Just what is Easter all about??

As I walked through my local shops the other day, gazing upon the great array of Easter delicacies and pondering the unusual bunny posters splashed over every square centimetre of merchandising space I began to wonder, what do people really think about Easter??

You could be forgiven for thinking that Easter is largely about gorging ourselves on chocolate and taking an annual pilgrimage to the delights of the Royal Easter Show. No doubt there would be a huge number of children who perceive Easter as one huge chocolatey feast interluded by a trip to the Showgrounds. There’s just nothing like a fun day out at the Show returning home with a fistful of show bags and parents who are poorer for the experience. The Royal Agricultural Society sure know how to keep this iconic Easter tradition alive!

I’m willing to bet that most new migrants arriving from countries where Easter is unheard of would come to a similar conclusion. Easter is when Aussies give chocolates to one another and enjoy a four day weekend!

But surely Easter is about more than just lifting the profit margins of Lindt and Cadbury??

You will be interested to know that Christians don’t have the monopoly on this festival. Its earliest origins lie with the Jewish festival of Passover and pagan festivals held to honour the goddess Eostre in the month of April.

For the Jews, Passover is a celebration of how God delivered His people from slavery in Egypt. He did it by sending a destroying angel who wiped out a bucketload of the Egyptians. Before the event occured, the Jews were instructed by Moses to sacrifice a lamb and paint the blood of the lamb over the doorways to their houses. In so doing, the destroying angel would recognise their houses and ‘Passover’ them, sparing the lives of those living inside. The ensuing bloodshed of the Egyptians led to the Jews being set free from slavery. And thus Passover became an annual reminder of what God had done.

 

It was during one such Passover feast in the early first century that a prophet and miracle worker named Jesus of Nazareth was arrested, trialled and condemned to execution. His crime? The Jewish leadership saw him as a threat to their power. After all, He was claiming to be the King of the Jews. Under cross examination from the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, Jesus was found to be innocent and undeserving of such a punishment. But at the insistence of the Jewish leaders, Jesus was crucified and hours later died a horrific death.

The occasion would mark the very first ‘Good Friday’ which certainly wasn’t good for Jesus but meant good news for humanity. Jesus’ death is understood to be similiar to that of the lamb that was sacrificed at Passover. Christians believe that He sacrificed His own body so that His people could be set free from slavery to sin and death. Not good for Jesus but good for anyone who receives the forgiveness on offer.

But the Easter story doesn’t end there. If that was the end of the story, then Jesus is just another dead dude.

The real lynch-pin of Christianity, the hinge on which the whole church swings is the bodily resurrection of Jesus three days after His death. Christianity lives or dies on that one fact. Debunk, disprove or discredit the resurrection and the Christian faith is futile.

Lee Strobel is one such atheist who saw the Achilles heel of Christianity. After his beloved wife converted to the Christian faith he was determined to convince her that it was all one big fairy tale. So he set about using his legal and journalism investigative skills to debunk, disprove and discredit the resurrection. But the more he sifted through the historical evidence, the more alarmed he became at the weight of proof that supported the claim that Jesus did in fact die and then rise back to life.

Lee was compelled by the explosion of Christianity in the very city that Jesus died in.  I mean, if Jesus was still dead, the authorities could easily have just produced His body and told everyone to calm down! In fact, anyone who opposed the followers of Jesus could have marched down to the tomb and produced tangible evidence that Jesus was still dead. The problem was, the tomb was vacant, empty and unoccupied!

Much weight is put on the evidence from the eyewitnesses who testified to seeing Jesus alive again. Multiple people claimed to have had a visit from the Risen Jesus. There were several occasions where Jesus rocked up unannounced, sharing a meal and even having physical contact with his followers. At one point 500 people witnessed Jesus alive at the same time. It could hardly have been hallucinations with so many involved!

But even more convincing is the lives that were changed in the process. Eleven out of twelve of Jesus’ closest followers were martyred. Killed for speaking up about the resurrected Jesus. This begs the question, why would they die for a lie?? Why would they be willing to be martyred for something they knew to be false?

Then there is the unusual case of the Apostle Paul. A man hell bent on destroying the church by arresting Christians and even approving of them being murdered. Out of nowhere this guy has a radical turnaround. He claimed that the Risen Jesus appeared to him while he was travelling on the Damascus road on his way to arrest more Christians. His Damascus road encounter led to a life that was completely dedicated to spreading the news of Jesus. It was Paul who first brought that news to Europe.
 

What else but tangible evidence would convince both Jesus’ best friend (John), his brother (James) and his worst enemy (Paul) to all come to the same conclusion and end up worshipping Him as God?

Richard Dawkins was mistaken when he wrote in The God Delusion that the ‘evidence for the resurrection doesn’t engage with the real evidence.’ What more evidence do you need then the eyewitness testimony of both His closest allies and worst enemy?

The mountain of written evidence has led some academics to claim that the events of Easter are some of the best documented from ancient history:

“I claim to be an historian. My approach to Classics is historical. And I tell you that the evidence for the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history...” – E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics at Auckland University

Faith is not a leap in the dark it is based on evidence. Christianity isn’t a blind faith but a faith based on true events documented in history.

The Easter story is the historical basis for the faith of millions.

So while you are chowing down on your Chocolate bunnies this weekend, be challenged to consider and investigate the One who made Easter famous.

Happy Easter!

Ben W