J. Brandon Magoo, the decrepit old geezer who a few years ago under suspicious circumstances highly indicative of chicanery and perhaps a deal with Lucy the gender-confused devil, became the occupant of the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington DC that has surprisingly not been renamed in one of the fits of anti-white hysteria that have marked the acceleration of Western Civilization’s descent into the final stages of Spenglerian winter, declared 31 March to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Exactly why he thought this segment of the alphabet soup gang the visibility of which proportionate to its representation in the public has become comically excessive in recent years, needed such a day, escapes me. Perhaps it is indicative of his eyesight having become so bad with age that he cannot see what is right before his nose. Lest anyone think I am unfairly picking upon our neighbours to the south who are twice unfortunate, first in being saddled with an ungodly republican form of government, and second in having Magoo as their president, I will point out that the twit who has led His Majesty’s government as prime minister for the last nine years is just as bad and doesn’t have the excuse of extreme old age. At any rate, Magoo’s choice of date looks very much like it was intended as a kick at his country’s Christians. For this year, the most important festival of celebration in the Christian Kalendar fell on 31 March. That is the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is the Christian Passover. In most countries it is called Pascha or some similar word derived from the Greek and Latin words for Passover. In some countries, not all, with Germanic based languages – English developed out of Anglo-Saxon a dialect of German – it called Easter, Ostern, or some other such cognate, for which reason countries with Germanic languages are infested with the type of Hyper-Protestant who likes to spread the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Church is not really celebrating the Resurrection on this day but rather worshipping some pagan goddess. Twits like this would have a harder go at selling such tripe in countries that speak Greek or a Romance language.
It is rather
amusing that these Hyper-Protestants are able to spin an elaborate conspiracy
theory from what they think they know about the name of the festival. In the lands where a variation of
Eastern/Ostern became the popular name of the festival the Church had been
celebrating as Pascha for centuries prior the name was taken from the month in
which it often fell. This is the month
that we call April. The Anglo-Saxons
called it Eosturmonaþ. (1) The Venerable Bede may or may
not be right about that name having come originally from a Germanic goddess. He is the sole source attesting to there having
been such a goddess. Whether or not the
pagan Anglo-Saxons worshipped such a deity is immaterial. She was supposedly the goddess of spring and the
rising sun – the term east for the direction in which the sun rises has the
same derivation – and this is the basis of her association with the month of
April. Eosturmonaþ was the
Anglo-Saxon “month of spring.” This is
the association that was undoubtedly foremost in the minds of the Anglo-Saxons
after they converted to Christianity and began calling the Christian festival
that often falls in that month by its name.
Far from being a paganization of Christianity the borrowing of
this name for the Christian Passover was very apt. While the Son Whose rising we celebrate on
Easter is the Son, spelled with an o, of God, He is also according to the
Messianic prophecy of Malachi “the Sun of righteousness”. That is the prophecy that reads “But
unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in
his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.” (Mal.
4:2) As for spring, into this season in
which after months of winter, trees put forth leaves, grass begins to grow,
flowers start to appear, animals come out of hibernation and the birds return,
God has placed within nature a depiction of resurrection. Perhaps this is also the reason why the
Jewish Passover which prefigures the events that culminated in the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ celebrated in the Christian Passover occurred when it did. The Jewish Passover falls on the 14th,
the Ides, of the month in the Hebrew calendar that since the Babylonian
Captivity has been called Nisan. The
original name of this month, the one used in the Pentateuch where the account
of the Exodus out of Egypt and the instructions for celebrating Passover are
laid out, is Aviv or Abib. (2) This word means
spring. The name of the city of Tel Aviv
in modern Israel means “Hill of Spring.”
This is why the Christian Passover is celebrated when it
is. In the early centuries of the Church different
regions had different practices with regards to the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. Some thought it should be celebrated on the
date on which it occurred in the secular calendar regardless of what day of the
week it fell upon. Others thought it should
always be celebrated on the day of the week in which it occurred, Sunday. Some thought it should fall on the same day
as the Jewish Passover. Others thought
that the dispensational change needed to be signified by a different date. In the first ecumenical Council of the Church
– a council, to which all the bishops from every region are invited and the
rulings of which are subsequently received as binding by the universal Church –
which was convened at Nicaea in 325 AD to address the heresy of Arius of
Alexandria, who denied that the Son was co-eternal, co-substantial, and
co-equal with the Father, it was ruled that the Church would celebrate the
Christian Passover on the first Sunday – the day of the week on which the
Resurrection took place – after the first full moon – a month in a lunar
calendar begins with the new moon and the Ides fall on the full moon so Jesus
was crucified on the full moon – on or after the spring equinox, an approximation
of the anniversary of the Resurrection.
For those for whom all this talk of spring, the moon, etc.
