So last night after prayer, my kids ask me what an Easter bunny has got to do with eggs. Rabbits are mammals, they tell me, they don’t lay eggs!
I tell them I don’t know. Genuinely! That has nothing to do with the reason for this season. It never has.
“Easter,” I tell them, “is a European cultural heritage. The only thing that connects the ancient Jewish and Christian celebration of Passover with Easter is colonialism, or more specifically, the unilateral appropriation from one tradition and morphing it with another in the expediency of political power.”
They look at me strangely.
“So, are we celebrating Easter or Passover?” they ask me.
“Frankly, I don’t care anymore,” I tell them, to their pop-eye astonishment.
What I care about is the compelling message of how Jesus transformed the ultimate subjugatory symbolism of the Roman cross to a formidable posture of humility for all time to come.
I’m thoroughly vexed how this powerful message continues to elude the overwhelming majority of the 21st Century Church.
“Sometimes I cry myself to sleep when I realise how the most powerful prescription to humankind has been diluted beyond recognition by the hegemonic human traditions,” I tell them.
The more I read the Holy Scriptures, the more I am persuaded that God intended the way of the Cross to be a defining framework of how Jesus’ disciples ought to lead their lives; a daily walk of humility and service to others.
Had the Church rejected the colonisation of Christianity by the hegemonic political powers, the world would be a vastly different place.
But alas for humankind!