Easter Sunday – Jesus rose again
View(s):Lenard Ranjith Mahaarachchi
Due to the Resurrection of Jesus, Easter became the greatest of all feasts, in the history of Christianity. Easter was the only event kept in the infant church community when even Christmas was not celebrated officially.
In 325 AD, a Church Council decided that Easter be kept as the major feast in the pristine church. Though Christmas is fixed for December 25th, Easter does not have a fixed date. Easter comes from the Scandinavian “Ostra” or the Teutonic “Ostern”- the goddess of mythology. In Sinhala it is Pasku from the Portuguese word Paska.
The word Easter connotes fertility and was celebrated as a spring festival on the Vernal Equinox. The church fixed Easter to the Sunday following the Full Moon of Equinox. And this explains why the date changes every year. This year (2013) it is on Sunday that follows the Medin full moon on Tuesday, March 26.
Easter may fall between March 22 and April 25. Easter, the Christian Spring festival of the New Testament, is the fulfillment of the Old Testament Jewish Passover ordered by Moses to commemorate the flight of the Jewry from slavery in Pharoah’s Egypt, to the Promised Land. Today, the Jewish Passover is replaced by the Christian Easter, the Lord’s defeat of death by His Resurrection.
Easter however is an adaptation of a pagan festival, associated with fertility, and eggs are exchanged as a custom. The Greeks exchange crimson eggs, which signify the blood of Jesus. In Austria it is green. The Slavic Christians colour the eggs in gold or silver, while in Australia it is pure white.
The church is in possession of the burial cloth of Christ left in the tomb that Sunday morn. I had the privilege of praying at this tomb during my visit to the Holy Land, a couple of years back. Research on this linen cloth (see John I9/40-41) has confirmed that it is the linen in which Jesus’s body was wrapped after it was taken down from the cross. It is also now believed to have been the very cloth that dressed the table at the Last Supper. Rebecca Jackson, a Jew and the only woman in the 50 member research team, is adamant that it was the very table cloth used at the Last Supper held in the Senaculum, a hall that was owned by Joseph of Arimathea who, buried Jesus with Nicodemus after taking Him down from the cross.
So today we have two mementos that are as witnesses to Christ’s Rising from the dead, i.e. the Empty Tomb and the Turin Shroud. The Shroud is now resting in a reliquary at the cathedral of John the baptiser in Turin.
In 1978 the whole world saw it on TV for the first time. The Shroud is eloquent testimony of Jesus’s passion too and shows the wounds suffered by Him at the flagellation, the head injuries caused by the crown of thorns and even the two wounds on the shoulders caused by the cross beam.
Jesus’s Resurrection is that single event which brought Christianity to the world. The resurrection is a sure sign of our own rising from the dead one day and it is the confirmation of our Everlasting Life. The most striking incident in the Risen Life of Jesus was His meeting Saul (Paul) on his way to Damascus. It changed Paul’s life and had impacted him to the extent that he wrote such things like To me to live is Christ and to die is gain: He that is in me is greater than he that is in the world. I can do everything in Him who strengthens me, and many more.
Paul also said that “If Christ be not risen, our faith is in vain and we should be pitied.” The Resurrection of Christ must mean to us today, that we need to rise with Jesus to a new life, abandoning the life of sin. A Happy Easter to you.
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