Spring, the Easter of the Year

Easter, the Spring of History

Spring is here. It showed up in force in my city this week. Spring is when everything comes back to life after the death of winter.

Easter is the traditional feast set aside to celebrate the resurrection. The word Easter is Anglo Saxon for spring equinox. Easter was calculated using the equinox, and the term for the equinox (Oestra), according to Bede, gave it's name to the Feast of the Resurrection. (Incidentally, the nation of Austria is also named after the spring equinox.)

We used to worship a goddess that was said to be the power behind the seasonal shift of the equinox. But she has been forgotten, and the heavens, which shout the praises of God, have come to be recognized and understood for what they are really saying. The word itself has been cleansed as the gospel has gone forth. Easter is now the  festival day in which we celebrate the fact that winter is not just overcome every year, the winter of the world was overcome when True Spring began. The Son of God burst the grave as he was raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit of God.

Adam. with his sin, cast the world into winter. But God began giving hints of Spring, What T.S. Elliot, in his poem ‘Little Gidding,’ calls, Midwinter Spring, where a day with winter on each side is bright with the hint of what’s coming.

When the short day is brightest with frost and fire and stirs the dumb spirit, not with wind, but with pentecostal fire.

All throughout the Old Testament, there were Midwinter Spring days. Where the spring itself doesn't come, but God makes it clear that Spring is coming. Resurrection is coming. History itself will have a spring equinox. When history turns from Winter to Spring.

This is why we called the festival Easter. This is why we named it after Spring, and why Spring itself has come to mean resurrection. The true meaning of Spring, the actual reason that God set up the cycle of the equinoxes and seasons, is because God is a God that brings life from death.

Everything in the spring is a legitimate symbol for our celebration of the resurrection. Eggs, rabbits, flowers, baskets of grass and candy, or seeing the ladies in beautiful Spring clothes, it’s all a wonderful and legitimate way of celebrating the resurrection. When Jesus came out of the tomb, the winter of history was broken and the Spring of history had begun.