Book Review: The Splendor of Easter

A Fair Trade Book



Book Review with Bonus Rant: The Splendor of Easter

Editor: Floyd W. Thatcher

Date: 1972

Publisher: Word

ISBN: none

Length: 134 pages

Quote: “[O]n the first Easter morning the human response was one of fear...Fear transformed to great joy.”

Here are fourteen Easter “reflections,” longer than the usual devotional meditations, shorter than sermons, plus three Easter poems, by people who have written other Christian material for Word Press. Thatcher, vice-president of the publishing company, commissioned and arranged these meditations for Christians to read one a day during the two weeks before Easter.

In some ways Easter is a more perplexing, divisive holiday even than Christmas for whole-Bible Christians. The Christmas story is relatively simple. Jesus was born in a warm country where celebrations of the winter solstice were minor. If He grew up celebrating Hanukah, the celebration was probably even lower-key than it is now. His family were temporarily homeless at the time, not because they were terribly poor (carpenters were respectable, often well off, as the working class went) but because they were being oppressed by one of those imperial decrees whose main purpose was to remind people that they weren’t living in a democracy. There is no evidence that He ever celebrated the Pagan winter solstice parties that involved gift exchanges, drunken orgies, and extravagant “sacrificial” barbecues, nor is there any valid reason to imagine His birth taking place “in the bleak midwinter” of northern Europe. On the other hand, in places where midwinter is bleak and many people become homeless...I suspect that Jesus could have thought of a better fundraising gimmick than appealing to the false image of His birth in some place that looks more like Bern or Banff than like Bethlehem, but I’m sure he’d empathize with those of us who exploit the false image when raising funds to help needy people through winters that really are bleak.

But then there’s Easter, the spring celebration. Jesus never celebrated Easter. What He celebrated was Passover. He left no instructions to Christians to replace Passover with a strictly Christian observance that might have been called something like Resurrection  Sunday, although He surely realized that His resurrection was the kind of event that people want to celebrate. Did He expect Christians to make a very strict division between celebrations of Passover (commanded), Resurrection Sunday (not mentioned), and Easter, the Pagan spring festival?

The theological questions can become tricky indeed. Eostre was the old English name of a “goddess” concept found all across Pagan Europe and Asia. The Bible writers were more familiar with “her” Middle Eastern names such as Ashtaroth, Ashtoreth, Asherah, and Ishtar—“Ishtar” may have sounded closer to “Easter” than “Eostre” did. This goddess was part of a myth or cult that celebrated rebirth or resurrection or at least reproduction, springtime, the cycle of the seasons, fertility, and the stars as markers of the progress of the earth through its orbit. She was often identified with a particular star or planet, often with Venus. In some places she was considered less important than other goddesses identified with Earth or the moon, but in several she was crowned “Queen of Heaven.” In Egypt she was Isis, whose mythical story probably predates Semiramis, Queen of Babylon, who allegedly reenacted the story. Both Isis and Semiramis lost their husbands, mourned for them, and claimed to have recovered their husbands “reincarnated” in sons. (Whether these sons were posthumous or illegitimate depends on which side the historian was on.) Lucius Apuleius famously claimed, in the novel Metamorphosis, that despite the official worship of Jupiter and Juno and the flourishing cults of Venus and Diana, Isis remained the most powerful of the “goddesses” in the Roman Empire.

Ancient Hebrews were strictly forbidden to worship Isis or Asherah. Queen Maachah of ancient Judah was dethroned for having joined the Asherah cult. The  cult’s practices evidently included a Lent-like period of “weeping for Tammuz” prior to the spring celebration. Tammuz and Dumuzi were Semitic names for the husband the “Queen of Heaven” lost. There was also an ancient Semitic vision of something like the Harrowing of Hell; some of the star goddesses—most memorably Inanna, the name of the star goddess in a poem that has been reconstructed and translated—went to the Land of the Dead to reclaim their loved ones. Inanna supposedly paid the guardians of the underworld everything she had, including her own “first” life, to reclaim Dumuzi. Bible writers mention the practice of “weeping for Tammuz” in ancient Israel as something good Jews wouldn’t do, an abomination when tolerated in the temple. Nevertheless the month when other Semitic tribes “wept for Tammuz” was called Tammuz in the Hebrew calendar, and it still is.

