Eoster

Pastor’s Epistle—April, A.D. 2015 B

The Dawn

I sometimes find it funny just how much old religion peppers our everyday speech. Our days of the week, for example, are named largely for Germanic gods. You can still hear this when you say them out loud: Tyr’s Day, Odin’s Day, Thor’s Day, Frey’s Day. The Roman gods, meanwhile, dominate our calendar months. Last March I mentioned Mars, god of war, and April stems from Aphrodite, goddess of love—or lust, anyway. Next up we’ll have Maia, an earth goddess, and Juno, goddess of marriage. June weddings are still the norm, aren’t they? Why, even our breakfast cereal reminds us of Ceres, goddess of grain.

This isn’t a bad thing. Foundational paganism can actually be quite helpful for people of faith. Christians have long viewed pre-Christian mythologies as pointing to Jesus in a veiled way. The Roman gods were used by the Church to illustrate abstract concepts: Aphrodite, for example, ceased to be the goddess of love and became instead a symbol for love itself. And of course worldly love points beyond itself to Christ, Who is true Love—so in a sense, Aphrodite paves the way for Jesus. Veiled truth prepares us for revealed Truth.

I bring this up because it has been pointed out, somewhat awkwardly, that the holiest celebration of the Christian year appears to have been named for a pagan goddess: Eoster. Have you heard this before? News magazines often publish “scandalous” stories like this around the Eastertide. According to the Venerable Bede, a Christian historian of early Britain, Eoster was the Germanic goddess of the dawn (who, for the record, had nothing to do with Ishtar, or rabbits, or eggs, in case you ever read such nonsense). As near we can tell, Eoster was the dawn, much in the same way that Aphrodite was love.

Obviously most Christians don’t call the celebration of our Lord’s Resurrection “Easter,” because most Christians don’t speak English or German. The proper name for what we call Easter is really “Pascha,” the Passover. Just as God’s people in the Old Testament celebrated the Passover meal to remember and relive God’s liberation of His people from slavery and the establishment of the Old Covenant, so do Christians remember and relive in Communion how Jesus died to liberate us from slavery to sin, death, and hell, and how at His Last Supper He established the New Covenant in His Blood. Jesus’ Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection are the Christian Passover: the story of how God has saved us and made us one in Him.

We do not call it “Easter” in English because we’re honoring a pagan goddess, any more than we thank Frey it’s Friday. (TFIF?) We call it Easter because it truly is for us the rising of the Son, the coming of God’s own Light from the East. Jesus Christ is the real God of the new dawn, and so He is the true Easter—the fulfilment of Eoster, if you will. It seems that the old pagans of Britain recognized that, in the Good News of Jesus Christ, a new day had dawned for all of humankind. The world itself is changed. All that went before points us to the Resurrection; the very rising of the sun points to the Risen Son.

Welcome to the new day of the Risen Lord. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.