Happy Easter! What does Easter really mean? For religious and non-religious people alike, it represents new life: an occasion for a family dinner, a chance to decorate with pretty spring colours, and maybe even give greeting cards adorned with adorable lambs.
For Christians, Easter goes further, acknowledging the resurrection of a man tortured and killed due to his insistence that he was the Son of God. We feast to celebrate the joy of his triumph over death.
The impact of this feast is heightened by the fact that it follows the spiritual sorrow and devastation of Good Friday as well as six weeks of Lenten fasting, sacrifice, and prayer. Spring colours and images represent the hope of life achieved through the Resurrection, while blatantly contrasting the darkness of death on Good Friday. Lambs represent the sacrificial lambs killed for Jewish Passover meals as well as the Christian sacrificial lamb, Jesus Christ.
There have always been people who believe that Jesus was nothing more than a prophet or a man with a good heart and a moral example. In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis rejects this, saying that Jesus had to be much more than “a great moral teacher” to make the claims that he did. In what has become known as the “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord” argument, Lewis states, “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse … You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Jesus’ insistence that he was the Son of God led him to endure suffering in ways that someone lying or insane could not have done. Furthermore, Jesus’ sacrificial death and his rising from the dead were foretold in the Bible and in Jewish tradition. Jesus fulfilled God’s Word.
As a devout Jew, Jesus shared a Passover meal with his friends on the night before he died. In the book of Exodus, we learn that during the plague of the death of the firstborns, Jewish people put blood on their doorframes so that the angel of death would “pass over” their families, saving their children and resulting in their ultimate escape from the reign of the cruel Pharaoh. They ate unleavened bread to represent the haste of this escape, without time for their bread to rise. They thanked God for allowing them to live. To this day, Jewish families share Passover meals in acknowledgement of being freed from slavery in Egypt.
Jesus, too, gathered with his friends to break unleavened bread. However, as pointed out by Pope Benedict in his book Jesus of Nazareth No. III, this meal was not exactly the same as traditional Jewish Passover meals. Jews of Jesus’ time would have sacrificed an unblemished lamb for their Passover meal, but there is no mention of lamb being served at the Last Supper. In fact it would have been the next day at 3 p.m. when Jesus died that the Passover lambs were slaughtered in the temple, pointing to the fact that Jesus himself was the sacrificial lamb as foretold in Genesis 22:8: “God himself will provide the lamb.”
Pope Benedict wrote, “Essentially, this farewell meal was not the old Passover, but the new one, which Jesus accomplished in this context … It was Jesus’ Passover. And in this sense, he both did and did not celebrate the Passover: the old rituals could not be carried out – when their time came, Jesus had already died. But he had given himself, and thus he had truly celebrated the Passover with them. The old was not abolished; it was simply brought to its full meaning” (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 114).
Easter represents new life, but not merely through one day of gatherings, meals, and temporary signs of spring. Easter is a season – lasting 50 days, until the Feast of Pentecost – to celebrate new life found in the hope of eternity: our exodus from the slavery of sin and death, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
