What have Easter bunnies to do with the resurrection?

As we emerge from the Easter weekend, Graham Tomlin unpacks why Easter is more than an illustration of new life.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

the first signs of Spring breaking through

Bunnies, chocolate eggs, crocuses. It’s that time of year again. The dark bleakness of winter is giving way to life and colour as the soil warms. We finally feel sun on the skin, wake up to early dawns and longer days.

Across the world, festivals celebrate the coming of Spring. The Qingming Festival is a traditional Chinese carnival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, observed by ethnic Chinese people across the world as a celebration of the new season. In the festival of Holi, Hindus across the world douse each other in brightly coloured powder or water, as a celebration of burgeoning love, and a prayer for a good harvest from the new growth in the land. The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer published a book that was to become famous: The Golden Bough. It was one of the first works of comparative religion in an age which was gradually becoming more knowledgeable about the religions of the world. In it, he identified a motif in many of the world’s religions: the concept of a dying-and-rising god. He saw the pattern repeated in fertility rites connected to the annual renewal of nature from the ‘death’ of winter. Gods like Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus - and Jesus - were examples of the same pattern.

The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems to be one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

These days, you often hear a similar version of this account. Christianity, we are told, is another form of the same story found in so many religions. Christians just took over and erased the earlier annual celebrations with their own version. Christmas was just a replacement for Yule, the ancient pagan winter festival. Easter recalls Eostre, a spring goddess from western Germanic lands, whose festival took place in April, connected to the spring equinox.

Today, we have lambs, daffodils, young rabbits and eggs. All of them emerge at this time of year and are, for us, signs of the rebirth of nature. It always seems miraculous, that from the deadness of winter, life is reborn. No wonder the ancient pagans, and religions all over the world, for that matter, found ways to celebrate new life, and to endue this season with mythical wonder.

It was tempting for James Frazer to bracket Jesus as just another of these myths of the death and rebirth of nature, the dying and rising god. Bunnies, eggs, Osiris and Jesus were all symbols, pointing to the same thing – the annually repeated miracle of new life in the Spring.

Yet this misses the point of what the early Christians said about the Resurrection. St Paul wrote: “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” His point was precisely not that this event was another illustration of the annual renewal of nature, the cycle of death & rebirth. It was something new altogether. It was the once and for all breaking of the cycle, spelling the end of death and its repeated power over us. Christ breaks through the dark wall of death so that millions of other can follow him through the breach into the light beyond it.

It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day.

The Resurrection of Jesus was the ‘firstfruits’, like the very first crocus of spring, the first apple on the tree. It was like a man breaking the four minute mile, a human being walking on the moon. A barrier had been broken that had always seemed impregnable and nothing would ever be the same again. It was the beginning of an entirely new creation that will one day come into fullness. It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day. The endless cycle of rebirth is suddenly folded out into a linear trajectory, pointing forward to the day when all shall be made new.

CS Lewis attributed his conversion at least in part to a conversation with JRR Tolkien which persuaded him that the story of Jesus – his incarnation, descent into death and resurrection to new life - was not just another example of the ancient myth of the renewal of the world, but was the thing towards which all the myths pointed – it was, as he called it in a famous essay, ‘myth become fact’. It’s worth quoting him to get the point:

Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate.

Of course, there will be echoes of resurrection in the other faiths of the world. Of course there will be pagan figures who look like Christ. Rabbits and eggs are to be enjoyed not frowned on as they point to the one great miracle. They are to be welcomed, not disowned. Lewis’ point is that the Resurrection is both myth and fact – myth become fact. The Resurrection doesn’t just point to the rebirth of the world. It is the rebirth of the world.

Now of course, Christians can’t prove it. They can, to be sure, point to evidence that the tomb was empty, that the profound, world-shattering effect on the disciples and even the rest of human history can only be explained by something truly extraordinary. But you can’t prove an event that by its very nature breaks the normal cycle of cause and event, death and rebirth, proof and disproof. You can only believe it and then re-build your whole view of the world around it. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it:

“At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. It provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview except one of which it was the basis.”

So, no, we can’t prove it. But we can at least do the early Christians the justice of acknowledging what they were saying and what they weren’t.

