I read about a woman in New York City who was interviewed as she departed church one Sunday.
A reporter asked, “What is Easter?”
The woman said, “Easter is when we throw off the robes of winter.”
A critic of Christianity said, “Easter is a spring ritual celebrating the ancient myths of the Mediterranean mind.”
Christians and non-Christians alike tend to join Easter with the arrival of spring.
As April 1 draws near, we have observed countless pointers to new blooms, the end of winter’s grayness and the re-emergence of green in our yards. Spring is our dominant metaphor for Easter.
I want to raise the question: Is spring an appropriate analogy for Easter? Perhaps not.
I came to this conclusion several years ago when I traveled to the southern hemisphere for the first time.
One of the things that I really wanted to see while there was the Southern Cross, that constellation that can only be viewed south of the equator.
One night in Kenya, I asked a resident of the country to help me find it in the night sky. There it was.
That experience started me thinking about the differences in the hemispheres. I paid attention in social studies as a child, so I knew the seasons are opposite.
I wondered, “What do they do about Easter down here, when nothing is blooming and everything is dying?” How do you have Easter if you can’t point to green grass, flowers in bloom or the death of winter passing away? How do you celebrate Easter south of the equator, without the metaphor of spring?
I Googled sermons in every English-speaking country south of the equator that I could think of. I discovered they do quite well without spring.
A couple of years later, I found these statements in “Mediations on the Cross” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Good Friday is not about the darkness that necessarily must give way to light. Nor is it the winter sleep or hibernation that stores and nurtures the germ of life. Rather, it is the day when the incarnate God, incarnate love, is killed by human beings who want to become gods themselves. It is the day when the holy One of God, that is, God himself, dies, really dies – of his own will and yet as a result of human guilt.”
Bonhoeffer continued, “Easter does not celebrate a struggle between darkness and light. … It does not celebrate a struggle between winter and spring, between ice and sunshine. Rather, it remembers the struggle of guilty humankind against divine love, or better: of divine love against guilty humankind.”
In the beginning chapters of Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, he speaks to the Corinthians about earthly wisdom – worldly wisdom – and how there is nothing in it that would make you think about how God saves us.
Paul says, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the Gospel, not with words of human wisdom lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power” (1 Corinthians 1:17).
In 1 Corinthians 2:13 we read, “And the things we speak of, we were not taught by human wisdom, but we were taught by the spirit who expressed spiritual truths and spiritual words.”
His point is you could look at spring all your life and never come up with the gospel message of Jesus Christ. The cross is foolishness.
Too often we ask nature to do our preaching for us. We ask questions such as, “How could you look at the beauty of spring and not believe in God?” As if that experience tells all a person needs to know about God and Christ.
Can we look at blooming azaleas and deduce, “Love your neighbor as yourself”? Is there anything in a dogwood that says, “Love your enemy”? Is there anything in grass turning green that says, “If you would be my disciple, deny yourself and pick up your cross daily and follow me”?
In all of nature is there anything that says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, and his son came into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him”?
We need to remember that Easter is not simply a time of general renewal, but this is a time when we come to worship because Christ has redeemed us by his cross – and the last enemy has been destroyed.
Joel Snider is a coach for the Center for Healthy Churches. A version of this article first appeared on his website, The Substance of Faith.
