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Easter
Editorial…
Kaieteur News – Today, Guyanese celebrate Easter- although it was early Sunday morning Christ Jesus rose triumphantly from the grave. Easter is one of the religious public holidays on our calendar as it commemorates a signal event in the Christian calendar. Christians believe that three days after Jesus was crucified and buried (commemorated on “Good Friday”) he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.
This resurrection provided irrefutable proof to believers that Jesus was indeed the Son of God as he had said and that he had conquered death. It is entirely possible that if not for this event, Jesus might have been considered as just another Rabbi – as his fellow Jews still regard him.
For Christians, then, Easter symbolises the love of God for his human creation since he allowed his “only begotten son” to be sacrificed so that believers could then experience salvation from sin. Emanating from its Jewish origins, Easter is associated with Passover and Christ, as the Lamb of God, replaced the Old Testament lamb eaten on that festival evening each year.
The New Testament symbols of the bread and wine were instituted so that Christians could eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, the true Lamb of God. Christ’s sacrifice replaced the need to kill a lamb.
The feast, and the festival of Easter, is moveable because it is not commemorated according to our dominant Gregorian calendar that is based on the solar year but the older Jewish system that follows the lunar demarcation. The choice of an Easter Sunday from a span of dates between March and April offers a long weekend to those countries like ours that offer public holidays for both Good Friday and Easter Monday.
And the activities over this weekend have been modified radically away from the original impetus even in Christian countries, much less very pronounced multi-religious ones like Guyana.
Here, even among Christians, Easter has become associated with many other traditions. Kite flying is about the most widespread and visible one. In the month preceding Easter kites are flown with increasing frequency culminating with the sky practically blanked out with kites of all hues and shapes across the coastland on Easter Monday.
Some insist that the flying of kites is meant to symbolise the ascension of Jesus into heaven after his resurrection, but this has not been conclusively proven.
What has been proven is that some of the traditions – including the name “Easter” itself – have come out of the previous religious traditions of converts – dubbed by Christians as “pagan”. The feast day of Easter was originally a European celebration of renewal and rebirth.
Celebrated in the early spring, it honoured the pagan Saxon goddess Eastre. When the early missionaries converted these Saxons to Christianity, the holiday was merged with the pagan celebration and became known as Easter. It fell around the same time as the traditional memorial of Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
Hot Cross Buns also come out of this pre-Christian tradition. At the feast of Eastre, an ox was sacrificed and its horns became a symbol for the feast. They were carved into the ritual bread – hence later, “hot cross buns”. The word “buns” is derived from the Saxon word “boun” which means “sacred ox.” Later, the symbol of a symmetrical cross was used to decorate the buns; the cross represented the moon, the heavenly body associated with the Goddess, and its four quarters.
So it appears that we are following a venerable tradition of merging indigenous customs into the received ones to create a uniquely “Guyanese” festival. The Bartica Regatta, the Rupununi Rodeo and other community celebrations that are held over the Easter weekend have joined the kite flying that brings us all together to assist in nation building.
But we ought not to forget that the kernel of the festival of Easter is a Christian religious one and all Guyanese should be respectful of the values sought to be transmitted in that tradition.
We hope the spirit of Easter will linger on in this Republic.
Happy Easter to all Guyana.
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