Easter and chocolate – 15 April 2016

The editorial in the latest Consumer magazine begins with this sentence: By the time you read this, Easter will be a distant guilt trip away.  People who read the Guardian Weekly are probably familiar with the irascible old bloke, Professor Pedanticus, who has a melt-down with every logical fallacy he encounters, or non sequitur.  There is something of the Pedanticus in me, on reading that sentence:  By the time you read this, Easter will be a distant guilt trip away.

Everything is wrong with that statement.  Easter is the high festival of Christian faith.  Easter celebrates the storming of the gates of hell by humility and goodness.  It announces that evil and death do not have the final word.  It proclaims life.  Easter forms and directs our faith and life, day by day, and from here to eternity.  It is never distant.

By distant guilt trip, says this writer Sue Chetwin, she means that we are slowly recovering from our over indulgence in chocolate eggs and chocolate easter bunnies.   Well, some may be.  Others of us may not have wallowed in chocolate to celebrate Easter.  And yet others, who did, are not yet on the road to recovery.  At another level of this – because secularism too has its levels of meaning – she says the real problem with chocolate is not so much sugar, as palm oil, a major ingredient.  So this is now an issue of justice.  The rich world’s hunger for palm oil in all manner of products is destroying ancient rain forests, and so the habitats of many animal species.  It is also feeding widespread political and commercial corruption.  I am sure she is right.  But in the process she has managed to turn Easter from the most sublime moment in Christian truth, to that most tedious of modern clichés, a guilt trip.  In cliché-land that’s right up there these days with adrenalin rush and caffeine fix.

Now of course, I am not being kind here to Ms Chetwin who is simply doing her job.  I am wanting to talk sensibly about Easter.  It is a mistake to expect the secular culture to know or appreciate what we greet and celebrate.  Indeed it seems, there is now a growing anger if “religion” is brought into the secular encounter with easter at all.  Secularism defaults to sentimentalism, to easter bunnies and wicked chocolate – and ploys for keeping your children entertained and not bored. 

In the church’s earliest years, Easter was the reinterpretation of the Jewish Seder, the Passover.  In the most ancient liturgical words we have, Jesus shared a meal with his followers, he gave new meaning to the ritual meal of the Jews, he was then arrested and he died at the hands of the Romans.  On the third day the tomb was empty and the lives of his followers radically transformed.  He has become the Giver and Renewer of Life, making – as the Hebrew prophet said long ago – all things new.  His presence makes possible our contemplative prayer, and all the light we may see in darkness.  Distant guilt trip…?  How sad to be so far from the point.