Easter message: At this time of new beginnings, a fresh start is good for all
17 April 2014
As Easter weekend approaches, the Reverend Martin Booth, of Saint Mary’s Church in Riverhead, considers the festival’s pagan origins and the important messages that have come to be associated with it...
There was once a pagan festival celebrating the new moon. It took into account the new leaves, the flower buds, the fledglings, and the small green shoots of seeds freshly planted.
It celebrated Eostre; the ancient Germanic Northern European goddess of Spring. Some say that Christianity came along and appropriated that pagan festival, even its name, and called it “Easter”. This is true; but not the whole truth. What the early Christian church was trying to say was: you know all those feelings of new life and new birth you celebrate in this festival? Well, here’s one further element you can add to it…
Over the millennia, humankind has always sensed something beyond what they could see and taste and feel. Something which some traditions came to call God.
What Christianity brought, as far as Christians were concerned, was a bringing together, a definitive understanding, of all those things that humans had sensed down the ages. It brought those ways of thinking a new focus and a deeper meaning.
There is no doubt that someone called Jesus lived. There is no doubt that this Jesus died at precisely this time of year.
In fact, contemporary research suggests we might even put an actual date on the day and the year in which Jesus died. This research involves such things as computer modelling of the night sky two thousand years ago, archaeology, and academic studies of the way people of the Ancient Near East calculated their calendars.
What Christianity did, then, was to help people reinterpret and reimagine all those things that people had vaguely understood and sensed down the years. Just as the raising to life of Jesus, Christians believe, was God helping us reinterpret and reimagine what it means to be part of creation; and what it might come to mean to humankind at some point in the future.
Wherever we are on the spectrum of faith and belief, Easter – a time when we celebrate new beginnings – could be for us a time to reinterpret and reimagine all kinds of aspects of our lives.
Perhaps there are new beginnings for us in all kinds of ways just around the corner. ? In how we care for ourselves and for others, in how we care for creation. After all – why just leave it to the New Year to make resolutions?
Wishing you peace and joy at Easter time.
(This article was also published in the Sevenoaks Chronicle, 17 April 2014)