Easter White

While there are millions of darker-skinned people who celebrate this holiday, Easter has always seemed to me the most quintessentially white-bread and ridiculous of religious extravaganzas. I mean, Christianity was, if not in origin, a white religion imposed on conquered tribes, and so its customs and observances remain.

After the Virgin Birth, there is nothing quite so staggeringly miraculous as the spectacle of Jesus rising from the dead three days after his crucifixion to sit at God’s right hand, promising to return to the living once more as the Messiah of the Last Judgment. This Event is one tough pill, even for some devout Christians, to swallow. The Bible anticipated the difficulty:

If it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

—1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Easter has come to mean cute bunnies, colored eggs and baked ham for the masses—at least in this country. I just returned from the supermarket in Gardiner, Maine, where I live, to find our white-bread population checking out with lilies and sprayed bunches of flowers, florid Easter cards, egg baskets—the whole megilla. Hams were springing off the shelves in the meat department.

A friend writes from Chiapas, in Mexico:

It's Semana Santa and everything's closed. I saw Jesus dragging a heavy wooden cross yesterday, preceded by Roman soldiers on horseback with helmets, capes, the Roman garb todo. Jesus was being whipped, etc. etc. The night before we went to visit seven churches, people crying over bloody effigies of Jesus. They do have faith, I'll say that.

They sure do, and theirs may be the most remarkable in the entire Christian world. These beautiful, dark-skinned people of Chiapas, descendants of the Maya who suffered and were nearly exterminated by the brutal Christian Spaniards—how to account for their taking up the religion of their conquerors with such fervor? To me that’s more miraculous than Christ’s resurrection.

Why has Easter become so totally white-bread and devoid of meaning in this country? Why is it so fundamentally silly? Maybe because it’s the ultimate test of whether you can believe in miracles, and most people would rather eat ham.

The Jews are celebrating Passover this week. That holiday is about eating bitter herbs and symbolic foods to mark the Exodus from Egypt, something I could almost buy into.

Comments

[Doug]

A bloody, tortured, beaten and crucified Jesus is way harder to commercialize than a cute, magic bunny who shows up at the mall and wants you to shove junk food down your throat!

[jgoods]

As usual, Doug is right on the money.