Radio Script #456

Little Talks on Common Things

April 17, 1960

This is the great, sacred day of the Christian year, when almost everyone who has even the remotest connection with a Christian sect of any kind goes to church. It is a season of the year also when Christians and Jews both celebrate a great religious festival, for at almost the same time when Christians observe Easter, Jews are observing the sacred annual season of the Passover. According to Jewish tradition, the first Passover was ordained by Moses at the command of God. Unmoved by the nine previous plagues, the Egyptian Pharoah had refused to let the captive Israelites go free. Then God brought upon the Egyptians the tenth and most dreadful of the plagues — the death of the first born son in every household. In order that Jewish homes might not be mistaken for Egyptians, Moses had told his people that God commanded them to sprinkle the blood of a lamb on the lintel of the door as a sign that the Angel of Death was to pass over that house on the night when the Egyptian first born were to die.

Ever afterward, in memory of their deliverance from Egypt, when that last plague melted the Pharoah’s hardened heart, on the eve of the fifteenth day of the month Nisan, Jews have celebrated the Passover. The date coincides with the Christian Easter because the events of Jesus’ week of passion, beginning with the triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, through the arrest, the trial, and the crucifixion, to the resurrection on the following Sunday, was the week of the Jewish Passover, which Jesus was himself observing, for Jesus and his little band of followers were Jews.

We read in the gospel of Matthew these words: “The disciples asked Jesus, ‘Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ He said ‘Go into the city to such a one and say to him, The Master says I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.’ And when it was evening, he sat at table with the twelve disciples.”

So it is that in the same spring season Jews hold their time-honored recognition of the greatest day in their whole history, the day of their deliverance from slavery, and Christians celebrate the greatest day in their history — the day when the leader and Savior conquered man’s most dreaded enemy, death. Without death there is no life. That is a fact that every biologist emphasizes. The plants and the animals and all mankind, one by one, die and their chemicals replenish the soil for life to emerge again. That is the great cycle of life. Without death it could not continue. Before it can come to life as a plant, the seed must be buried in the earth. Before it can soar aloft on butterfly wings, the caterpillar must enter the long sleep in its chrysalis tomb. Before the awakening of spring, the earth is shrouded in the cold death of winter. Jesus said: “Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But when it dies, it brings forth fruit.” Thus Christ summed up the truth that is so hard for us to understand — that life is ever dependent upon death.

People often ask why the date of Easter fluctuates between the extremes of March 22nd and April 21st. For instance last year it was on March 29th, while this year it is on April 17th. The reason is because, instead of being given a fixed date, the way December 25 has been assigned for Christmas, in fixing Easter the Church followed the lunar, not the solar, calendar, the kind of calendar like the Jewish one which links each month with the phases of the moon. The Passover, whose chief day falls on the fifteenth of Nisan, always comes near the full of the moon. So it came about that Easter was fixed as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. The Vernal Equinox is the day when the sun crosses the Earth’s equator, or the beginning of spring. Thus the Sunday that follows the full moon occurring next after the 21st of March is always the day assigned to Easter.

The passing of the years brings inevitable change in our customs, and customs differ greatly in different parts of our country. I was born and spent my childhood years in a small mill village in western Maine. Until I went to college I cannot recall that I had ever heard of Lent. Of course I knew about Easter. The four Protestant churches in my town all made much of Easter Sunday, but none of them paid any attention to Lent. The forty days before Easter meant nothing at all to the school children or the adults in my native town. The reason is because the town had neither a Roman Catholic nor an Episcopal church at that time. When I was a student in high school, that town of 3,000 inhabitants had only three Catholic families, and most of the English mill workers, especially in their second generation, though originally Episcopal, had affiliated with the local Methodist church.

