Dear Editor,
Every year at this time, our anti-Christian friends take the opportunity to share with us what Easter means to them. Please allow me to share with them what Easter means to us Christians.
Easter is the principal feast of the ecclesiastical year commemorating the slaying of the true Lamb of God, the resurrection of Christ, the foundation stone on which the Christian faith is built and the birth of the Christian Church.
Easter is the connecting link between the Old and New Testament, the connection between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Eucharistic worship and the relationship between the type and the reality.
Christ's death and resurrection has its types and figures in the Old Law, particularly the Paschal Lamb which was eaten on the 14th day of Nissan. This Jewish feast was taken over into the Easter celebrations. St Paul in his first recorded Easter homily said: "Our Passover Lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed therefore let us celebrate the feast" (1Cor 5:7-8)
The Easter liturgy sings of the passing of Israel through the Red Sea, the Paschal Lamb, the column of fire etc. So the Old Testament era was not an end in itself but a prefiguring of Christianity. The key to understand Easter is to understand how salvation history evolved.
A James
alvalj@cwjamaica.com
What Easter means to Christians
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Every year at this time, our anti-Christian friends take the opportunity to share with us what Easter means to them. Please allow me to share with them what Easter means to us Christians.
Easter is the principal feast of the ecclesiastical year commemorating the slaying of the true Lamb of God, the resurrection of Christ, the foundation stone on which the Christian faith is built and the birth of the Christian Church.
Easter is the connecting link between the Old and New Testament, the connection between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Eucharistic worship and the relationship between the type and the reality.
Christ's death and resurrection has its types and figures in the Old Law, particularly the Paschal Lamb which was eaten on the 14th day of Nissan. This Jewish feast was taken over into the Easter celebrations. St Paul in his first recorded Easter homily said: "Our Passover Lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed therefore let us celebrate the feast" (1Cor 5:7-8)
The Easter liturgy sings of the passing of Israel through the Red Sea, the Paschal Lamb, the column of fire etc. So the Old Testament era was not an end in itself but a prefiguring of Christianity. The key to understand Easter is to understand how salvation history evolved.
A James
alvalj@cwjamaica.com
What Easter means to Christians
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