The Resurrection: Born Again

BY BARNABY DEVITT

The glorious Christian holiday of Easter Sunday happens on Sunday, April 4. It’s always the Sunday following the first full moon after the March equinox. Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating the flight from Egypt, is on the night of the full moon and is March 30. This year the equinox is on March 20 at exactly 5:32 in the afternoon. The sun will pass directly overhead. Actually, the sun will not pass overhead, but we will revolve, and the sun will seem to be directly overhead. Because of the earth’s wobble, from now until the summer solstice the sun will seem to rise further and further in the northern sky and the days will get longer until after June 21 when the wobble of the earth will start to swing back and the days will get shorter.

The March equinox also marks the first day of spring, and it marks the beginning of the astrological calendar. This time of year was important to the ancients because this was the time to start preparing the ground for planting. For at least the last 10,000 years most of our ancestors spent most of their time cultivating crops. They quickly learned that for fields to grow crops year after year the soil had to be rejuvenated. They fertilized their fields with manure and bone or blood meal. The meal was an excellent source of nitrogen.

The earliest religious stories we have in Western culture are of divine creatures sacrificing themselves, being torn apart and buried in the earth and resurrected. Osiris was called the savior of ancient Egypt. He was killed by his brother, dismembered and buried in many different locations. It was believed that his sacrifice made the fields fertile.

Likewise, Dionysius, the Greek god and son of Zeus, was killed, torn apart and resurrected. His resurrection insured fertility for Greek fields. The springtime Dionysian festivals in Athens, five centuries before Christ, performed tragedies where often a hero was sacrificed for the common good. It is easy to see how the story of Jesus fits nicely into this tradition. Jesus was captured by the Romans after celebrating the Passover meal with his disciples.

The Passover meal commemorates the flight of the Jews from bondage in Egypt. Jews are supposed to eat bitter herbs and dip food in salt water to remember their lives as slaves under the Pharaohs. They are supposed to eat reclining to remember their flight did not allow them tables and chairs, and they are supposed to save an empty plate for Elijah.

When Moses pleaded with the Pharaoh to let his people go, he warned that if they were kept in bondage, plagues would visit the Egyptians, culminating in the deaths of their oldest sons. On the night that the angels of death were to visit the Egyptians, the Jews were told to smear the blood of a lamb on their door to protect them and to prepare an extra plate at the table. It seems sensible to assume that the angels of death were Jewish assassins who were trying to insure they had a safe house and a place at the table if they were being chased by Pharaoh’s police.

Certainly by the time of Jesus, and in the context of a Roman occupation, the Passover meal had revolutionary meaning. The meal follows the driving of the money changers from the Temple and that action marked Jesus as an
enemy of the state. With the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus this rebellion was temporarily suppressed, but it came back with a vengeance in 66 AD when the Zealots seized the Temple. The Romans eventually won and destroyed the
Temple in 70 AD. But the story of Jesus endures.

The story of the resurrection gives us hope at the end of a long Minnesota winter. Somehow the sacrifice of all those who went before inspire us to believe there is new and fertile grounds for our dreams and desires.