Because this is the central Christian claim – that the Resurrection is not a metaphor for something else – for the rebirth of nature in the spring, or for the fertility of nature. In fact, it’s the other way round. The rebirth of nature is a metaphor for the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus is not an illustration of something else. It is the one thing of which everything else is an illustration. In the light of the Resurrection, the renewal of nature in spring is not yet another round in the endlessly repeated cycle of death, rebirth and death again, but it points forward to the day when “the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed.”

Explainer

Creed

1 May 2024

4 min read

Those unexpected angel stories

Shedding a strange light on a disenchanted world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

An almost abstract image with overlays of colour over a group of people standing.

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Unlike Robbie Williams, who sings about them, sometimes I preach about angels. When I do something always happens – people start telling me their own angel stories.

There was the one a soldier friend told me. During an army climbing expedition to Mount Kenya, one of his team had fallen to his death from a sheer rock face. Caught up in the drama of the moment, my friend found himself stuck on a ledge, unable to move up or down, paralyzed by fear and frustration. Suddenly, in an inaccessible part of the world, where they had seen no-one for days, on a mountain where they were the only registered group present, a climber appeared out of nowhere, moved onto the ledge where he was standing, tied a rope into his harness, lowered him down the rockface to safety before disappearing up the face never to be seen again.

Or the story of a pastor who got into trouble in an airport. A stranger walked by and asked if he could help, and remarkably fixed a seemingly intractable problem. The grateful passenger took a selfie of himself and the stranger, but when he looked at the phone later on, there was a picture of himself, grinning into the camera, with his arms around… nothing.

Why do so many stubbornly believe in angelic beings, when a materialist view of the world laughs scornfully at the idea as a bit of pre-modern superstition?

These are not just modern stories. In the second century, a young man called Justin from Asia Minor was working his way through the various schools of Greek philosophy. One day, he was walking along the beach at Ephesus, wondering, as young people have always done, about the meaning of life in general and his own life in particular, when a mysterious old man came alongside and joined him in conversation. As they walked together, the old man spoke about the philosophers and how none of them were quite able to answer the deepest mysteries of life. He advised Justin to read the Old Testament prophets, before disappearing into the distance. Justin did so, became a Christian and went on to become one of the greatest early theologians of the Church and one of its early martyrs for the faith – hence the name he is remembered by today - Justin Martyr.

Was it an angel? Or a real, yet mysterious old man? Are angels real? And if so, what is the point of them? Surveys tell us that 30 per cent of British people believe in angels. In the USA that figure rises to 70 per cent. Why do so many stubbornly believe in angelic beings, when a materialist view of the world laughs scornfully at the idea as a bit of pre-modern superstition? After all, the cynic might say all these stories can be explained - these were just ordinary people who turned up unexpectedly.

The encounter opened the eyes of the person in the story to another realm, a world unseen yet just as real as the seen.

The word angelos in Greek simply means messenger – and it can mean either a human or an angelic one. In the Bible, angels don’t usually appear with glowing white clothing and wings sprouting from their shoulder blades. When they come to people with a message, they often appear in the guise of ordinary people. In fact, it’s often hard to tell whether you have been visited by an angel or just another human.

The point, therefore, is not so much about the angels, but about the message that they bring. They tend to turn up when there is something particularly important to announce, something like the birth of Jesus, when an angel appears to the young Mary to tell her the news that she will give birth to the Son of God, her, and then quite a few of them turn up to sing to the shepherds, an indication that something big was happening.

In each of the stories above, the encounter opened the eyes of the person in the story to another realm, a world unseen yet just as real as the seen. An inexplicable encounter with what just might have been an angel has the capacity to open our eyes to the fact that the world is bigger than we often assume – that as Hamlet says to his dull, practically minded friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The Nicene Creed, the classic summary of Christian faith, speaks of God as the ‘Creator of all things seen and unseen’. We are all used to what we can see, yet some of us only have space in our world for things that can be seen, touched or measured. Yet there are surely those unseen realities – things we cannot see or measure, like love, compassion, holiness, miracles, God and - yes – angels.

A random sermon on angels elicits hushed stories that people feel almost embarrassed to speak. Such mysterious experiences are far more common than we realise, as Dan Kim points out elsewhere on this site. Yet these experiences are not an end in themselves but are perhaps a way of God getting our attention when we refuse to listen to more ordinary approaches. These experiences open our eyes to a dimension of reality that is as real, if not as visible as the one we deal with every day – and become a gateway to a journey of discovery of an unseen world alongside the seen, that sheds a strange but welcoming new light onto a disenchanted world.