It’s Easter Sunday. For those of you who only know Easter as a day for bunnies and chocolate, I’ll try to explain origin of Easter.
It started with the Jews. They were all the time sacrificing bulls and lambs to God in order to atone for their sins. It sounds barbaric, but there’s some logic to it. If you’ve done something wrong, like stole your neighbor’s plow, you ought to be held accountable. You know good and well you shouldn’t have taken his plow. When you feel guilty enough, or you get caught, you’d take a lamb to the High Priest to be sacrificed – the lamb died for your sins. It was a high price to pay back then, so it served as a deterrent for stealing as well as a way to relieve your guilt.
Unless you’re a psychopath, most humans will eventually feel guilt for hurting another person – maybe not until they’re on their deathbed, but sooner or later they’ll say, “I regret that I…” or “I wish I hadn’t…” If a person is forced to publically admit their crime and give up a lamb for what they’d done, they wouldn’t have to carry all that guilt on their shoulders for years. It’s genius, really. Instant justice so people could get on with their lives. Maybe they’d stop being jerks too.
Which brings me to Easter. The Jews, around 2,000 years ago, had gone through a lot of rulers who set bad examples, and they’d done a LOT of misbehaving. They worshipped other gods, sinister gods that wanted them to have sex with temple prostitutes or sacrifice their own children. I’m not saying all Jews went astray because there were always good people in the Bible and some (called prophets) tried to tell others how wrong these things were. Unfortunately, they usually got killed.