Fasts and vows of abstinence have a certain inherent appeal to all humans. Early spring, when food stores were depleted, seeds needed to be replanted rather than eaten, and people might have felt the need of a fast, seems the universal season of choice for annual customs of fasting and abstinence. Later spring, when fresh greens, some fruits, and young animals appear, naturally called for feasting. Whatever it was called, the season of abundant new life always called for celebration. Extensive studies like The Golden Bough describe the “Corn King” cults that worshipped natural, vegetable death-and-renewal. Easter belongs to that tradition.

The New Testament story of Jesus clearly identifies the Resurrection with the historical event celebrated by Passover. That year Passover fell on a Thursday. There is actually some debate whether Jesus went to Jerusalem to eat the Seder on that Thursday, then was crucified on Friday and resurrected on Sunday (problematic, because it doesn’t allow for three days and three nights) or ate an early Seder on the Tuesday, was crucified on Wednesday, was resurrected on Saturday evening, and showed Himself to His friends on Sunday (not part of the beloved Catholic tradition, but it does allow for three days and three nights). If He used the word sabbath to refer to that Passover Thursday, Jesus could only have intended to reinforce the idea that His disciples should continue celebrating Passover. At a Passover Seder the main dish was traditionally an innocent, perfect young lamb, and Jesus, as an innocent, perfect young martyr, was “The” Lamb.

Christians have long agreed that it’s not merely a coincidence that the Passover and Resurrection celebrate events that took place at the same time that Pagan cults were celebrating the renascence of animal and vegetable life. According to one ancient and honorable tradition, this is the result of a spirit of confusion that encouraged satanic rituals, with orgies and human sacrifices, to distract people from celebrating the grace of God. According to another ancient and honorable tradition, it is the result of God working, in mysterious ways, to prepare non-Jewish people to understand something about the Resurrection.

Meh. I think St. Paul might have said that which it was depended on how any given individual responds to it. Most of us now celebrate Easter with traditions that may be irrelevant and silly, but are hardly satanic. If egg-rolling has anything at all to do with ritual prostitution in the cult of Ashtoreth, the connection has stretched too thin to be noticed by those at the egg-rolling stages of life. And it’s hard to say that Christians should ban the name “Easter” from our vocabulary when you know that the Hebrew prophets who denounced “weeping for Tammuz” not only left the “month of Tammuz” in their calendar, but also called God Ba’al, the same word (it means “lord and master”) they used to refer to the various Pagan “gods” they opposed so vigorously.

(The use of Ba’al in the Hebrew Bible isn’t even like the way modern Christians write “Those half-civilized Muslim barbarian fanatics are praying to a different God,” meaning that, while Muslims agree with Jews and Christians about there being only one Supreme Being, some Muslims’ beliefs about that Being are radically different from ours. It’s more as if a preacher chose to preach about the opposition of Christianity to Satanism and kept saying things like “Then Our Lord rebuked their lord...” and “Their lord tried to tempt Our Lord...”)

But here we are, with all these semantic conflicts, trying to remind ourselves that what Easter (or can we now agree to call it Resurrection Sunday) means is not “tulips and daffodils, / Bonnets and bunnies, / Baked hams and lambs” but “In me arise, my Lord! / And keep on rising.”

I don’t, can’t, believe that God doesn’t want us to admire and celebrate the joy of the natural renewal of physical life. If we weren’t meant to rejoice in tulips and daffodils and bunnies and lambs, the consensus of humankind wouldn’t always have been that those who fail to rejoice in those things are emotionally ill. I merely observe that the beautiful little “everyday miracles” of springtime, which are what Old English Pagans celebrated at Easter, fade into the background when we celebrate the unique, supernatural miracle of the Resurrection.

That’s actually Sallie Chesham seems to mean by the first poem in this collection, but to me it’s much easier to say it more clearly if we separate the concepts of Resurrection and Easter—oh, at least as clearly as we separate the concept of Passover from those.