From earliest colonial times the New England settlers, both in the Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colonies, had repudiated all of the ritual and most of the sacred ~ays of the established churches, either of Rome or of England. So they wanted nothing to do with the rules of diet and behavior peculiar to Lent. They expected their church people to observe not only an occasional day of humiliation and fasting duly appointed by the magistrates, but also to live the same kind of orderly, frugal, righteous lives 365 days in the year, not just the forty days before Easter. Of course both the Catholic and the Episcopal churches did not sanction loose living outside the days of Lent, but the lavish and sometimes riotous festivals of the period just before Lent — festivals such as later came to this country in expressions like the Mardi Gras in New Orleans — were severely frowned upon by the New England Puritans.

What a welcome change toward Christian universality the years have brought!

Today almost every Christian church, in rural as well as urban areas, gives due attention to Palm Sunday as well as to Easter, and observes many ancient customs of Holy Week. In my boyhood not one of the four local churches in my town held the now customary three hour service on Good Friday. How much better it is that in these times of world-shaking crisis, all Christians should remember reverently the days of the entry into Jerusalem, of the Last Supper, of the trial and crucifixion, of the triumphant rising from the tomb. Nor should we forget that our fellow citizens, the Jews, are at the same time observing with respectful reverence the deliverance out of Egypt by the same God whom we Christians also worship.

How easy it is for us to forget that the very word holiday means holy day. We have seen most of those days gradually usurped by two powerful forces — recreation arid commercialization. We surely don’t need to be reminded of what has happened to Christmas. And what about Easter? For how many people has it become the single Sunday in the year when one goes to church to show off the new spring clothes and hope to have a news photographer take your picture on the church steps?

Press and radio say almost nothing about Easter sermons in our nation’s largest city, and a great deal about the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue.

We Americans, especially those of us who bear any allegiance to a church, ought to give more thought to a threatening tendency that has long been with us, but has become more menacing in recent years — the persistent secularizing of religious things. The secular life pays homage to property and material success. So, the church with the biggest and most elaborate building, with the most money, and the greatest number of members, is regarded as the best church. But is it? May not some little congregation of devout worshippers, meeting in a crude, log chapel, or even in the open air, as the martyred Colby graduate, Francis Rose, held his meetings in the Philippines until he was executed by the Japanese invaders — may not such a congregation be more truly successful than the best dressed group in the most lavishly equipped sanctuary?

In this Easter season we must not forget that, by the best secular standards, Jesus was a failure. He had no money, held no property, built no cathedral. He died a convicted criminal by the method of execution reserved only for traitors against the state. In bitter disappointment and trembling fear his followers dispersed. One had betrayed him, another had denied him, most of the others had run away. That was the situation on the Saturday that followed the cruel three hours of Good Friday afternoon.

Then on the Sabbath morning something happened — something that rallied the frightened followers, that turned failure into success, defeat into victory. It was not success and victory by secular standards, but rather by the standards of humility and service and sacrifice that Jesus had preached through the little towns of Galilee during the three short years of his ministry. Eighteen hundred years before the Broadway play of that name, a preacher from Nazareth was saying, “You can’t take it with you.”

Whether or not you have been to church today, you cannot escape the significance of Easter. The new life which the risen Christ brings to man is not just ordinary, biological life. The gift of Easter is not mortal, but spiritual life. And this gift comes as the fruit of failure. defeat and death. The passage from Good Friday to Easter Sunday is the passage from the gloom of death to the dawn of eternal life.

It is a hard lesson for man to learn — that all his striving is as nothing compared to the gift of spiritual life. How hard also it is for us who have lost loved ones to see in that loss anything except the end of both hope and faith. But what did Jesus say? “Except a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone; but if it die, it brings forth fruit. Whosoever would save his life, shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” The King of Kings died upon a thief’·s cross; then he rises from the tomb. Why? Because, by that strange contradiction, he fulfills the seed time and the harvest, the setting and the rising of the sun, the never-ending cycle of the seasons — bringing the eternal renewal of life to despairing human kind.

So, casting aside the usual tag line of this program, let us remember the meaning of Easter, not for old times’ sake, but for the sake of those eternal truths that are the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Year: 1960