I like Easter. It’s much less a theological thing, though. For a brief time, I had a pastor named Matt who described himself as more of a Lenten than an Easter person. And I get that.
There was a meeting I was supposed to attend this week, but I blew it off because it was on Maundy Thursday. Someone said that he didn’t know what that was. I noted that if you’ve seen the painting of The Last Supper, not just the one by da Vinci, you have some idea. Or if you’ve listened to/seen the latter half of Jesus Christ Superstar, which ends before the resurrection.
Those Lenten songs, Requiems, and the like resonate more with me than the triumphant Easter anthems.
I like going to church on Easter Sunday. One year during the first decade of this century, my wife and I were driving to Charlotte, NC, to visit my family. But I hated not singing. Listening to church music on the radio merely made me more melancholy.
I love to see the C&E people at church. C&E refers to those folks who come only on Christmas and/or Easter. I do think about the limited theological picture they get. “They sing the Hallelujah chorus almost every time I’m there,” they might determine, but so it goes. Do people still wear Easter bonnets?
When is Easter?
I’m a fan of Lent and Easter bouncing around the calendar. It’s like jazz; ya gotta riff with it. As timeanddate.com notes: “Easter falls on the first Sunday after the Full Moon date, based on mathematical calculations, that falls on or after March 21. If the Full Moon is on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated the following Sunday.
“Although Easter is liturgically related to the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere (March equinox) and the Full Moon, its date is not based on the actual astronomical date of either event.
“March 21 is the Church’s date of the March equinox, regardless of the time zone, while the actual date of the equinox varies between March 19 and March 22, and the date depends on the time zone.” And it’s even a little more complicated than that.
The art piece was created by my daughter, who writes: “Re-coop-erations – Recuperations Project – Scale Shift. Eggs represent a very literal sense of recuperation, new color, new season, and new life. In many traditions spanning geographies and time, many cultures have used eggs in customs, especially those around the time of the Spring Equinox. During Nowruz, the Iranian and Persian New Year, families decorate eggs to bring good luck and fertility. Pre-Christian Ukraine brightly decorated eggs.”
Of course, Christianity leaned into the spring festivals, just as they positioned Christmas to coincide with the Roman holidays of the winter solstice.
Happy Easter!