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What Easter really means

Living

The Easter festival is the oldest and most important festival in the Christian calendar. Most people know that it celebrates Jesus’ resurrection, but apart from that, our knowledge of Easter can be patchy. Christian or not, you may be interested to know a little bit more about the Easter story, so in the spirit of the popular ‘For Dummies’ manuals, here’s a little about Easter!

At Easter time Christians remember the week that Jesus was crucified or ‘Holy Week’. It signals the end of Lent, the traditional time of fasting in the Christian calendar, and starts with Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus went to Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish festival of Passover. Crowds waving palm branches welcomed this controversial figure seen by the authorities as a political instigator, as he rode into the city on a donkey.

 Maundy Thursday remembers Jesus’ ‘Last Supper’ with his disciples when he gave them the mandate to love one another. That night he was arrested. Good Friday remembers the day when Jesus was tried and sentenced to death for claiming he was the Son of God.

The method of his execution was one of the most brutal known to man — death by nailing to a cross. Easter Sunday celebrates the day Jesus resurrected, as he had earlier predicted to his followers. It is, therefore, a time of great celebration for Christians.

Easter is always celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the Vernal Equinox (one of the two days in a year when the sun passes directly over the equator). This is to connect it with the Jewish Passover feast, which is when Jesus had the Last Supper.

Many elements of modern day Easter celebrations originate in ancient pagan traditions. This is because Christianity has always sought to adopt elements of the culture it finds itself in to help people understand the gospel in their own language.

The name Easter for instance, comes from the Saxon goddess of Spring, Eostore, whose festival Christian missionaries would have found celebrated across Europe.

Apparently, Eostore found a wounded bird and turned it into a hare so it could survive the winter. When the hare found it could lay eggs, it made a gift of its eggs to the goddess. And so the tradition of the Easter bunny and Easter eggs was born.

In Germany, people paint eggs green and eat them on Maundy Thursday while in Greece and the Balkans, eggs are dyed red to symbolise the blood of Christ. In the late 19th Century, Russian aristocracy commissioned the French jeweller Faberge to create an Easter egg like no other, fashioned from enamel and encrusted with the most dazzling jewels. These Faberge eggs are worth millions of dollars today.

At its heart though, Easter is not about bunnies or eggs but about a Saviour who gave the ultimate sacrifice so that humanity can be reconciled to God.

 Happy Easter!

Photo: www.blackdropsbeautiful.com

Pastor M is a leadership coach, author and the senior pastor at Mavuno Church. Follow him on twitter @muriithiw or like his Facebook page, ‘Pastor_ M’

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