the great day

We have come to the conclusion of observing Holy Week. We finish on a high note by celebrating the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday. Each year I hear questions like, “Should we really celebrate this day?” Some feel it is simply the Church ripping off a pagan holiday that celebrated the goddess Ishtar among other things. So some choose to point and ridicule and hold their positions very highly while turning their back on the tradition of the early church fathers (For examples of this just Google Ishtar + Easter).

This honestly bothers me a little. I did some reading on it, and wanted to understand on a deeper level exactly what all this came from. The opinions are mildly diverse and there is little agreement on the exact details. One of the things that I found interesting is that those who claim Easter is a pagan holiday in Christian dress typically skew the details ever so slightly, and use generalities to get their point across.

I can understand people who get ruffled by Easter Eggs and Easter Bunnies. The eggs and bunnies are indeed connected to ancient pagan worship both of which symbolize fertility, and represent great hope for a bountiful crop each spring. Let us however, not confuse the commercialization of a holiday with its roots.

Some decry Easter as the great fallacy because of its name. Easter … Ishtar. Easy connection, or is it? There is an Anglo-Saxon god of spring named Eostre, while their names may be connected, there is little to no evidence proving such a thing. Ishtar, in her day however was influential, and her myth begat the myth of many other goddesses. The myth was basically that her son/lover went to the underworld. She went to save him, was imprisoned, but every spring she was released for six moths to give life to the world (while this is a simplification of the tradition, it captures it in broad brush strokes).

Today, people in the English-speaking world piously stand and point to this day and say, “Easter is Ishtar!” That would work except that the we are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, not a pagan festival. You see Christians all over the world are remembering Christ’s resurrection. While eggs and bunnies are present (and are a connection to pagan festivals) this is not the focus of the Historical Church. The rest of the world does not call this holiday Easter … they connect it to the Hebrew word Pesach which is the name for the Passover festival during which Jesus was crucified. The Greeks call it Paskha; in Latin it is Pascha (which is what the Roman Church would have called it); the Italians celebrate Pasqua; in Spanish it is referred to as La Pascua; and in Scots Gaelic it is An Casca (in may Eastern European Languages the day is simply called “The Great Day”). The holiday was not called "Easter" until the 8th Century, by which time it had already been in existence for 700 years. The modern languages that still call it by this name are English, German, and Samoan.

Why, however, isn’t celebrating this day spoken of in the Bible? Surely, if Jesus wanted us to celebrate this day, then he would have commanded it! I would appeal to Apostolic Tradition on this one. Some hold that if the Bible doesn’t command it, we shouldn’t do it (many of us however are very comfortable with disobeying explicit commands that are in the Bible, weird huh?). I realize sadly, that Apostolic Tradition is much forsaken in the Modern Evangelical world, yet for 1500 years it was recognized with great respect.

In the earliest records of celebrating the day of Jesus’ resurrection, there was much debate about what the actual day was according to the Hebrew calendar. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have one day and John seemingly has another. So the early church fathers tried to understand the day. One of the people intimately involved in this discussion was Polycarp. It is widely accepted that Polycarp was a disciple of John, who was a disciple of Jesus. Polycarp was disagreed with Bishop Anicetus of Rome not in whether or not we should observe Resurrection Day, but when we should observe it. Polycarp in this discussion claimed Apostolic Authority for his position … again he was not arguing against celebrating, only when. Here we have a disciple of John who never once argues against celebrating the day, rather his passionate concern about exactly what the date of the celebration should be seems to validate the celebrating of Resurrection Day. The interesting thing about Polycarp is that the date for which he argues is the date the John points to in his Gospel. Beyond Polycarp there were numerous Bishops who favored celebrating the festival on Nisan 14 in accord with the Biblical Passover and the tradition passed on to them by the Apostles.

So what are the origins of Easter? Simply put, it is the day when the women who followed Jesus went to the tomb to care for the body of Jesus. It is the day when an angel told them, “He is not here, He is risen.” It is the day when Peter and John ran to the tomb to see if what they heard was true. It is the day that is the hope of our ancient past and our eternal future. It is our hope for today. Let us not hang ourselves on etymology and semantics. Let us rather run to the spirit of the day, the beauty of the day, when Jesus the Christ, Son of the Living God, was raised from the dead through the power of his Father.