out how you can get three days and three nights
between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.
I did a lot of research to
try to figure that one out, and as it turns out, it seems He was
crucified on a Wednesday. It was the day before Passover, which
apparently landed on a Thursday that year. Not the day before Shabbat
(Saturday). Then you give Him three days and three nights (that would
be 72 hours), and He rises, not at sunrise on Sunday morning (when
the people showed up before dawn on Sunday morning, he was already
risen), but at sundown on Saturday night. Now I admit that I had
always believed Jesus rose on Sunday. Even after I got the story on
what day He was actually crucified, I never thought to do the math.
Now I'm thinking that there is not a single detail of this annual
fiasco that can be found in the Bible.
All the research I did
for this had lots of references, both from the Bible and from other
sources. I didn't bother to include those in my little rant here
because I figured if it actually made a difference to anyone reading
this, it would be pretty easy to find the stuff yourself. I did
provide a link to get you started. But while this whole thing weighs
heavy on my heart, I believe a majority of Christians actually know
this stuff. They just don't care. Anytime I bring this up to somebody
in church, they say that traditions are important. Something about
comfort and connections to the past. Let's not forget the chance for
the family to get together and fellowship. A lot of people tell me
they just do it for the children. It's so much fun for them.
OK, now I'm a
curmudgeon. Sucking all the joy out of Spring. But for the sake of
fun, aren't we teaching the children to grow up practicing religions
that are contrary to what we claim to believe? I actually know a
few practicing Pagans, and they are laughing their butts off at us.
They know we are celebrating their holidays with them. How can we
convince them that we have a better way when we are actually
practicing religion their way?
So what to do? I don't
know. What I like to do is get a leg of lamb and eat it at Passover, which happens to fall on April 22nd this year at sundown. (Yes, it moves around a lot, too. But that's because the the Gregorian calendar we use isn't in sync with the Jewish calendar. It's fixed on the 14th of Nisan on the Jewish calendar.) I try to get close to Passover. It usually ends up being on the closest
weekend to the Passover so my family has a chance to get together. It
also gives me a chance to eat lamb. I don't go through the whole
Passover feast thing because I wasn't raised Jewish and I would look
really stupid. But I love mutton, and it's pretty expensive, so I
kind of need an excuse. I eat plenty of pork all through the year
(BACON!), so it's not like I've got a thing about clean vs. unclean
meat. But it does seem a little incongruous to celebrate Jesus Christ
by making it a point to eat something He would never have eaten. The
children? Why don't we take them fishing. Jesus liked fish, and the
kids have a great time...if you can keep them from falling in the
water. My kids are grown now, way past the age for Easter egg hunts.
But you never outgrow fishing.
I'm not going to say
that any of this is going to keep anybody out of Heaven. I'm
certainly in no position to judge. I get as excited about spring as
anybody, and the things that get me excited , as I mentioned at the
top of this diatribe, have little to do with worshiping God. Like all
Christians, I cling to the hope that Christ, knowing how stupid,
selfish and spiritually clumsy I am, died for me anyway. But what I
tell my kids is: if you see any little round things in the yard left
by a rabbit, DON'T EAT IT! Even if it does look like chocolate.
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