Why Easter beats Christmas feast in religious importance

Two high points that mark the eventful terrain of Christian festivities are Easter and Christmas. Between these well-celebrated Christian feasts, most people believe Christmas is the most important. Yet Christian history would prove them wrong.

Easter was the first feast to be celebrated. In fact, early Christians considered the resurrection of Jesus such an important feast that they began to celebrate it every Sunday. While Sunday had not become a public holiday yet – it would become one only in the fourth century – they gathered in the homes of the faithful to listen to the Scriptures and to break bread together. They referred to Sunday as “the Day of the Lord”.

By the second century Christians had begun to mark a specific Sunday closest to the Feast of the Jewish Passover to celebrate the Christian version of the Pasach. This great feast was preceded by a period of preparation that lasted 40 days in what is referred to as the Season of Lent. This is to be a time of intense spiritual exercise marked by practices of prayer, fasting and alms giving. And the follow-on of the actual feast lasts 50 days. All this simply goes to demonstrate the importance of Easter in the Christian calendar.

MCDONALDISATION OF RELIGION

So, how did Christmas come to take an upper hand over Easter? The answer is simple enough: commercialism that emerged from British and American pragmatism. It popularised symbolic practices that had emerged around Christian feasts across the world. For instance, it is only since the 19th century that Christmas has come to be celebrated as we do today with its myriad paraphernalia of gifts, cards, trees, turkeys, Brussels sprouts, and of course, Santa Claus.

Not surprisingly, these practices have caught on very strongly even in African cities. Incidentally, in Nairobi, in the first weeks of March, a supermarket had their shelves stocked with Coke bottles that were labelled in red with Santa Claus. It is not clear why Coca-Cola Bottlers and the retailer failed to notice the difference between Christmas and Easter!

There have also been some attempts to muddle Easter by commercialising the traditional customs of Easter eggs and bunnies. Both are symbols of the fecundity and life that Easter celebrates.

Fortunately, the Chinese manufacturing industry has not captured the African markets with these items. The unfortunate side to this is that Easter celebrations tend to be of low key, especially for the kids. It does not evoke the same euphoria that Christmas does.

It should be acknowledged that religions, and particularly religious festivals, have their social functions. They offer us a sense of identity, cater to our need for belonging, and help us negotiate gracefully the various transitions in life. So, we do need religious functions and festivities. Most of these customs around Christian festivals have symbolic draping. It is only when these festivals are made bereft of their original meaning and get secularised that we need to raise eye-brows. We need to be wary of what I call the “McDonaldisation” of religion.

Secularisation of religious events, including Easter, happens when they fail to mediate an inner experience for the adherents. For most Christians, Easter might just be an historical event that is commemorated, rather than being an experience that brings about a personal transformation.

What is the difference between an event and an experience? In the past weeks I have been keenly following the news about the painstaking search for the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. Yet for me, this has been a mere event that had taken place somewhere in Southeast Asia. However, I am sure, for the families that are still waiting for a meaningful explanation to this mystery, and more so for the crew and passengers on the flight, this was an experience – a gruesome one at that.

Let us look at the event that is being celebrated at Easter so as to draw a meaningful experience.

DID JESUS RESURRECT?

Easter simply commemorates the resurrection of Jesus. But did Jesus really rise from the dead? No one saw Jesus rise from the dead, but it is from the after-experiences of the event that we can infer three pointers that show why Christians believe he rose from the dead. The first pointer is the empty tomb. The new tomb in which Jesus was buried was found empty. The Gospel writers insist that it was a new tomb (Jn 19:41); hence there was no mix up of bodies. There were the Roman guards, and they, too, bore witness to the empty tomb (Mt 28:11). Besides, when the disciples were preaching about the resurrection, no one brought up as counter-evidence his remains, or identify a tomb with the alleged body of Jesus.

Secondly, all Gospels are agreed on the fact that women were the first witnesses of the resurrection. In the Semitic cultures, words of women had no value, as is the case in some cultures to this day. Therefore, if the disciples were framing a big lie about the resurrection they would not record that the women were the first witnesses to the resurrection. To the disciples, the resurrection of their Master was an undeniable miracle that could not be weakened by the words of women.

IF CHRIST HAD NOT BEEN RAISED

The third pointer is the experience of the disciples of Jesus themselves who courageously bore witness to it. The disciples had to hide behind closed doors after the death of Jesus for fear of the Jews (Jn 20:19). How did they suddenly come out preaching, even putting their own lives at great risk? The Acts of the Apostles is full of counterintuitive narratives. These cowardly disciples were ready even to die for the truth that they proclaimed. Their experience of the Spirit of the Risen Christ, in what is associated to Pentecost by the Evangelist Luke gave them that unshakable audacity.

The Apostle Paul asks a more intriguing question: what if Christ had not been raised from the dead? Writing to the Christians in Corinth he reminds them, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1Cor 15:14). Here lies the core of the Easter experience. He goes on to assert that Christians’ belief in the resurrection of Jesus provides the foundation to their own hope of the future – in this life and the next. Yes, death and suffering are not the end. Life goes on.

Elsewhere, the Christian Scriptures invite the believers as they commemorate the death and resurrection of the Jesus to “purify our conscience from dead actions so that we can worship the living God” (Heb 9:14). This could be the challenge to Christians who will gather in their thousands in churches around the world today to celebrate the resurrection of their Lord and Saviour. The feast beckons them to a renewed sense of hope as they deal with the tendencies of decay within their own souls.

The author is a Roman Catholic priest and the co-ordinator of the master’s programme in counselling psychology at Tangaza University College, Nairobi.

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