Days are lengthening; the air is warming. The first signs of life begin to appear: buds on branches, daffodils in the garden, Easter eggs at the supermarket.
The absurdity of bunnies laying eggs (whether chocolate, plastic, or hard-boiled) and the familiar commercialization of another holy day may raise doubts about the timing of Easter. ‘It is unlikely that Jesus was born “in the bleak midwinter”. Did he really rise from the dead in the spring?’ But Jesus’s resurrection does indeed have more to do with the new life of spring than does his birth with the long nights of winter.
The Gospels tell us that Jesus’s supper with the twelve was a Passover meal. Jews from near and far had thronged Jerusalem to appear before the Lord for the first annual festival. They gathered to celebrate God’s salvation, their redemption from slavery in Egypt during Aviv, the first month of their year.
Jesus shares the bread and cups of wine with his apostles. He calls the bread his body and the wine his blood. Breaking body and shedding blood were steps in ‘cutting’ a covenant, as God had with Abraham and Israel, when he promised his people a special relationship of love and faithfulness (see Genesis 15 and Exodus 24.1–11). Now at Passover, Jesus cuts a new covenant with his people. Tonight, they eat bread and drink wine. Tomorrow, the Lamb will be sacrificed. The lifeblood of God’s Firstborn smeared on a beam of wood will rescue God’s people from death.
Passover is thanksgiving for new life, for the beginning of the seasons of a new year. The day after the Passover Sabbath, people bring the first sheaves of the barley harvest. The priest raises these first fruits and waves them before the Lord (Leviticus 23.9–14). They are an offering of thanks for the first evidence of God’s provision and an expression of hope that he will fulfil the rest of his promise.
The women who follow Jesus watch him being laid in the tomb, and then they rest on the Sabbath. The day after, the first of the week, they return to the tomb, only to discover that Jesus has been raised!
God has raised his own Firstborn, Paul will reflect later, as ‘the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep’. Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of a whole new creation. It is the first evidence of God’s power to give life to his people, an expression of hope that he will raise us too. Our mortal bodies will be sown like seeds in the earth, but, in the resurrection, we too will ‘sprout’ as glorious new bodies fit for eternal spirits (1 Corinthians 15).
Spring’s flowers bloom this week and fade the next. But it is at this time of year, two millennia ago, that God raised his Firstborn as the Firstfruits of the new creation. So we exult this day in the hope of the glory of God, for we too will be raised to live with him and die no more.
