An Easter saga

At my old church in Florida, every year when we came out of church on Easter Sunday morning, the cars in the parking lot were plastered with fliers that decried Easter as having nothing to do with the resurrection.  The word “Easter” was a reference to a pagan god of fertility or something and, indeed, my dictionary of etymology says that Eastre was the name of a Germanic goddess, deriving from the word “east”, indicating an original reference to the goddess of dawn.  OK, but my etymological dictionary also begins the definition by stating that by the year 1103, it was a festival commemorating the resurrection of Christ, from which we get the name Ester (the title of a book of the Old Testament, last time I looked.)

Along those lines, I have never figured out what the heck the Easter Bunny has to do with the resurrection.  And why would a rabbit go around laying eggs anyway?  Besides, rabbits don’t lay eggs, so where would an oversized rabbit get eggs - from the Easter Chicken?  OK, an egg can represent new life, new life being offered by the resurrection, but Jesus didn’t lay an egg in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Egg hunts are harmless fun, but the closest thing I can come to a biblical reference for them is a horde of locusts descending on the landscape!
 
Eastre, bunnies, eggs…  I really wouldn’t mind coming around to what some have begun referring to as Resurrection Sunday.  Seems to say what we’re celebrating pretty straight-forwardly, but then, since its earliest days, Christianity has been shrewdly appropriating the dates of pagan holidays, taking what has already been considered sacred and overlaying it with the Christian story (everyone likes Christmas trees, right?), sanctifying the time to the Lord, but until it becomes more common, happy Easter!
 
— Marc Vance, Associate Rector