The Many Stories of Easter
from CLF Archives, author unknown

Easter got its name from the direction of the sun's rising. After the longest night of the year, people watched the sun rise in the East a little earlier and move a little higher in the sky week by week.
In some northern lands, the people would climb through the late winter snow to the mountain tops, and on each crest bonfires would blaze up to show the sun the way. Sometimes they tied bundles of straw to huge wheels, set the straw on fire, and rolled the flaming circles along to help the sun return. Even before calendars, people knew that the longer days meant melting snow, softening soil, growing time, and another harvest of food to keep their families fed...another year of life to live.
Once people became gardeners and tenders of flocks, aware of the results of their own lovemaking, they consciously participated as partners with the gods, in the great life process. Planting time became a victory over death. Symbols of new life were held sacred: the seed, the flower, the egg, the organs of human sexuality, the newborn of all animals, and especially the fertile rabbit.
Ancient Egyptians thought of their rich valley as a woman, the goddess Isis, and of the great Nile River as the god Osiris, flooding the land each year with life-giving water. Their story says that Set, a jealous brother, killed Osiris and scattered his remains along the river bank. Isis lovingly put Osiris together and brought him back to life. After his resurrection, he lived forever as ruler over the souls of the dead in the Elysian Fields. The story was re-enacted in spring celebrations for centuries and must have been known by the Hebrew slaves before the time of Moses.
Babylonians told the story of Tammuz, god of the harvest, who died young,
and of Ishtar, goddess of love, who rescued him from the underworld. Phoenicians had a similar story about Adonis and Aphrodite. The rituals of death and rebirth for these gods were observed by neighbors of the Hebrews who reclaimed their Promised Land, bringing with them another springtime celebration, the Passover.
One of the great stories of all time, mixing reality and imagination, told and retold in the camps of a wandering tribe, and finally written down in a patchwork of many versions, Passover tells Jewish people everywhere that their god kept his covenant with his chosen people and overpowered their enemies. Because the Egyptian Pharaoh refused the Hebrew slaves religious freedom. Moses, his brother Aaron, and their god Yahweh brought one affliction after another to the Egyptians. Finally Yahweh passed through the land by night, bringing death to the first-born son of every Egyptian family. So that the Hebrews would be spared, Yahweh told them to kill a lamb and mark their doorways with its blood. When Yahweh came to a door marked with the blood of the lamb, he would pass over that house. Generation after generation, the Jews have celebrated this Passover according to instructions given them by Yahweh through Moses. Ancient symbols-the egg, new green leaves, the lamb-are used again, along with unleavened bread and wine, in the special Seder dinner each spring.
It was a Passover Seder meal that Jesus shared with his disciples on the last Thursday of his life. Many of his people hoped that he would set them free from the Romans who then occupied their Promised Land. And it must have been partly fear that he might try to lead an uprising which caused the Romans to seize him and bring him to trial. The Jewish officials, however, were more concerned with another kind of freedom that Jesus preached-freedom from the old laws, freedom to live in a new Promised Land, an open community of humanness and love which he called the Kingdom of God.
So it was that hundreds of years after that original Passover, Jesus was crucified. People said that God had sacrificed his own firstborn son, and they called Jesus "the lamb of God." His followers could not accept his death. Surely if he was the Messiah, the son of God as they suspected, he could rise again and have eternal life, like the old nature gods whose stories they may well have remembered.
Once again the ancient story elements were revived as they told of the women going to the tomb of Jesus and meeting the angel who said, "He is risen. Why seek you the living among the dead?" And a new ritual observance began, followed by generation after generation of Christians, who re-enact in the Mass the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and partake of his strength and spirit with the unleavened bread and the wine of that last Seder supper.
Other great leaders have died in the cause of freedom and a larger life for their people....leaders like Lincoln, Gandhi, King. We know, even without elaborate myth-making, that they shall have eternal life as long as we keep their memories green and their lifework growing.
Still, the most ancient Easter story is nature's own story, as spring comes year after year, awakening life on Earth once more.

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