Radio Script #63

Little Talks On Common Things
April 9, 1950

This is the great, sacred day of the Christian year. I hope most of you have been to church today; but, if you have not, you have perhaps listened to the glorious Easter music and heard a stirring Easter message on the radio. Yet there are some interesting things about Easter that are not familiar to many people.

First of all, though Christianity gives Easter its best and most profound meaning, certain fundamental ideas and ideals told in the Easter message are found in many of the world’s religions. Easter, more than any other festival of the church, contains ideas and truths that go back to the dimmest records of man’s history conceptions that have come down to us from far-away prehistoric man.

Before it can come to life as a plant, the seed must be buried in the earth. Before it can soar aloft on its brilliant 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 once said: “Unless a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it d:les, it brings forth much fruit.”  Thus Christ summed up the strange truth so hard for us to understand, the truth that life is ever dependent upon death.

A multitude of grains are gathered together and die under the grinding stone, and out of this death comes bread, the staff of life. Then that bread is buried in the human body that it may live and grow. Then that body itself returns to the earth, where its chemicals give life once more to ‘the buried seed. That is the great cycle of life. Without death it cannot continue.

Very few people, even educated people, think with abstract ideas. Only when the great abstractions are turned into concrete images do we comprehend them at all. And the more primitive, the less cultured, a people, tlle more colorful those symbols are sure to be. That is the way myths and legends are built up into dramatic rituals and the beautiful symbols of cultured art.

Many people think a myth is just a made-up yarn of fiction. Not so. A myth is much more than that. It is an attempt of primitive man to explain some strange phenomenon of nature, like thunder, or growing plants, or recurrent floods, or the last great mystery of death.

The oldest myths behind the great central truth of the Easter story concern our favorite symbol of Easter, the egg. Just as it is the first memory of Easter that most of us carry from our own childhood, so it takes humanity back to the oldest known civilizations on earth, Egypt, Mesapotamia, and India.

In Egypt the God Geb produced a mighty egg, from which the whole universe was born. Out of this egg came the phoenix, the fabulous bird which was the symbol of the sun. In the myth the phoenix died by setting fire to its own nest and burning itself to ashes. In those ashes was an egg from which the phoenix hatched again. The Hindu and Mesapotamian stories are similar.

Now the point is that the human mind is of the same essential nature in all times and places. Hidden in its unconscious depths are the profound truths of God, and those truths find expression in symbols that are remarkably alike in all parts of the earth.

Why should our modern Easter be associated with these ancient myths?

Because there is an obvious parallel between the rising of Christ from death and the rising of the universe from the original darkness of chaos. Between the phoenix myth and our Easter there is an even more striking parallel. Both emphasize the profound truth that out of sacrifice and seeming defeat come victory and life. The phoenix rises from the ashes, Jesus from the tomb.

It is no accident that Easter annually comes near the vernal equinox.

It is not a fixed date, like Christmas, because in ancient times it was associated with the lunar as well .as the solar calendar, with the moon as well as the sun. Hence the date of Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the 21st of March, the date of the spring equinox.

Long before the time of historical records, the ancient legends assure us that the quarter of the sun’s journey which lies between the spring equinox and the summer solstice has always been a season of religious rites connected with the sowing and the fruition of crops. Not only is there striking similarity between seed and living plant on the one hand, and the entombed Jesus and the risen Christ on the other hand, but we are also reminded that Jesus likened himself to the vine and ordained that the blood of the cruShed grape Should be the sacramental symbol of his own blood in celebration of the Lord’s Supper. The fact that bread is made from ground corn and wine from crushed grapes has long been connected in religious symbolism with the idea that eternal life is the result of sacrifice — of life-giving death.

Do not misunderstand our meaning. We are not suggesting that the Christ story is a mere survival of old myths tacked on to the true history of a Galilean prophet. We are rather emphasizing the fact that Christ brought in definite, human historical manner the same divine truth that the old myths sought more feebly to explain. Christianity sees Christ as God in human form — the complete embodiment of the ideal pattern or divine law by which the universe and man are created and have meaning — in Short, the incarnation of what Christians for twenty centuries have called the Word of God.