End of quibble. What else do the writers have to tell us?

David Allen Hubbard offers a fictional interview with St. Peter, based on his understanding of Peter’s epistles.

Robert A. Raines notes that the resurrected Christ came to His friends as a stranger—after the resurrection they seem not to have recognized Him at once, when they saw him—and suggests that this might have been meant to help us “recognize [H]im now in a stranger on the road.”

Leighton Ford discusses the psychological issues that underlie faith and doubt: “If you find that you can’t believe that Jesus Christ really came back fromt he dead, you should in all honesty ask, ‘Is my problem merely intellectual? Or is it possible that I don’t want it to be true?’”

Gerald Kennedy reflects on the hymn “Amazing Grace.”

Charles L. Allen reflects on the hymn “He Lives”: “He lives, Christ Jesus lives today...He lives within my heart.”

Donald B. Strobe discusses the Christian concept of hope.

Bruce Larson shares insights from a tour of Jerusalem.

Gary W. Demarest considers how the Resurrection (can) set people free from fear.

Thomas A. Fry weakens his argument significantly by conflating death with resurrection. “Jesus...says that death is like a wedding.” Jesus says no such thing. In the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, He compared something—either spiritual repentance and renewal during this lifetime, or the Resurrection—with a wedding. Death itself would be the renunciation of bachelorhood, if resurrection is the wedding, or the life of sin and/or ignorance and/or lack of mature spiritual consciousness, if spiritual enlightenment is the wedding. In Gethsemane Jesus did not express the feelings of a bridegroom.

Vernon C. Grounds reflects on Galatians 6:14, which inspired the hymn, “In the cross of Christ I glory.” He quotes a Chinese writer, “antagonistic to the gospel,” whose rather awkward English can be paraphrased, “If a father was killed by a gun, would his children revere the gun?” The short answer to this argument has always been, “No—but if the father was shot and not killed, in the natural course of events, then his children might preserve the gun as a souvenir of their father’s big adventure. The Crucifix, the image of the cross with Jesus on it, is a blatant appeal to emotion that some Christians reject, although many churches that refuse to display a crucifix will allow sermons to be preached, and books printed, that dwell on that ‘ohhh, the anguish Christ suffered for your sake’ appeal. What Protestants revere is the empty cross, from which Jesus refused to come down while His enemies were destroying His original mortal body, but on which He did not die—the symbol of the Resurrection.” But Grounds offers a longer answer, arguing for the Crucifixion as proof that God is Love.

Robert E. Goodrich cites news items as evidence that the world had never needed God more than it did in 1972. Perhaps not; as baby-boomers’ memories begin to soften around the edges it can be useful to remember that, no matter how much more eupeptic and energetic some of us were in 1972, the world needed a Savior just about as much then as it does now, and probably just about as much as it did in 1872.

Wayne E. Oates describes St. Paul’s teachings in Galatians 2:19-20, Romans 6:1-4, and Romans 8:38-39 as a way of “participating in the Resurrection.”

Earl Palmer celebrates the victory the Resurrection has given us: “when [H]e promises forgiveness...I know that because of the victory of Easter, his promises...will hold.” 

Roger Fredrikson celebrates the “surprise” of a Baptist meeting in Moscow during the Cold War, and describes the spiritual presence of Christ as something that “has sneaked up on” us.

If you remember these writers, you already know to expect  each piece to be written in its author’s own style. Some writers offer Bible studies, some rely on traditional rhetorical devices, some offer personal narratives. Each was a successful author, in his day, with a following; Larson’s and Allen’s books are still being reprinted. None can be called heretical, apart from the confusion of Easter with the Resurrection. Only Fry seems to me to misrepresent Christianity, and that obviously (at least it’s obvious to a middle-aged reader)through carelessness.

At the time of writing, the Internet reported that Floyd W. Thatcher was still alive, though not young. If you buy The Splendor of Easter here, therefore, it's a Fair Trade Book; you send this web site $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, and we send 10% of the original total price of $10, or $1, to Thatcher or a charity of his choice. Four or maybe six books of this size would fit into one $5 package.