Easter is a mess. Not the resurrection of Jesus part...I base my Faith on that. When it comes to the message it sends to today’s kids, the way we recognize Easter as a society is a mess. It is a mixed up jumble of secular candy coated confusion and deep (and sometimes dark) religious ritual. It’s no wonder kids “get” Christmas and then when Easter rolls around are all over the place. At least there’s a logical tie between the gifts Santa brings and the Gift of Jesus Christ…it makes sense, even to a toddler, it's a birthday party. Throw in some wise men, as stretched as their story has become, and bingo, a relatively seamless celebration of both the secular and supernatural all wrapped up in ribbons and bows and placed in a manger with a sprig of holly for good measure. It is easy to put Christ in the center of Christmas in my house, and I think the overall celebration surrounding it helps. Easter on the other hand is a tougher egg to crack.
Picture this from a child’s perspective. Giant rabbit hops from home to home in the dead of night depositing varying amounts of candy and colorful hard boiled eggs around, putting chocolate mini statues of itself in a colorful basket with some jellybeans. You get hopped up on marshmallow peeps only to be rushed off to church in new and uncomfortable clothing, sometimes even adorned in ridiculous hats all to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus who as far as you remember is only like 4 months old by now but now has a beard and holes in his hands from where guys in metal hats hung him up on a cross to die….whoa…bring back the over-sized bunny with the basket.
Yea, Easter is a tough one to sort out for young minds. As an adult I get the connection. The sacrifice of Christ is celebrated by the victory over death with His resurrection, thus our salvation. Peeps and eggs and all things springy and pastel represent the rebirth and renewal that happen each spring in nature, just as Christ’s resurrection announces our rebirth from sin to a new life in Him. I get that, as an adult. Still don’t understand where the giant varmint with the jelly beans came to be part of it, but I can follow most of it. Kids have a much harder time making that connection. They just celebrated Jesus birthday…and now in the course of just a few months He is killed and is born again….this doesn’t even begin to touch on how in the world you explain crucifixion to a 5 year old…let alone explaining WHY anyone would crucify another person anyway ESPECIALLY Jesus…and yet how can a child understand the glory that Easter represents without understanding what Christ did in His death and resurrection? This is something I am trying to figure out right now. I have a 7 year old who is asking some good questions and a 5 year old who THINKS he has it figured out and I know that neither really gets it. They know who Jesus is and they know what He did for us and why…as much as they can at their respective ages, but how do you wrap all of that up in a candy coated marshmallow and plop it in a basket with some plastic grass? It confuses the heck out of kids, who really don’t understand death in the first place…adding a hopping mutant bunny and chocolate doesn’t make it much easier….and when schools and even churches embrace the bunny and the jellybeans it just adds to the confusion. I just think it is too important an issue to not figure out and I am trying to find some way to explain it without watering down how big a deal it is…in my opinion the events of Easter to a Christian outweigh, to some extent, the Christmas celebration anyway...I mean without Christ's death and resurrection Christmas would not quite be as big a deal...right?
