I often feel quite apathetic about Easter. As Christians we tend to talk about Jesus’ death and resurrection a fair bit. If you manage to go a group bible study without mentioning it… well it would be rare, heck you might even be doing something wrong since we tend to look at things in an “only by the grace of God” light. So Easter doesn’t seem like such a special time because we’re always reminding ourselves of the things that happened.
It also doesn’t help to think cynically about holidays like this and to think that Easter and Christmas were already festivals, for example a festival for Spring and the regeneration of life, Winter and the only tree that survived the frost. Christians decided that these would be good times to celebrate the things that are important to us, and indeed they were good opportunities to do so. It’s interesting now that in a not-so-Christian western world we still call it Easter and no one has tried to make the move back to the Spring Festival – I suppose it doesn’t help that it’s actually Autumn down under, and I suppose everyone loves their four day weekend (and the excuse to eat copious amounts of chocolate).
I think it’s time for me to put cynicism and apathy aside.
For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Romans 6:7-11
That is surely something to celebrate.
Image by `suzi9mm.
