Over the centuries Easter has changed its appearance to accommodate different societies. In the early centuries its celebration was workaday. The weekly Eucharist was a celebration, often in homes, to prepare for the return of Christ at the end of time.
When the persecutions stopped Easter took on a more elaborate appearance — large churches in the cities, a month of fasting to prepare for Easter and a week to celebrate the events leading up to Jesus’ death and Resurrection.
In a Christian society, too, the events, games, vegetation and meals at Easter were marked by Jesus’ story. Hot cross buns, Easter eggs, brodetto pasquale, passion plays, Easter lilies and passion fruit owe their names to Easter. Their names remain, even as secular events have also come to mark the season: from the football played on Easter Monday and then Good Friday, the Stawell Gift and country tennis tournaments.
In Christian churches the celebration of Easter this year will look more like Lent or Passion week. All Australians, too, will be without football, concerts, interstate and international travel and family gatherings. The atmosphere, too, will be one of constraint, not freedom. Instead of celebrating the present, we may be weighed down by fear and anxiety about the future. We are all captive to COVID-19.
These restrictions are hurtful. But they also open out to the original depths of the Easter story. In the Gospel stories Easter Sunday dawned as emptily as it threatens to this year. There was nothing to celebrate. Jesus’ world had been shut down; his disciples had shut themselves away in locked rooms in fear that they would be the next to suffer; the only people in the streets apart from the soldiers were a couple of Jesus’ friends, mostly women, whose love overcame their fear and drew them out to visit his tomb.
As the sun rose on Easter Sunday his followers had not simply lost a friend and a leader. They had also lost the hope and meaning they had found in him. They followed him because they believed that God would act through him to free his people. His crucifixion had proved that belief to be absurd and had taken away any grounds for hope. The leaders of his own people had disowned him. The Romans had done what they were experts at doing: they had killed him slowly outside the city, leaving him nailed naked and writhing to a timber pole, stripping him both of his humanity and of the credibility of his claim. Easter dawned in a desert.
'This year, as we contemplate all the things that could separate us from hope, Easter invites all of us, whether or not we share Paul’s faith, to reflect on what matters to us deeply enough to sustain us in the face of loss and death.'
The Gospel stories of Easter are stories of more than celebration. They evoke in various ways the disciples’ transition from despair at the death of their friend and leader and the loss of their own hope, to joy and the understanding that God has freed them though his death. Disciples cowering behind locked doors find Jesus in the room with them. Disciples leaving Jerusalem in grief find him walking with them. Mary Magdalene, grieving as she goes to the tomb to anoint his corpse finds him waiting unrecognised for her outside the tomb. These stories all point to the mystery of God’s presence and victory in what seemed to be a crushing defeat.
In a stirring passage, St Paul begins with the words ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God’. He goes on to list the human catastrophes that might be expected to do so. He was confident because he believed so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
Today Paul might have added to his list of things overcome all the experiences of the COVID-19 — the sickness, death, isolation, impoverishment and loneliness that it has brought with itself. For him the raising of Jesus meant that beyond these things lay a hope and love that were stronger than death.
This year, as we contemplate all the things that could separate us from hope, Easter invites all of us, whether or not we share Paul’s faith, to reflect on what matters to us deeply enough to sustain us in the face of loss and death. If the celebrations of Easer are muted, its challenge to reflect on our lives and world is sharpened.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Palm tree in desert (Getty images/Jose Luis Pelaez)