Easter

I've always preferred Easter to Christmas. Somehow for me Easter is just so much more of a Christian celebration. Christmas is OK but has it's drawbacks with the timing chosen to coincide with old pagan festivals, mass commercialisation and its hedonistic results.

Theologically speaking there are good reasons for Easter being more important in the Christian calendar. We are called on to remember (yes, even celebrate) his death until he comes again. So much hangs on the Easter events of death and resurrection. My own conviction to Christianity came at a meeting where the resurrection was being discussed. Confronted with the resurrection and nothing else, I felt that I had to make a choice one way or the other. You can almost forget everything else. If Jesus rose from the dead, as he said he would and as the Old Testament prophesied, then we all have important questions to face about God, our faith, our morality. If he didn't then everything crashes.

Two recent news stories captured my imagination with some sort of relevance:
1. Apparently while church attendance continues to drop, the number of people counting themselves as Christian seems to be fairly constant.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6517807.stm
While I am in no way advocating a position that you have to go to church to be a Christian, the interesting thing for me is that the article, maybe even all the people asked, completely missed the point - the point about what it means to be a Christian. Belief in God, even the Christian God, isn't the decider. Sorry if that bursts a bubble but it's not. There's not a lot of point in me saying it is when it isn't. What ensues in the media is a debate on going to church, church serices becoming more "relevant" or more trendy, internet churches and online worship. All of which is interesting but still a long way from the central point. I don't want to get all detailed, theological and technical but there are two quick points worth making.
- If we start asking about belief in Jesus Christ the Son of God and his death and resurrection...rather than a vague "belief in God"...well then we are getting somewhere.
- Nicodemus' question to Jesus..."What must I do to be saved?" Answer: you must be born again.
I'll refer back to my "simple ain't easy" post of a few weeks ago. The two points above are simple. But they are not easy. Whereas it seems to me that an inexact and vague "belief in God or a god" is easy but not simple.

2. The chocolate statue of Christ in a New York gallery. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6513155.stm
There was uproar at the statue. As far as I could tell, the main point of unrest was that Jesus was not wearing a loincloth. Now I've always been someone who doesn't like the depiction of Christ in statues, paintings and film as a general rule. I'm not totally convinced this is a theological argument as much as a personal taste one so I don't get on my high horse about it (that conjures an interesting picture in itself - a moose riding a horse?) But one thing that has always bothered me when I've seen paintings and statues in churches is the historical inaccuracy of showing a loincloth. The accounts I know specifically describe how Jesus was naked and how the soldiers divided his garments, including the loincloth. It may only be a small piece of cloth but when it is there, wrongly, it somehow misses the utter humiliation that he went through. It dignifies it in a small but significant way that I personally find offensive. So is it preferable to depict Christ naked? Well, as I've already said, I think it's preferable not to depict him at all. Loincloth problem solved!
As far as physical depictions of Christ go, I liked the chocolate one. Firstly because of its unusually accurate representation of the piece of material but also because of the substance used. For me it forces us to ask an important question: What's it all about? Is it about the eggs and bunnies and chocolate? Or are they just a distraction from the real question about who Jesus was, about his death and what it means for us, and about his all-important resurrection and the freedom and certainty that it gives us?

Enjoy your easter break, enjoy some chocolate eggs - not too many though, while it's Ok for the Moose's FatFighters targets to slip into the background for a day or two, don't spoil all the good work you've done so far or make it harder again for yourself after Easter. But why not make this Easter a special one by sparing a thought for the real meaning. And if a chocolate statue helps to focus your thoughts, so be it...