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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
April 16, 2006
Celebrating Easter
One of the most impressive Christians I know -- and have known since childhood, well enough to know that I know what I know -- does not celebrate Easter.Not a person I could ever deprecate. Her heroism is of the sort for which state honours were never designed; her accomplishments just those which are disparaged in our feminist-abortionist “mainstream” culture. Which is well, because she has never looked for recognition from it. She rose out of a hard and impoverished childhood, kept her head through a terrible personal heartbreak, kept her eyes fixed on the Cross, then went on to raise and home-school a large and happy family, full of capable musicians -- nearly without money in a remote Canadian place. She’s a strict Calvinist, and celebrating Easter, or Christmas, or any other holiday but Sunday, is against her principles. To her mind, and that of her co-religionists, none of these festivities are mentioned in the Bible, and that’s that. I both disagree, and applaud. They could not be, I compulsively reply -- for the events recorded in the New Testament are the originals, the “prototypes” shaping the new Christian liturgy. Or, more precisely, reshaping and transforming the received, ancient Hebrew Temple worship, now that Christ, in his own person, is understood as having supplanted the Temple at Jerusalem. We know more about this today, than could be known during the Reformation, and thanks to work by such pioneering scholars as Margaret Barker (The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy) we can expect to know even more in the future. Details will remain murky, but the central fact is emerging. The early Christians were consciously continuing the high priestly rituals of the Temple. The iconography and cosmology of the first centuries is deeply rooted in the Temple past, and the whole revelation of Jesus Christ is interpreted by that light, including everything from the Bread of the Presence, to the conception of Mary the “Mother of God”, to the Trinitarian expression of God on high, to the idea of canonizing Scripture. In other words, the place to look for the origins of Easter is not only in the Jewish observance of the Passover, but behind that Temple Veil, in the holy of holies. And the “construction” of Easter is not a human rationalization from the external events reported in the Gospels. It instead issues from deeper springs -- and from a Christ who is understood as already present, however vaguely discerned, throughout the time before his Incarnation. Catholics honour Scripture and Tradition, with capital letters, as do the members of the Eastern Churches. Protestants, for the most part, honour Scripture, and pick and choose through the traditions. A Calvinist as strict as my magnificent friend, accepts Scripture alone. But to my catholic mind (small-c now, for in this respect my views have not changed from when I was an Anglican), this does not make sense. For how could we know what Scripture was canonical, and what was apocryphal, had there not been a living, and necessarily mostly oral, tradition at work? Indeed, when I think it through: it is from the Tradition that the Scripture emerges. I was reminded of all this last week, by a great splash of media nonsense about the “discovery” of a “Gospel of Judas” -- 13 sheets of crumbling papyrus, probably from the 3rd century A.D., that had been recovered from the Egyptian desert, a generation ago. Breathless media hacks, knowing approximately nothing about the background of the case, quickly declared that “we” (i.e. “those Christians”) would have to revise “our” (read: “their”) whole account of what happened on Good Friday. Breaking news: turns out Jesus asked Judas to betray him. This “Gospel of Judas” was merely the latest of innumerable Gnostic and other apocryphal texts to emerge from the same desert sands. It was probably written in the first place for the express purpose of subverting the faith of early Christians. But for whatever purpose, it was something utterly not new. Even the cult of Gnosticism is still with us, in its various New Age forms. And, one of the purposes of the Church remains, to be a fortress against the assimilation of rubbish into Christian beliefs and practices. What we need to know about Easter, is that it was universally observed in the Church, from the earliest times of which we have record. And that, to know what happened before the earliest records, you had to be there. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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