Easter reflections, part 2

Why is it that the Christmas season lasts for a month, but the Easter season lasts only for a week or two at most? As I opined in my last blog entry, isn’t Easter the more significant holiday? Isn’t the death and resurrection of Jesus the most important event in Christianity, even in world history?

I was therefore ready to rant that the Easter season ought to be beefed up to reflect its relative importance. Let’s expand the focus on Easter as it approaches, maybe emphasize it for three or four weeks. Let’s make a bigger deal out of Palm Sunday. Let’s press for a national holiday coincident with Easter (I’ve always wondered why, with all of the holidays we have, and with all of the reasons for them, we do not have a national holiday on Good Friday or Easter Monday).

But as I progressed down this mental path, two significant roadblocks presented themselves. Maybe they are both obvious. The first is that, in our culture, an expansion of the Easter season would only mean an expansion of “commercial Easter”—more time for the Easter Bunny to appear at the mall, more time for Easter egg hunts, more time to sell chocolate eggs and bunnies in their pastel-colored wrappers, and more time to invent new traditions that have nothing to do with the death and resurrection of our Savior.

The second roadblock to the need to expand Easter is more significant, in my estimation. If you go to church at least semi-regularly, you have no doubt heard the reason before. That is, as Christians, the whole reason we worship on Sundays in the first place is to remember the resurrection of Jesus. We are to be celebrating Easter every week!

All four gospel accounts say that Jesus’ resurrection happened on the first day of the week (the day after the Sabbath). Later, during the time of the early church, Christians began the practice of meeting together on the first day of the week to commemorate the resurrection. This came to be known as “the Lord’s Day.” In 1 Corinthians 16:2, Paul gives instructions as to what the believers in Corinth should do on the “first day of the week,” implying that they gathered together on that day. In Revelation 1:10, John’s vision is given to him on “the Lord’s Day.” This practice of Christians gathering for worship on “the first day of the week” or “the Lord’s Day” is also found in other writings of the first and second century, and obviously continues to today.

The commercialization of Easter, like that of Christmas, is silly and is certainly deserving of light-hearted chiding. (For instance, how do you explain the association of the Easter bunny, who is a rabbit, with eggs? I don’t get it.) But I’m thankful that instead of meandering off on that tangent, I was instead reminded of how all of us ought to be viewing worship services each and every Sunday. It is the Lord’s Day, and we go to church every Sunday to celebrate Easter—the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.