Bounded In An Eggshell

Easter is the most counter-programmed Christian holiday. Having Christmas at the Winter Solstice sort of makes sense because "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" and the incarnation makes sense as the dawning of the promise of redemption. Easter, on the other hand, is a pagan celebration of Spring birth recast as a celebration of Divine sacrifice.

This rich palimpsest of symbolism would have been taken some planning if it had not been for the fact that God routinely calculates pi to infinite places and doesn't recognise the concept of a challenge. Easter is more or less the vernal equinox because Jesus died at the Jewish Passover, and presumably Jesus died at Passover because at the original, Mosaic passover the first born (of Israel) were sacrificed that the chosen people might go free. God, with the sensibility of a fine poet, juggled ideas of sacrifice, freedom and (re-)birth. Oh, and Cadbury's Creme Eggs.

Mention of creme eggs is not flippant. If God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent etc. then He didn't simply construct one perfect associative structure and then turn in for a couple of millenia to see how the whole thing turned out. God foresaw (or, more properly, saw) that The Great Escape and The Sound of Music would end up being associated with Christmas, and He also saw that eggs of chocolate would be eaten at Easter.

Moreover, it is a theological nonsense to suggest that God planned all the imagery of Easter up to Easter Sunday, A.D. 30-odd and then left the rest to be debased by humanity. The popular image may be of a creator god who keeps coming back to His creation only to discover that his hooligan offspring have messed it up again, but that isn't a view that squares easily with the concept of an omniscient or omnipotent deity. Pretty much the only reasonable interpretation of the course of history is that at the point God said "Let There Be Light" He also willed the sacrifice of Christ and that Cadbury's creme eggs would get mysteriously smaller from invention to A.D. 2009 and beyond. He also saw that His own raising from the dead would become inextricably connected with an Irish rebellion of 1916.

The presence of God is often felt on mountainsides and barren coasts, but omnipresence is also fortuitously manifest in Lindt bunnies. You just have to know how to look.