On Faith: Easter is complicated

 

On Faith: Easter is complicated

John Nassivera On Faith

Bear with me, please, this might be a bumpy ride. For those of us whose mother tongue is English, Good Friday and Easter are especially complicated holidays. Right off, we have this word “holiday,” a word that many are unaware actually comes from the two words “holy” and “day” being elided together to create “holiday.” Most of us think of “holiday” as just a day off, such as Labor Day holiday, etc. In the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese), the words are variations on “dia santo,” literally “sanctified day.” English, unfortunately, encourages us to forget that a holiday is (or at least originally was) holy.

Then we have this word “Easter.” Oh, Lord help us, this is a bad word. Its origins have nothing whatever to do with Christianity or Judaism. “Easter” comes from the Germanic word “austron” meaning “dawn,” and the Old English “Eastre,” an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn. So our English word Easter is actually thoroughly pagan in origin. But this is perhaps not all that surprising because we know that the Catholic Church, as it spread around the world for many centuries, willingly employed syncretism (a blending of religious systems) in order to Christianize peoples away from paganism, which often included blood and human sacrifice.

So, is Christ nothing but a pagan god of the sun and the dawn who arises from the death of cold winter with the warming spring equinox? No. Christ is what these other religions were pointing toward; Christ fulfills and subsumes all these earlier spiritual and natural manifestations of death and rebirth. Yes, he is related to the spring equinox, but he is far more than that. Yes, he is an agricultural god, the manna from heaven, the life-giving corn god in Mexico (celebrated each March in the Feast of Our Lord of the Conquest in San Miguel de Allende). But at the same time, he is far, far more than any agricultural god, than any sun god. He is both and not either/or. He is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. It’s complicated.

Unlike in English, in all the Romance languages, the word for Easter is a variation on the word “Pascua,” which is the Latinate word for the Hebrew “Pesach” meaning Passover. So in all the Romance languages, the word for Easter affirms the holy day’s connection to Passover. And this word Passover refers to the account in Exodus 12-14 where God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites to sacrifice a young lamb and rub its blood on their doorposts, thereby causing the plague of the death of the firstborn to pass over each of those houses. The lamb was then eaten by each family that evening.

Of course, this foreshadows John the Baptist calling Jesus the “Lamb of God” in the New Testament; and the eating of the Passover lamb foreshadows Jesus telling his disciples “Take this and eat, this is my body, broken for you.” We are saved by the blood of the lamb is an idea that rings loudly across history. Passover/Pascua/Easter is a celebration of God’s protection and salvation of us. That’s the whole point.

Before we arrive at Easter, however, we English speakers have another linguistically confusing holy day called “Good Friday.” This day commemorates the day our Lord was crucified and died on the cross. It seems odd, to say the least, to call such a day “Good Friday.” Here again, English puts us at a disadvantage. In the Romance languages, Good Friday is called variations on “Viernes Santo” which means “Sanctified/Holy Friday.” That makes perfect sense. In fact, centuries ago, the English word “good” could also mean “holy,” but hardly anyone knows this anymore. So we are also calling it Holy Friday, we just don’t realize it.

But all of this begs the question: Why did Jesus Christ have to be crucified and then rise again in the first place? That is a very complicated narrative to be at the center of a religion. It is really hard to believe. In fact, it is so hard that today we have something known as Christian atheism, which embraces the teachings, symbols, practices and communities of Christianity, but does not accept the idea of the existence of a supreme deity or miracles. Jesus was a truly great teacher, perhaps the greatest ever — but he had to die to save us.

I’m not willing to take the step into Christian atheism, although many of my friends are in that camp. I do not subscribe to an all encompassing materialism or scientism. I think — along with a goodly number of quantum physicists — that there is a higher and deeper level of reality that is extremely hard to understand. Call it a spiritual level and a mystery. I also believe — along with the Einstein Prize physicist John Archibald Wheeler — that we live in a “participatory universe.” This is to say, we conscious human observers actually participate in the creation of reality when our observations cause the wave functions around us to collapse into what we see and measure. We are a little, tiny bit like God. We are “made in God’s image.”

So, was Jesus the son of God and of one substance with God the Father? He called himself the “son of man” and referred to God as “my father.” I am willing to take the leap of faith and take him at his word. He not only taught by using words. He also taught by publicly living his life, death and resurrection. The old ways of blood sacrifice in the temple in Jerusalem (and all the other temples in the Roman Empire) needed to be shut down. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son” to be the final blood sacrifice to redeem us and show us to reject violence and the shedding of blood. God taught us a lesson we should never forget. But we do forget. That’s why we always need forgiveness.

The “conscious observers” of Jesus Christ teachings and life were, first of all, the disciples. They participated in creating the reality that is the narrative of Christ saving us from our own worst intentions. Even though God has loved us, we humans killed his only begotten son. That was the ultimate act of violence. Yet the ultimate act of grace is that God, through his son, will still love us and forgive us. We are instructed to love God and love each other. That is the mystery and the method of salvation. We do not fully understand it, but we choose to have faith that it is so.

If it is not so, then all of our lives here and now and all the lives across all the ages have been utterly meaningless, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Are we nothing more than ants toiling in darkness? No. We are creatures of the light.

Yes, Jesus is the god of the dawn — the dawn of a new light, of a new age, of a new covenant. There are two parties to any covenant. Both parties participate in a covenant, both parties bring it into existence and sustain it by their acts of volition and good faith.

Like the arrival of dawn, like the arrival of spring, the resurrection of Jesus (into a spiritual, glorified body energized by light) provides us with an example of a life, an afterlife, to come. The universe itself is energy, waves of energy and probabilities. We know this now as scientific fact. The law of conservation of energy tells us energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed from one form to another. Waves of energy can become light, and light can be particles or waves, matter and/or energy. Jesus was transformed from matter into light and we shall be transformed likewise. I don’t fully understand it, but I have faith in it.

Like I said, Easter is complicated … really complicated.

John Nassivera is a former professor who retains affiliation with Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He lives in Vermont and part time in Mexico.