Each year, devout Christians often receive an admonition to resist the commercialization of Christmas. We put bumper stickers on our cars telling us to “keep Christ in Christmas,” and we remind our children that gifts are a celebration of the mystery of the Incarnation, but not the main purpose of the holiday.
Of course this is an important and much-needed reminder, but why don’t we receive such a warning on Easter? While stores capitalize with pastel plastic eggs and bunny-embroidered sweaters, you would be hard-pressed to find a non-Christian celebrating Easter the way that many non-Christians celebrate Christmas.
What makes Easter resistant to the commercialization that can so easily corrupt Christmas? I think it is because the beautiful, awful mystery of Christ’s victory over death — the Paschal Mystery — is too mysterious to be reduced to consumerism, and even the secular world knows this intuitively.
The Paschal Mystery refers to the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord, the central mysteries of our faith. To understand why we call this a mystery, it is helpful to take a look at the “mystery cults” of the ancient world.
In the ancient Greek and Roman world, mystery cults were specific subsets of the pagan religion. These cults, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website, focused much more on assuring its participants would fare well in the afterlife, and involved reenactments of the death and rebirth of certain gods.
However, as they were pagan cults, these mysteries involved all manner of wild immorality. But the cycle of death and rebirth points to a longing of the human heart for immortality, and some level of understanding that man cannot achieve it on his own.
In the Christian tradition, mystery takes on a more specific meaning. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains: “Theologians give the name mystery to revealed truths that surpass the powers of natural reason.”
In the strictest sense, the article adds, “A mystery is a supernatural truth, one that of its very nature lies above the finite intelligence.”
The Paschal Mystery is at the very center of our faith – but what makes it mysterious?
Why would an all-powerful God take on human flesh and die the death of a sinner to save the men who betrayed him? As St. Paul writes in the first letter to the Corinthians, Christ crucified is “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.” Man, through his own reason, could never come to the story of the Incarnation, and Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, through his own discursive reasoning. But God in His goodness revealed His love to men.
The Paschal Mystery is the fulfillment of the Jewish celebration of Passover, when the blood of lambs marked the doorposts of the Israelites, whose homes in Egypt were spared the terrible plague of the death of the firstborn. In the Crucifixion of Christ, God Himself became the Paschal Lamb, with His blood covering all men to save them from eternal death. And just like the ancient Jews ate the Passover lamb, Catholics at every Mass are invited to partake in the Eucharist, the flesh and blood of the true Paschal Lamb.
Thus, the celebration of Easter carries a certain somber awe, as Christ descended into Hell before the glory of His Resurrection. While the pagans marked their mysteries with frenzy, drunkenness, and orgies, Christians mark their sacred mystery, the Mass, with reverence and love. They prepare to participate in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the Paschal Mystery brought to us during Mass, with fasting and penance.
So how do we celebrate Easter? In his Second Festal Letter, Saint Athanasius wrote that Christians should celebrate the feast of Easter in such a way that non-believers see that God is truly with them.
“Let us then, as is becoming, as at all times, yet especially in the days of the feast, be not hearers only, but doers of the commandments of our Saviour,” the saint wrote, “that having imitated the behaviour of the saints, we may enter together into the joy of our Lord which is in heaven, which is not transitory, but truly abides.”
As we celebrate the joy of Easter, may we have a proper awe and reverence for the sacred mystery of the Resurrection and seek to abide with Christ always.