Easter Week

Easter Week

            Let’s face it. Not everybody celebrates Easter, or Easter week. And even those

 who do, celebrate something other than the historical significance of the events some two thousand odd years ago. It’s all very confusing. There are those in the Christian churches who mark the event of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection as the pivotal point in the establishment of the church. I think that’s what Easter is meant to signify.

Yet there are others who celebrate it with new hats and whole outfits to promenade around in and show off what they bought at Macey’s that’s different from anything anyone else bought. Woe betide any woman who is caught wearing the very same outfit as anyone else she knows.

Then there’s the chocolate culture. Chocolate Easter eggs, chocolate Easter bunnies, chocolate this, that, and the other. You add to that the Easter egg hunts for children to take part in and you’ve got total confusion on what this time is really about. All this commercialism has diluted the meaning behind the occasion to a competition between Macey’s and Walmart and all the candy companies. So this then is what one man gave his life for, it seems.

Actually, crucifixion was not all that uncommon a couple of thousand years ago, witness the pile of bones on Golgotha. Back then they did some gruesome things to people as a matter of course. That wasn’t really the issue. It was the fact that Christ was sold into the hands of his accusers for thirty pieces of silver. It was the fact that he was wrongly tried and convicted. That came to be the heart of the issue. And it wasn’t even Pontius Pilate, his executioner who was as much to blame for his death as it was Rome and the Jewish people who pressured him into it. Thus you have the original basis for anti Semitism.

The sad thing is that if you read human history all the way from King Herod through the execution of Christ, and have a look around you at the world today, we haven’t come very far. It’s a sorrowful commentary on humanity that it is able to preach about love and respect for one another and human kindness and then do the exact opposite. True not only of society, but of the church as well.

When you think about it, it wasn’t Christ who was the Christian. It was (St.) Peter who started the church business, based on his interpretation of the teachings of the Teacher. And the many forms the church has taken since are no better. It seems we are not destined to be tolerant and loving of our fellow man, but rather, greedy self serving predators bent on taking everything for ourselves at anybody else’s expense and the devil take the hindmost. So in the end, Easter has become a celebration of Macey’s and Walmart, or so it seems from up here on the top shelf. Happy Easter everybody.

Just sayin.