If then the Word of God is the design in the mind of the Architect of the Universe, there is every reason to expect resemblances between the life of Christ and all the processes of nature that are found in the heavens, on the earth, in man himself. That is why Christ rose from the dead with the ascending sun and at the season when crops rise from the ground. For the works of the Creator are all of one piece. Behind Christ and the crops and the seasons and the inner workings of the human mind is one spirit, one rythro, one moving purpose, one God.

As the centuries roll by, numerous customs and folk-ways come to surround all the religious rites and festivals. Easter is no exception. Eggs have been a part of the Easter folk-ways for many centuries. Sometimes they are left white or brown, sometimes they are gaily dyed. In parts of Eastern Europe they are elaborately painted with crosses. In France children making their first confession on Holy Saturday take a present of eggs to the priest. In other countries children hunt for eggs in the garden. In our own national capital they· roll them on the White House lawn. Today, not only in America, but in Europe as well, candy eggs are prevalent.

Then there is the Easter bunny. He came to America long ago from Central and Western Europe. His origin is one of those peculiar twists of language, where one word that sounds like another confuses the first thing with the second. In many parts of Europe, even to this day, the last sheaf of grain taken at the harvest is called the hare, and its cutting is called “cutting the tail of the hare”. An Easter hare hunt — hunting rabbits, not grain sheaths — was observed in England from remote Anglo-Saxon times, and in Hungary and South Germany it has long been the custom for children to put an image of a rabbit in the basket prepared for the Easter eggs. There is little doubt that the rabbit became associated with eggs and growing grain because of the two meanings of the word hare.

Then there are Easter hot cross buns. In the time of Samuel Pepys, three hundred years ago, peddlers went through the London streets on Good Friday morning, crying:

“Hot cross buns, hot cross buns,

One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns;

Smoking hot, piping hot,

Just come out of the baker’s shop;

One a penny poker, two a penny tongs,

Three a penny fire-shovel, hot cross buns.”

These buns, or spiced rolls, with a cross originally indented on the top, now made of sugar frosting, were eaten by almost every inhabitant of England on Good Friday morning. The custom probably originated nearly 600 years ago when in 1361 at st. Albans Abbey one of the monks baked buns of this form as gifts for the poor.

At the time of Chaucer, about 1400, there were many beliefs about good luck and good health associated with hot cross buns. Unlike common bread, they were supposed to keep a long time without mold. They were grated into medicines, used as charms against shipwreck, for keeping rats out of the grain, and as good luck talismans,the way American negroes cherish a rabbit’s foot.

Easter has always been a time of rejoicing, and strange as it seems to us today, some of the playfulness and jollity that usually goes with rejoicing was once carried on in the church itself. At one time a kind of Easter game was played in the choir by the clergy. It may even have been played with eggs. In the records of Chester Cathedral in England is found this interesting account: “The bishop and dean took eggs into the cathedral and, at certain stages of the service, engaged in an egg-tossing match with the choristers.” In the course of time these games were withdrawn from the sanctuary and became popular egg-throwing and egg-rolling games on the village greens.

Several authorities maintain that it is an old Easter custom that accounts for the origin of pariSh houses, the sOCial halls that now adjoin so many churches of all faiths. An important festive event of Easter 500 years ago was the Easter Church Ale, a distribution and drinking of ale after the principal Easter service, the money thus derived being used for repairs to the church fabric. It is not hard to understand how these church ales degenerated into disorderly affairs, so that they had to be put out of the church itself. As-a result church houses were built or rented adjoining the church, and were equipped with kitchens and dishes. Some of those houses became taverns but the majority became the pariSh house or social hall for the church community.

Allover the united States, and in many parts of Europe, the Easter service is the occasion of popular services, held on some convenient hill. This is the outstanding Protestant contribution to Easter. It has no part in the historical liturgy of the church, but is a popular expression of the people.

Some deep seated instinct of devotion drives modern man out of his comfortable bed into the dim light of early morning to herald the risen Christ.

Whether or not you have been to church today, you cannot escape the mighty 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 life, but spiritual life. And this gift comes as the fruit of death. The passage from Good Friday to Easter Sunday is the passage from the gloom of death to the dawn of real life.

To admit that desperate clinging to one’s mortal life is a futility and an illusion seems complete violation of common sense. It looks like the end of faith and hope alike. But what did the Master say? “Except a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it remains alone; but if it die, it brings forth much fruit.” “Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” The King of Kings is born in a manger. He dies 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 in a word, he brings real, eternal life to man.

Year: 1950