Easter
From Lady
Day: The Vernal Equinox (Easter):
The other Christian holiday which gets mixed up in this is Easter.
Easter, too, celebrates the victory of a god of light (Jesus) over
darkness (death), so it makes sense to place it at this season. Ironically,
the name 'Easter' was taken from the name of a Teutonic lunar Goddess,
Eostre (from whence we also get the name of the female hormone, estrogen).
Her chief symbols were the bunny (both for fertility and because her
worshipers saw a hare in the full moon) and the egg (symbolic of the
cosmic egg of creation), images which Christians have been hard pressed
to explain. Her holiday, the Eostara, was held on the Vernal Equinox
Full Moon. Of course, the Church doesn't celebrate full moons, even
if they do calculate by them, so they planted their Easter on the
following Sunday. Thus, Easter is always the first Sunday, after the
first Full Moon, after the Vernal Equinox. If you've ever wondered
why Easter moved all around the calendar, now you know. (By the way,
the Catholic Church was so adamant about NOT incorporating lunar Goddess
symbolism that they added a further calculation: if Easter Sunday
were to fall on the Full Moon itself, then Easter was postponed to
the following Sunday instead.)
Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi says the following in Should
Adventists Celebrate Passover Or Easter?
The change from the primitive observance of Passover to that of Easter-Sunday
was not only a change of dates from Nisan 14 to the following Sunday,
but also a change of meaning and experience. The primitive Christian
Passover followed in many ways the Jewish Passover. Both celebrated
the drama of redemption, though the focus of the Christian Passover
was not the deliverance of God's people from Egyptian bondage, but
their deliverance from the bondage of sin through the sacrifice of
the true Paschal Lamb.
The waning influence of Jewish Christians and the growing influence
of Gentile Christians led not only to the adoption of a new date,
Easter-Sunday, in order to have "nothing in common with the detestable
Jewish crowd," but also to the acceptance of pagan speculations
and fertility myths, which are foreign to the Biblical meaning of
Passover.
|
