Tomorrow is Good Friday (making today Maundy Thursday), which means that everyone who gave something up for Lent this year is almost released from their penitence. Easter Sunday is a time for reflection on salvation and Jesus, and above all is crucial to what makes the religion Christianity and not just another hue of Judaism. In fact, the timing of Easter is also a huge factor to designate Christianity from other religions.
The Liturgical Calendar was not designed accidentally, nor the naming of the Christianity’s Spring importance. “Easter” linguistically comes from “Ostara”, which is what the Anglo pagans at the time called their Spring celebration (related to the equinox) and is still practiced today by Wiccans. But the idea of celebrating Easter isn’t rooted in pagan traditions.
The non-English Christian terminology for Easter is “Pascua”. If you’ve ever studied any of the romance languages (rooted in Latin, might I add), then you’ve probably heard of this before. But even “Pascua”, from Latin, is out of the Greek word “Pascha” which actually means “Passover” – as in the Jewish celebration. (In the Liturgical calendar, Easter happens at the end of Passover, on a Sunday, because everyone knows that’s the Lord’s Day.)
So, what is Passover about?
Passover is a Jewish tradition to commemorate their liberation from slavery by God, and in Christianity, Pascha celebrates Jesus’ liberation of “human” slavery by representing all the sins of humanity for all time so that no more sacrifices ever need to be served to God again. This is why there are Salvation messages, because Jesus represented all of the impurities ever, in order to achieve freedom of the spirit, to become the connector between our inner spirit and The Spirit that is commonly referred to as God. So, when a bunch of Jews broke away from Judaism and took to Jesus as disciples, the need for Judaism was trashed for Christianity because the Jewish customs weren’t necessary anymore. (This is also why all the laws of Leviticus and the Old Testament are irrelevant to Christianity and how the New Testament replaced them.)
Well, that’s a lot of Christian doctrine mixed up with eschatology with a nice simple bow.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Passover was originally built on an apotropaic rite as well as the Canaanite rite of Unleavened Bread (so the Jewish tradition overrode the Canaanite rite after they conquered them, not unlike how Christians overrode the pagan Ostara). Apotropaic rites are essentially “good luck charms”, and the first one the Jews performed acted as a hopeful “good luck” to send themselves off as before their great Exodus from slavery in Egypt. The term for Passover came from the type of lamb that they used as a sacrifice: Korban Pesach. (Pesach became Paschal, which became Pascha.)
So Christianity built upon Passover and set up Easter as a time for communion to commemorate Jesus’ redemption and replacement of these rites for once and for all. But really, Easter served as a destruction of lesser cultures. Early Christianity wanted to stomp out the pagan religions, and Early Judaism wanted to stomp out the Canaanites’ religions. But really, Christianity is a religion of power, built on minorities, in order to further the spread of itself. Like a cultural virus. And that doesn’t sound very peaceful.
I mean, think of The Crusades? Going and conquering in the name of Jesus? That sounds like colonization of the New World, with all the Gold, God, and Glory. Or like Manifest Destiny. How many cultures and peoples have been “stomped out” (metaphorically and literally) because of Christianity?
And I guess, when I’m talking about Christianity, I should be more specific: Original, Early Christianity was “Catholicism”. The Council of Nicea grew out of the need to organize and unify all the peoples in Christendom (which at the time was a geopolitical power run by the Romans to defeat the pagans and Muslims). This was done by the Roman Empire. Christianity was a political movement, a control tactic, because Constantine (The First Christian Emperor) decided to conquer the Byzantines, and with his as the “first papal claim”, Constantine’s Empire led to the Edict of Thessalonica which made all the subjects of the Roman Empire profess their faith as Christian. (As a side note, before Constantine, Christianity was illegal. Ever heard of Nero? He burned his own city down and blamed the Christians just to persecute them.)
Christianity only went mainstream because rulers wanted to use it as a manner of control and as an excuse to conquer other lands and peoples. So Christianity isn’t peaceful. The whole Papal head and structure of Roman Catholicism was even designed to keep the poor and the uneducated that way, and that’s why Martin Luther translated the Bible (which was canonized by the Council of Nicea) so that anyone could read the Word of God and not be exsanguinated financially and spiritually by the Catholics. Throw Calvin into the fight, and bam! You’ve got Protestantism and Catholicism – and Eastern Orthodox, too. All of these gave way for the thousands of other denominations of Christianity that we have today, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Bible and the structure of Christianity are rooted politically in control.
The rituals and motions of Protestant Christianity (which is the most common “thread” in the US) grew out of this same religion of power, and there has been a huge mess of spirituality and cultural correctness ever since. A lot of non-denominational churches just consider themselves followers of Jesus, without any of the political game attached.
The reality is that spirituality is internal and individual and above any system of religion. Just consider these words from Bishop John Shelby Spong:
God is not a Christian. God is not a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems, which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition. I walk through my tradition. But I don’t think my tradition defines God. It only points me to God.
It is the individual’s responsibility to seek and find God. The religious system is merely a vehicle to find God, to explore your spirit, and to transform your self and spirit into a purer, improved, socially-obliged being.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
A. W. Tozer
My personal grounding is in Christianity. Jesus is my vehicle, but “the church” is a controlling power that has little or no place in my practice and spirit. A place to worship and fellowship with others is necessary to enhance my own journey toward God, but that doesn’t have to mean a physical or structured space.
Your heart must ring true and your spirit must rejoice in your spirituality. Or it is worthless.
Spirituality isn’t about the end result but about the regrounding journey to achieve oneness with The Spirit. You have to rebalance your self and spirit, and you can’t be in a hurry to get there.
There is a consistency with the “Jesus is everyone” thought – because if I’m channeling my spirit to become like Jesus’ (rooted in The Spirit), then I too should be reaching to achieve this oneness with others as well – that I am also homeless, and in poverty, and injured, and grieving, and in death, and in impurity. In achieving oneness, I must be journeying to love and to spread love and exist spiritually in a place beyond power and control, beyond negativity and hatefulness.
So with Easter Sunday around the corner, as we reflect on Jesus’ metaphorical role as the ultimate connection between the sufferings of humanity and the serenity of The Spirit, we too can find a spiritual space of kindness, peace, patience, and tranquility. We can balance our self and our spirit and further our journey for oneness through inner strength and development and outer sharing and love.
This is the true need for Easter: to liberate our spirits from darkness and celebrate goodness with others, especially as Spring begins to form around us and new life is beginning once again.
Writing Jay Curtis 