The Real Meaning of Easter

Whether you simply attend an Easter Morning service, or you indulge in an observance of all of Holy Week from Passion Sunday to Easter Day, do you come out of this most important Christian religous observance with an idea of what Easter is about? Sadly most Christians may not!

Assuming you have graduated from the understanding that Easter Eggs and chocolate rabbits are NOT about Easter, but are included among the activities of Easter, then what are you left with?

Many people think Easter is about Jesus coming back to life after Good Friday's execution on the cross. Others think Jesus simply reappeared in a spiritual sense (no body of any type). Overall, the sense is that Easter Day is a happy day, celebrating Jesus being back with us.

Thankfully, NT Wright, Bishop of Durham, articulates an accurate representation of what Easter really means here.

According to Wright, Easter is about a new creation that has already begun. God is remaking His world, challenging all the other powers that think that is their job. The rich, wise order of creation and its glorious, abundant beauty are reaffirmed on the other side of the thing that always threatens justice and beauty - death. Christianity's critics have always sneered that nothing has changed. But everything has.

Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn't have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he's still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he's gone to heaven”.

The world wants to hush up the real meaning of Easter. Death is the final weapon of the tyrant or, for that matter, the anarchist, and resurrection indicates that this weapon doesn't have the last word.
So Easter is not about the new life of Jesus. Easter is about the recreative work of God, first carried out in the person of the Trinity, Jesus. It is a foretaste of the saving work God will carry out on the rest of the creation (that is us) in His time.

Now, time for Easter Eggs and chocolate bunnies........sorry, not rabbits......