Eoster
Pastor’s Epistle—April, A.D. 2015 B
The Dawn
I sometimes find it funny just how much old religion peppers
our everyday speech. Our days of the week, for example, are named largely for
Germanic gods. You can still hear this when you say them out loud: Tyr’s Day,
Odin’s Day, Thor’s Day, Frey’s Day. The Roman gods, meanwhile, dominate our
calendar months. Last March I mentioned Mars, god of war, and April stems from
Aphrodite, goddess of love—or lust, anyway. Next up we’ll have Maia, an earth
goddess, and Juno, goddess of marriage. June weddings are still the norm, aren’t
they? Why, even our breakfast cereal reminds us of Ceres, goddess of grain.
This isn’t a bad thing. Foundational paganism can actually
be quite helpful for people of faith. Christians have long viewed pre-Christian
mythologies as pointing to Jesus in a veiled way. The Roman gods were used by
the Church to illustrate abstract concepts: Aphrodite, for example, ceased to
be the goddess of love and became instead a symbol for love itself. And of
course worldly love points beyond itself to Christ, Who is true Love—so in a sense, Aphrodite paves the way for Jesus. Veiled truth prepares us for revealed Truth.
I bring this up because it has been pointed out, somewhat
awkwardly, that the holiest celebration of the Christian year appears to have
been named for a pagan goddess: Eoster. Have you heard this before? News
magazines often publish “scandalous” stories like this around the Eastertide.
According to the Venerable Bede, a Christian historian of early Britain, Eoster
was the Germanic goddess of the dawn (who, for the record, had nothing to do
with Ishtar, or rabbits, or eggs, in case you ever read such nonsense). As near
we can tell, Eoster was the dawn,
much in the same way that Aphrodite was love.
Obviously most Christians don’t call the celebration of our
Lord’s Resurrection “Easter,” because most Christians don’t speak English or
German. The proper name for what we call Easter is really “Pascha,” the
Passover. Just as God’s people in the Old Testament celebrated the Passover meal
to remember and relive God’s liberation of His people from slavery and the
establishment of the Old Covenant, so do Christians remember and relive in
Communion how Jesus died to liberate us from slavery to sin, death, and hell,
and how at His Last Supper He established the New Covenant in His Blood. Jesus’
Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection are the Christian Passover: the story of
how God has saved us and made us one in Him.
We do not call it “Easter” in English because we’re honoring
a pagan goddess, any more than we thank Frey it’s Friday. (TFIF?) We call it
Easter because it truly is for us the rising of the Son, the coming of God’s
own Light from the East. Jesus Christ is the real God of the new dawn, and so
He is the true Easter—the fulfilment of Eoster, if you will. It seems that the
old pagans of Britain recognized that, in the Good News of Jesus Christ, a new
day had dawned for all of humankind. The world itself is changed. All that went
before points us to the Resurrection; the very rising of the sun points to the
Risen Son.
Welcome to the new day of the Risen Lord. In Jesus’ Name.
Amen.
Coincidentally, First Things today proclaims Jesus not only the true Eoster but the true Dionysius as well.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2015/03/dionysian-jesus
Sure, but why did He draw so many Apollonian followers?
ReplyDelete