Just as early missionaries didn’t reject or receive the pagan holiday of Eostre but rather redeemed it for Jesus, we too seek to redeem the cultural practices we observe in the U.S. without letting them overshadow Jesus and his Resurrection, and without making us completely irrelevant or even antagonistic to culture and those weird Christians on the block, the ones everybody tries to avoid because they believe that being for Jesus also means being against fun.

Just as early missionaries didn’t reject or receive the pagan holiday of Eostre but rather redeemed it for Jesus, we too seek to redeem the cultural practices we observe in the U.S. without letting them overshadow Jesus and his Resurrection, and without making us completely irrelevant or even antagonistic to culture and those weird Christians on the block, the ones everybody tries to avoid because they believe that being for Jesus also means being against fun.

Easter is the biggest Sunday of the year for Christians—and rightfully so. It’s an occasion for us to celebrate the Resurrection, the victory of Jesus Christ over Satan, sin, and death.

It’s also when a few of the more “interesting” folks in the church, the kind who like to write end-times charts on ammo boxes in crayon, come out of the woods to rail against the day as a pagan holiday.

It’s most likely that the origins of Easter stem from early Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the British Isles during the first millennium who celebrated a spring festival in the month of April in honor of their goddess Eostre, who represented fertility and the arrival of spring, light, and the rising dawn.

When Christian missionaries first arrived in Britain from the Roman Empire during this time, they incorporated some of the pre-existing traditional festivities into the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which took place in the same season. Basically, since everyone had the day off and it was a fun time to celebrate, the Christians then were unsure exactly when Jesus rose from death and so they chose to add their celebrations to the day. Over the centuries, the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection overtook Eostre in popularity, although the name stuck as “Easter.”

Some Christians, rather than celebrate the fact that a day that was once devoted to the celebration of a pagan god and is now devoted to Jesus, wish to be the conscience police and go around telling everyone how they should stop having fun and celebrating because of the day’s origins. If someone has a conscience issue with celebrating the holiday, they should abstain, but to rail against kids eating candy and having fun sounds more like the religious types who murdered Jesus than the kids who hung out with him.

When it comes to cultural issues like this, we as Christians should view them through a simple rubric: reject, receive, or redeem? In this case, the early missionaries to the British Isles sought to redeem Easter rather than reject it or simply receive it. As a result, it became one of the centers of Christianity for many centuries and Eostre the goddess was all but forgotten.

On the other end of the spectrum, for most people in our culture, Easter is more synonymous with fluffy bunnies, brightly painted eggs, kids hopped up on chocolate and a great meal with family and friends.

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