I have a complaint about how we celebrate this holiday.  Something feels a little uncomfortable about Easter to me.  For starters, it’s not about a sweet, soft, cuddly newborn baby, like Christmas. Even though they make noise and smell bad most of the time, babies are still pretty likeable. Our hearts are pulled to them, to their innocence and to their need for our care. The Christmas story is easy to love with the happy birth of Jesus; the visitation of angels to Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds; the star that led the wise men who brought gifts. All the elements of a beautiful story are present, including miracles and a dramatic rescue from the jealous King Herod. What’s not to love about this feel-good story?

But Easter is about an innocent man who was executed, savagely, brutally and without mercy. It’s not a pretty sight. The story is filled with blood, gore, and violence. Even though our culture flocks to R-rated movies, there’s an understanding that they are not real. But Jesus’ story did happen, and our sensibilities recoil from the harshness of that reality. It was nothing but the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man.  It’s quite a different image than the Nativity scene.

Something else about Easter feels wrong. It’s not an entirely happy story. Jesus lived a life acquainted with inexplicable grief. To be completely rejected by everyone, to be purely innocent yet condemned to death is, and always will be, beyond comprehension.  This is not to say Jesus did not have wonderful moments of joy and happiness during His years on earth. He did. But He came to His own, to His own people, to the planet He created; and I imagine He felt deep loss every day at the broken state of all He created and loved.

So how do we celebrate the Easter of death and sacrifice? Society has tried to soften the harshness with baby chicks, bunnies, white lilies, and bright, colored eggs. I guess that may have a place.  After all, Easter is about new life and all of these happy symbols represent that truth. It is no coincidence that Easter is a spring holiday; when all of the earth is awakening from its winter slumber.  But, I wonder, shouldn’t there be more?

Christmas is essential, no one can deny that, for it is the beginning.  But without Easter, Christmas would have likely been forgotten not long after it had begun. So then, why does Christmas get all the attention?

Maybe Easter ought to be more celebrated than Christmas, for truly it is the pinnacle of the Christian faith. Yet, you may say, “but Pastor you seem to celebrate Christmas more than Easter.  Even here at church we have far more Christmas decorations than Easter.”  That is true, but there is also a reason.  Christmas, although a holy day in its own right, is more of a vacation season; a festival of celebration, a fun season, and since it is about the birth of a child, it is focused on kids.  Most of us celebrate birthdays in a far different fashion than we celebrate deaths.  Christmas often involves family, Christian and non-Christian family alike can fellowship with us at the cradle.  Easter is more for the Christian, not many non-believers are interested at fellowshipping around the tomb.  Today, Christmas is a federal holiday in the US, but “Easter” gets no such treatment.

I guess there are many reasons why Christmas gets most of the attention.  One reason for the difference in the way we treat these holidays may be the ancient roots of the Christmas celebration, which by the Middle Ages had become an immoral feast, somewhat like the Mardi Gras is today.  Cotton Mather, among the most notable New England preachers, lamented how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty … by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” Christmas became a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be tossed out, at least until the season was over.  In fact, the holiday caused such disturbances, the city of Boston outlawed Christmas celebrations from 1659 to 1681. Following rioting in New York in 1828, the city recast the holiday as a time for peace and family, leading to many of our current cultural attitudes about Christmas.

So, what changed? What made Christmas all fuzzy and warm?  Well, Christmas got reinvented, but Easter didn’t.  In the 19th century, Christmas, the secularized, domestic “family” holiday as we know it today, was reinvented. Christmas came to be identified with the celebration of childhood. Childhood itself was, of course, a relatively new concept.  It was linked to the rise of a growing prosperity which did not require as much child labor as in the past.  Kids, had time to play.   Merchants were quick to promote the new holiday as a time to think of others, to be generous, and to spend money at their stores.  Actually, nearly everything we think we know about Christmas, from the modern image of Santa Claus to the various Christmas traditions, derives from the 19th century, specifically, Christians, who redeemed Christmas by rendering it an appropriate, G-rated neat and clean family holiday, primarily for the kids.

 But no such redemption ever happened for Easter. While it received a minor family-friendly makeover, Easter didn’t have the massive public relations machine behind it that Christmas did.  Instead, with its theological significance intact, Easter has maintained its status as a religious holiday and — the Easter Bunny and eggs aside — largely avoided modern make-overs. It is estimated that for a number of years Easter and Christmas were referenced about equal in printed papers and books. By the 1860s, references to Easter were half that of Christmas. By 2000, Christmas was referenced almost four times as often as Easter.

To get down to it, the birth of Christ is the beginning of hope, but Jesus was not a threat when He was born, except maybe to Herod.  Christmas, with its celebration of the birth of a child, is a natural fit for a secularized celebration of childhood. Christians and most non-Christians alike can agree that Jesus Christ, whether divine or not, was actually born and that His birth is probably worth celebrating. Plus, the subject matter makes it ideal for a child-centered holiday. The family, Mary, Joseph, and the Child huddled together in the warm glow of love, translates pretty easy into a holiday centered around family, children, and childhood.

 But the message of Easter, that of an adult man who was horribly killed, only to rise from the dead, is much harder to secularize. Celebrating Easter demands celebrating something so miraculous that it cannot be reduced, to a heartwarming story about motherhood and family.  The Christmas story is still pretty believable even without the supernatural.  Discount the virgin birth, the angels, and the star and you still have the nucleus of a great story; and a believable story.  If you discount the supernatural from the Easter story, you don’t have much left.  Without the supernatural, all you have is a story about betrayal, torture, and death.

 But the same qualities that make Easter so difficult to secularize are also what make it so profound.  Easter, at least to me, is more of a holy day. For it is the holiness of Jesus that gives us new life, the resurrection we commemorate on Easter.  Some say we should celebrate Easter just like we do Christmas.  I’m not sure I would agree with that.  What I would like to see is an Easter, not with gifts, parties, and elaborate decorations, but a genuine day of rejoicing, similar to a stadium full of enthusiastic people who are jumping up and down cheering because their team won.  At Easter, we who believe celebrate a victory unlike any sports team; we rejoice over the unspeakable deliverance given to us by Christ when He conquered sin and set us free. We, too, were dead and now are alive! That victory deserves an extravagant, jubilant acknowledgement.

 One of my favorite hymns says, “My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, oh my soul!”  That line is worthy of cheering as you would at a   football game.  Too bad that isn’t normal Easter protocol.

 Peter in his first epistle writes the following:

 “According to his abundant mercy, (God) hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

I Peter 1:3

 The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is key to our faith.  I would like to suggest to you that Christianity is not just a set of good moral ethics, though it embraces them.  Christianity is not simply how we “worship God” though that is an important component of it.  Christianity is not about just being a good person.  What I would like to suggest to you is that Christianity is about knowing the risen Christ personally.

 In his famous book “Mere Christianity”, C.S. Lewis made this statement, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg–or he would be the devil of hell.  You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”

So, what do you think?  Do you really believe He rose from the dead as millions of Christians over the centuries have claimed?  If Easter is going to mean anything to you this year, may I ask the question:

 Do you know, personally know, the risen Christ? 

Dr. Worthington has been in the ministry for over forty five years and serves as President of Pathway Ministries and Christian Bible College.