There was a remarkable little essay in Slate last week on “Why Easter stubbornly resists the commercialism that swallowed Christmas”; I think the author, James Martin, overstates his case somewhat, since there are commercial traditions around the holiday (Easter baskets full of candy, Easter eggs and the kits they sell to dye them, all courtesy of the Easter bunny), but his point holds: Easter is still primarily a Christian holiday, not a “consumerist nightmare,” as he describes Christmas. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but there’s good reason for that—neither the crucifixion nor the Resurrection are commercial-friendly:
Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies, animals, angels, and—thanks to the wise men—gifts, is eminently marketable to popular culture. . . . The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the shock it had for those who first participated in the events during the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals. . . .Even the resurrection, the joyful end of the Easter story, resists domestication as it resists banalization. Unlike Christmas, it also resists a noncommittal response. . . . It’s hard for a non-Christian believer to say, “Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead.” That’s not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God’s son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you. Easter is an event that demands a “yes” or a “no.” There is no “whatever.” . . . What does the world do with a person who has been raised from the dead? Christians have been meditating on that for two millenniums. [sic] But despite the eggs, the baskets, and the bunnies, one thing we haven’t been able to do is to tame that person, tame his message, and, moreover, tame what happened to him in Jerusalem all those years ago.
Amen.