When I went home for Easter this year I realised that I would have really minded missing out on the special celebration of Easter, had I not spent it in my fairly ‘traditional’ Anglican church. Here in York I attend a Pentecostal church, which has very different traditions and doesn’t like to make a particular ‘fuss’ over Christmas or Easter. I originally assumed that this was merely a difference in emphasis, so I was rather surprised last year to discover that the Pentecostal church didn’t especially celebrate Pentecost either! Thinking about how much I personally valued celebrating Easter, made me wonder whether it was pure nostalgia or if there was actually some merit in observing the festivals of the church in the same way each year.

Although some might say that ‘doing the same thing’ causes it to lose meaning and become mindless repetition, I would argue that there must be some value in keeping Christian festivals; otherwise why would God, in the Old Testament, have designated so many feasts for his people to keep? To take just one example, in Exodus 12:24–27, it is written,

Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the LORD will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, “What does this ceremony mean to you?” then tell them, “It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.”

The Passover was to be kept by the Jewish people in order to remember how God had rescued them at the time of the Exodus. In terms of thinking about celebrating Easter, it is worth pointing out that it is no accident that our Holy Week is during the seven days of the Jewish Feast of Unleavened bread. The giving of the regulations for the Passover undeniably looked forward to Christ. The Passover lamb which was killed by each household and its blood smeared over the doorposts, (causing the angel of death to ‘pass over’ the Hebrew homes when he killed the first-born of all the Egyptians) is a vivid picture of how the blood of Christ, shed for us, saves us from the death penalty that our sins deserve. The very details given about the Passover lamb point to Christ; it was to be a first-born male, spotless, without blemish and no bones were to be broken in its death.

At the Last Supper (which we celebrate on Maundy Thursday), Jesus gave further meaning to the keeping of the Passover by identifying the unleavened bread with his body and the wine with his blood. In 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 it says,

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood: do this whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me. For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

For this reason Christians celebrate the Eucharist, not only on Maundy Thursday (although the Last Supper is especially commemorated then in many churches) but also more frequently in communion services.

This is in some ways a very similar model to how the Jewish people kept Passover. Keeping the festival as God had ordained it, at the time of year that he had saved them from slavery in Egypt, prevented them from forgetting what God had done. Obviously the intention was not that they should completely forget this for the rest of the year, but that at least once each year they should be vividly reminded of it. However, if you doubt that they could really have forgotten such a miraculous deliverance even if they hadn’t been annually reminded of it, just look at Judges 3:7. “The Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD; they forgot the LORD their God and served the Baals and the Asherahs.” Just one generation after the death of Joshua, the whole nation had managed to forget their God and turn aside into idolatry. I had always rather looked down on the Israelites for this; surely they must have been incredibly stupid not to learn from their past? The history of their nation as recorded in the book of Judges is ridiculously repetitive — they forget God, serve other gods and sin; God gives them over into the hands of their enemies, they cry out to Him, He has mercy and rescues them, and they forget, turn aside and sin again. Now maybe you think that if God did something as dramatic now as the Israelites had witnessed then, you could never forget it or cease to be thankful for it. Well He has and does. God’s salvation of each one of us through the sacrifice of Christ for us, is the greatest miracle of all time, and one anyone can know in his or her life. It is, however, all too easy to forget this and yet still think that if God would do for us some particular thing we desire then we would always be thankful.

What shocked me into realising this was a conversation I recently had about healing in which I basically moaned about how unfair God appeared to be in giving it! In Acts 5:16, Luke states that all the sick brought to the apostles were healed, and the gospel writers never record Jesus refusing to heal someone. Yet now, although I may read of churches which have healing services (and presumably healings at least sometimes occur at them), many don’t even anoint the sick, and within my own experience no one has ever been healed as a result of prayer.

Shortly after this, I was reminded of last summer, when I was preparing to leave home within the week to work with Tear Fund in Nairobi and came down with an ear infection. The pain was so severe that I could not sleep for three nights, and was in no fit state to get equipment, make arrangements or pack. I spent the nights pleading with God to make me well enough to go, yet I was told at the doctors that I should expect to remain as bad for about a fortnight. Then, the day before I was to go, I woke feeling completely better. The doctor said that my ear canals were still as swollen as before, yet I was in no pain. Being of little faith, I still expected the plane journey to be agonising; but I didn’t even suffer discomfort. I can only conclude that God enabled me to join a team working in a country that I had hoped to learn a lot from — yet in less than a year I had so far forgotten the experience as to complain against him. I appear to have an even shorter memory span for God’s goodness than the Israelites whom I had dared to despise. I do not suppose that this is by any means the only example of me forgetting an instance of God’s great mercy to me. It has however made me reflect upon God’s wisdom in giving the Israelites feasts to remember what he had done for them.

Although the new festivals of the church are not ordained for us in Scripture, I feel that the keeping of them at a particular time of year should not be scorned. It might arguably be better to always remember everything that He has done all the time; but we are fallible. To be reminded each year of God’s greatest gift to us, his Son, is certainly far better than to risk forgetting altogether.

Fiona Worthy