No, it’s not that the chocolate bunnies are taking their eyes away from Jesus. It’s not that the Easter-egg hunts are turning a serious celebration into a greed-inducing carnival game. The 15-foot-high snow globes on front lawns at Christmastime along with the shopping-mall-Santas are worse, and I take my kids to see them without too much heartburn.
It’s that our Easter traditions are so cheesy and cheap. And so that’s the impression our kids get about the resurrection itself.
I’m looking at the front page of the weekly Target Ad, and it’s hawking $1.99 bags of candy to stuff in your kids’ Easter baskets. The week before Christmas, that page was advertising $199 bikes and $249 Wii’s.
Now, I’m not a fan of the American cult of consumption, but I am a fan of consistency. If you’re going to give your kid a Nintendo DS for Christmas, for crying out loud, don’t put a $1.99 bag of chocolate eggs and a $4.99 toy car in his Easter basket and call it square.
Either go big (dropping 10,000 Easter eggs from a helicopter is so ridiculous that it just might count), or go home and cut out the shlock altogether. Return to a purely spiritual celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection.
We’re talking about the most significant event in human history, man.
As Christians, it’s the event we pin all our hope on, for this life and the next. As Paul said, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15).
Which means that everyone who doesn’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (40% of Americans, according to this poll, maybe even higher in Hawaii) should pity you right now because you give such astronomically serious weight to this one little mythical event that supposedly happened thousands of years ago.
Any of your neighbors showing any signs of pity? No? Maybe it’s because your family’s celebration of Easter is as fluffy and weightless as theirs.
And maybe that’s why the next generation of believers will ascribe even less significance to the resurrection than we do.
Looking to establish more meaningful Easter traditions in your family? Try starting with this idea. It got our kids thinking and talking seriously about the death and resurrection of Jesus.