What Is It About Easter?

What is it about Easter that everyone gets excited about?  Is it the brightly colored eggs or the adorable outfits for our children?  Maybe it's the delicious chocolate that candy factories spin out?  Oh! Wait!  It's because we're supposed to celebrate Jesus' resurrection, right?  Nope - it's none of these things.  In fact, Easter is a Pagan holiday designed to promote fertility and has nothing to do with Jesus. 

The Encyclopædia Britannica comments: “There is no indication of the observance of the Easter festival in the New Testament, or in the writings of the apostolic Fathers. The sanctity of special times was an idea absent from the minds of the first Christians.”—(1910), Vol. VIII, p. 828.


The Catholic Encyclopedia tells us: “A great many pagan customs, celebrating the return of spring, gravitated to Easter. The egg is the emblem of the germinating life of early spring. . . . The rabbit is a pagan symbol and has always been an emblem of fertility.”—(1913), Vol. V, p. 227.

In the book The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop, we read: “What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name. It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, . . . as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar. . . . Such is the history of Easter. The popular observances that still attend the period of its celebration amply confirm the testimony of history as to its Babylonian character. The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now.”—(New York, 1943), pp. 103, 107, 108; compare Jeremiah 7:18.

Nowhere in the Bible does it indicate that early Christians observed either a weekly Sunday mass or a yearly Easter to commemorate Christ's resurrection. 
 
The night before Jesus died he ordered a different celebration.  Jesus served his disciples a simple meal of bread and wine (no honey-glazed ham or turkey) and commanded them, "keep doing this in remembrance of me." - Luke 22:19.
 
It was thus Christ's death, not his resurrection, that Jesus wanted memorialized.  And how often did he want this?  On the night of the Jewish Passover meal - a yearly celebration of Israel's deliverance from Egypt. (Matthew 26:19, 20, 26-28).  Neither Easter no any other celebration was commanded by Christ. 
 
Socrates said, "The apostles had no thought of appointing festival days, but of only promoting a life of blamelessness and piety."
 
Please remember the one commandment that Jesus gave us, to remember his death.  Understanding and meditating on what this ultimate sacrifice means will help us have a greater appreciation for Jehovah God and his only begotten Son, Jesus.  I hope you will be able to attend the Memorial service being held on the evening of March 30th.  Call your local Kingdom Hall.  If registered, you may find it by searching http://www.kingdomhalls.org/.  I would guess that the Watchtower Society in Brooklyn can even help locate the nearest Kingdom Hall to you.