Your opinions, please.
Easter is not a Biblical holiday (neither is Christmas, for that matter). While they commemorate Christian events, they are "tacked on" to tradition, not intrinsic to it.
Easter was actually a fairly big event when I was kid. We sometimes (maybe often) went to church and had a big family meal.
We don't so much, now. We go to church, of course, but we've never gotten into the secular stuff like egg hunts and roasting bunnies (or whatever you do with them). We do try to remember the Christian part, reflecting on Jesus' resurrection, but if memory serves (and it often doesn't), we don't do a special meal. Partly out of laziness, and partly because we have no extended family here.
Is Easter a big deal? Should Christians be compelled to observe it?
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Easter
Posted by Rob at 5:36 PM
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5 comments:
Yes. The christian part, anyway.
But something else to understand, why is Easter bright colors and dancing rabbits when Easter is the day we observe Jesus' sacrifice for us???
Back when Christianity was an underground movement, a Roman emperor, Constantine, found it a good way to stablize his reign, so he brought "above ground" and made it the official religion. To aid in the adoption of it, pagan rites, such as Spring fertility festivals were rebranded as Christian holidays. Easter is also a spring celebration, so the pastel colors, rabbits, and eggs symbolize new life.
In our culture, it's become commercialized for profit.
I think having a particular time to remember the resurrection is important, so I have no problem with observing it in some form; I'm just sometimes bugged that all the baggage is expected but of little vaue (though traditions are important to a family, and holidays foster that).
Depends. For me it's always been a day spent with friends and eating a lot of food while running around getting messy. I do know, that it's a holiday I prefer to spend with fellow Christians, as secular people only view it as bunny-and-egg day. More like a celebration of spring really.
This year I'm celebrating being able to celebrate Christian things without Obama O-banning it. :)
Yes, holidays take away our every-day excuses and make time for family stuff.
I prefer to think of the Christian absorption of pagan holidays as 'redeeming' them...sort of a Lewisian point-of-view on how the smatterings of truth found in paganism pointed to the Real Thing, if only they could have recognized it.
So I don't find any harm in Christians doing the egg-and-bunny thing, as long as that is not the central focus. I liked getting candy as a kid (duh) but I knew that was not what the holiday was about. My favorite part was seeing Jesus removed from the cross at church (we were Catholic - so the big centerpiece behind the altar was a crucifix with a wooden sculpture of Jesus on it, and on Easter Sunday they took him off of it and hung him above it somewhere. Of course, he still looked like he was being crucified, but the weirdness of that never occurred to me as a kid.)
That's what i've always liked on the non-christian side. The bunnies and the eggs never made any sense, but the food...that's another matter entirely. Then the Christian side is bigger, although I don't really think that food is on the christian side or the non-christian side.
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