Spring Festivals and Easter
In many cultures there are festivals around the time of the March equinox. In some cases, as in Northern Europe and Iran, with the Nowruz festival, they are associated with themes of new life as the growing season begins. In others, as in India, they are associated with the harvest of crops that have grown through the winter season.
The God who revealed himself to Moses and who guided the Jewish people on their journey through wilderness to the Promised Land was a desert god. But his character changed after the people settled in Palestine, and Yahweh took over the role and functions of the indigenous vegetation gods. The agricultural festivals were reinterpreted in terms of Jewish history. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel put it,
The festivals of ancient peoples were intimately linked with nature’s seasons. They celebrated what happened in the life of nature in the respective seasons… In Judaism, Passover, originally a spring festival, became a celebration of the Exodus from Egypt; the Feast of Weeks, an old harvest festival at the end of the wheat harvest (Exodus 23:16; 34:22), became the celebration of the day on which the Torah was given at Sinai; the Feast of the Booths, an old festival of vintage (Exodus 23:16), commemorates the dwelling of the Israelites in booths during their sojourn in the wilderness (Leviticus 23: 42-3). To Israel the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature even though physical sustenance depended on the latter. While the deities of other peoples were associated with places or things, the god of Israel was the god of events: the Redeemer from slavery, the Revealer of the Torah, manifesting Himself in events of history rather than in things or places.
Christianity inherited from Judaism this historical transformation of seasonal festivals. Jesus’ last supper with his disciples took place at Passover, on the eve of his crucifixion. His death on the cross on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday are the central events that Christians commemorate in the festival of Easter. Like Passover, the timing of this festival depends on the full moon and the vernal equinox, but whereas Passover happens on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, the celebration of the Resurrection must be on a Sunday. Thus, Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The date of Easter Sunday can be as early as March 22 and as late as April 25. Because Easter is a moveable feast, so are all the feast days associated with it. The fasting period of Lent begins forty-six days before Easter Sunday, on Ash Wednesday, which can be as early as February 4th or as late as March 10th. The day before Ash Wednesday is Shrove Tuesday, or Carnival, the last chance for feasting, singing and dancing before Easter, celebrated most spectacularly in Brazil. The feast of the Ascension, when Christ’s resurrected body rose into the sky, is forty days after Easter, and Pentecost, or Whitsun, the festival of the Holy Spirit falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter Sunday. Trinity Sunday is a week later.
Thus, Easter has several aspects or levels. It is a spring festival, a time of regeneration and rebirth, with presents of eggs and images of rabbits - which breed like rabbits. As a commemoration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, it also inherits archetypal images of dying and resurrected gods, like the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, a god of death and resurrection, and of sprouting vegetation. All around the eastern Mediterranean there were annual celebrations of the death and resurrection of a god associated with crops. As the anthropologist James Frazer put it, ‘Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead.’ In his book The Golden Bough Frazer pointed out that in many cultures the first fruits, the newly harvested crops, were eaten sacramentally as the body of the vegetation spirit. In a chapter called ‘Eating the God’ he compiled numerous examples from all around the world. Frazer also drew attention to many example of sacrificial kingship, in which kings, who were believed to be endowed with divine powers, were violently sacrificed so that they did not grow old and feeble, and endanger the life of the group.
Yet another element in the Easter story is that of the sacrificial animal whose death ensures the safety of others. In the context of the Jewish tradition, this took place in three ways. First, the sacrifice of a ram by Abraham instead of his own son Isaac involved a substitution of animal for human sacrifice. Second, the sacrifice a lamb at Passover protected the people of Israel from the death and destruction visited on the Egyptians. And third, in an annual Jewish ceremony, the sins of the people were laid upon a goat, the scapegoat, which was driven away into the wilderness, where it perished, taking away the sins of the people with it. The death of Jesus on the cross was like that of a sacrificial animal, taking away the sins of the world. He was the Lamb of God, Agnus Dei. The old pattern was reversed: instead of an animal being substituted for a human sacrifice, a human was substituted for an animal in this full and final sacrifice.
Frazer believed in an evolutionary ideology that saw primitive humanity as engaged in magical practices, which gradually gave way to religious belief, and then finally reached the highest level of human development in scientific thought. When I was a teenager, one of my science teachers introduced me to Frazer’s ideas, which had their intended effect. I recognized that there were many elements in the Christian religion that were rooted in ancient mythologies, pre-Christian fertility cults and magical rituals. These seemed like good reasons for rejecting Christianity in favour of science and reason.
I am still in favour of science and reason, though no longer a believer in the ideologies of scientism and rationalism. But as a practising Christian and as a participant in the Christian festivals and sacraments, I now see these deep archetypal elements as a strength, not a weakness. The continuity of the seasonal festivals of Christianity with pre-Christian festivals and myths makes them more powerful, not less powerful, and gives them greater meaning and depth.
For a more extended discussion of holy days and festivals, see Chapter 6 of my book Ways To Go Beyond and Why They Work. Also available as an Audio Book.
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