smacks of paganism, I strongly recommend, a) reading your Bible more thoroughly
– that God gave the lights in the heavens for “signs, and for seasons, and for
days and for years” is stated in the Creation account (Gen. 1:14), and the
calendar the Israelites used was a lunar calendar in which each month was the
length of a moon cycle, and b) reading C. S. Lewis’ God In the Dock. This is a
collection of essays compiled by William Hooper and published after Lewis’
death. It is largely apologetic in theme and the essays that deal with Christianity and paganism are particularly
relevant. Lewis, in rebuttal of the
school of skeptical anthropology that drew inspiration from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and wrote off
Christianity as presenting simply another version of themes that appear
throughout pagan mythology, pointed out that by contrast with the figures in
these myths, Jesus lived, died, and rose again in history, not in some
otherworld and othertime, but in a known place and time in this our world. He
also pointed out that by contrast with mythology, in which a dying and rising
again god may be understood as symbolizing such things as nature and fertility
and the life cycle, with the events of the Gospel, it is the things in nature
that the myths signify that themselves signify Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. If you are averse to this sort of argument
that Jesus is the reality to which myths imperfectly and indirectly point,
understand it in terms of the New Testament’s theology of revelation. God has revealed Himself to all in His
Creation, St. Paul explains in the first chapter of Romans. This is called natural revelation. It is insufficient to bring anybody to a
saving faith but it provides enough light that the ideas that natural man
derives from this revelation, whether philosophical or mythological, while they
will be marked by numerous errors, will not be entirely devoid of truth. The ancient Israelites were given a different
type of revelation on top of this. It is
called special revelation. The true God in
establishing His Covenant with the Patriarchs and later the nation of Israel
gave them a revelation of Himself and His will that no man could come to from
natural revelation alone. That
revelation too, however, paled in comparison to God’s ultimate revelation of
Himself in the Incarnation. When St.
Paul brings up natural revelation in the first chapter of Romans it is at the
beginning of an argument in which he shows that the nations of the world,
despite this revelation, fell into the apostasy of idolatry and gross sin, and
then shows that the Jews who had been given God’s Law fared no better, but that
the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike, are sinful, lacking the righteousness
that God requires of them, which righteousness God gives to Jew and Gentile
alike freely by His grace in Jesus Christ, through His Death and
Resurrection. This is something to
which those who stick up their nose at Easter, the Christian Passover, and
insist that we should stick to the Old Testament feast, really ought to give consideration.
As important as the delivery of the ancient Israelites from
Egyptian bondage, to which the Jewish Passover looks back, was, unless it is regarded
as a type, foreshadowing the greater deliverance that Jesus Christ would
accomplish it is merely the story of one nation, one people. The Hebrew people, enslaved in an Egypt that
had forgotten Joseph, was delivered by the God Who had made a Covenant with
their distant ancestors, by sending a series of plagues upon Egypt culminating
in the death of the firstborn from which only the Hebrews were spared on that
first Passover, prompting Pharaoh to finally give in to God’s message through
Moses, and let the people go, or rather drive them out. Thus a nation was born and to that nation
these events will always be specially sacred.
The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, however, was not some tribal deity,
but the True and Living God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and God had
promised the Patriarchs that through them He would bless all the nations of the
world. The Hebrews in the Exodus
account represent all the people of the world, their physical bondage in Egypt
represents the spiritual bondage to sin that has been the plight of the world
since Adam, their deliverance from that slavery on that first Passover
represents the redemption from slavery to sin, death, and devil that Jesus of
Nazareth, the Son of God, the Promised Christ or Messiah, would purchase not
just for Israel but for the entire world by dying and rising again from the
dead. There were many facets to this
redemption. The Church Fathers in the
first millennium stressed that because the Incarnate Son of God was sinless,
death had no claim on Him, and so by dying He entered death’s kingdom not as
captive but Conqueror, and liberated those over whom death had lost his claim
by taking Jesus. In the West in the
second millennium the vicarious aspect of Christ’s death, that He bore our sins
so as to settle our account and make us righteous before God, came to be
stressed. These are two aspects of the
same truth which cannot be comprehended in any one single theory. However we understand the mechanics of His
Death for us the story is not complete without His Resurrection. In His Resurrection the enemy that comes for
us all in the end is himself overthrown and destroyed. This is a victory that ultimately we are to
share in. As John Donne put it: One short sleep past/We wake eternally/And
death shall be no more/Death thou shalt die. In another very real sense our sharing in
the victory of Christ’s Resurrection does not await that final day. St. Paul explains in the sixth chapter of
Romans that in out baptism into Christ’s Church we are baptized into Christ’s Death. Being so joined to Him in His Death, we
remain united with Him in His Resurrection and our sharing in His Resurrection
life is the new spiritual life into which we are regenerated and in which the
Apostle enjoins us to live to God in righteousness. This is the substance of which the first
Passover was the shadow.
In discussing Christ’s victory we often speak of the enemy
that He defeated, death, as a person.
This is not just a device like the Grim Reaper of folklore that helps us
to make tangible the concept of death.
The Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us exactly who death
personified is: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and
blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he
might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil”. (Heb.
2:14) It should not surprise us
therefore, when agents of the devil act out his impotent rage against all that
Easter represents by doing things like declaring a day for something stupid,
silly, and nonsensical and making it fall on the same day as Easter. Nor should we allow it to disturb our peace
of mind. These are the last desperate
measures of an already defeated foe and should be regarded as such and as
nothing more.
Happy Easter!
Christ is Risen! He
is Risen indeed!
Alleluia!
(1) The letter þ is called a thorn and is pronounced like th. It is a runic letter. When printing was invented, rather than make a distinct type form for it, printers often made y do double duty, for itself and for thorn. In the 1611 edition of the Authorized Bible you will often find "the" and "then" printed as ys for thorns with the other letters in small superscript above them. For the most part obsolete, this runic addition to the Latin characters that otherwise make up our alphabet, survives in the signs of businesses that have deliberately archaic names like "ye olde shoppe". The "ye" is not the second person plural pronoun, which would not make sense as the first word in the name of a store, but the definite article spelled with the y version of thorn.
(2) The second letter of the Hebrew alphabet can be pronounced either like a b or a v. In modern print Hebrew, the pronunciation is indicated by the presence of a dagesh, a dot in the middle of the letter. If the dagesh is present bet is pronounced like b, if it is absent it is pronounced like v. The dagesh like all Hebrew diacritical marks including the vowel indicators, is a relatively modern invention absent from ancient Hebrew writings. This is why some words are transliterated into English both ways.
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