2020 Note: In the wake of the Corona virus pandemic, we are approaching the central holidays of Passover, Holy Week, Easter, and Ramadan (which comes unusually early this year) at a time when we are not able to commemorate them and worship with our faith communities as we usually do. I hope, for Latter-day Saints especially and for Christians more generally, that the materials I provide on this blog might be particularly useful resources for individuals and families to turn more intensely to scriptures, music, prayer, and family traditions as a way of finding greater peace and hope in these uncertain time.
Wishing love, blessings, and especially health to all this season
Eric Huntsman, Lent 2020
See also my 2011 LDS Living article, "Preparing For Easter: Ideas for Celebrating."
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| Carl Bloch, He Is Risen |
Given that
Easter is actually the more important holiday theologically-speaking, I am surprised
that it receives so much less attention than Christmas. While we spend the whole month of December—and
often even more—decorating for Christmas, shopping, and listening to Christmas
music, far less preparation seems to go into our celebration of Easter.
As all
holidays—religious and national—become increasingly more commercialized, it
seems more incumbent than ever for families and individuals to make an effort
to have them serve better as teaching and commemorative opportunities.
Many of our
initial efforts to make holidays more special were initially driven by the
desire to use them to teach our children principles of the gospel and focus
them more clearly on Jesus Christ. But
as we have done so, we have found that they have blessed our lives as
well. Sometimes using music, decorations,
or other holiday customs with these purposes in mind has reinforced our faith
in the very things that we are trying to teach Rachel and Samuel
.
Using our
more familiar and established Christmas traditions as a guide, in recent years
we have adapted them for Easter. We have
tried to decorate a bit more for Easter and have developed the family tradition
of using the week before Easter to focus us more on the events leading up to the
death and resurrection of Jesus. Ideas
for this revolve mostly on using the scriptural accounts of the Savior’s last
days as the material for our personal and family scripture study, but they also
include trying to listen to and sing more music fit for the season.
Easter Decorations and Customs
Admittedly
Easter does not enjoy the repertoire of holiday decorations that Christmas
does, and many of the more common decorations have more to do with eggs and
bunnies than they do with the dying and rising Lord. We have found that not only symbols of spring
and new life, such as flowers and plants, but even fun decorations, such as
Easter eggs and the occasional rabbit, can still create a feeling of joy in and
around our home. As much as a Utah spring will allow, I clean up the yard and
flower beds a couple of weeks before Easter, and we have planted plenty of
early blooming flowers such as daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and primroses.
A few
traditional Easter lilies and some other flowering plants in the living room helps
sets Easter week apart as something different just as a Christmas tree and
evergreens do in December But we have
also found that putting pictures of scenes from Jesus’ final week—the triumphal
entry, the Last Supper, Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the
crucifixion, and the empty tomb—provide visual reminders of what the week is
about and give us opportunities to talk to the children about what we are
celebrating.
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| Our "Easter crèche" |
Along those
lines, we also have a small statuette of Jesus praying, a lovely olive wood
Last Supper scene from Bethlehem, and, perhaps most unusually, an “Easter crèche.” Our Nativity scene plays such an important
role at Christmas-time, that we were thrilled when we found a combined Palm Sunday
and Garden Tomb scene by Fontantini, the same maker as our Christmas scene.
Celebrating a
modified form of Advent has also become an important part of our Christmas
season. Not just on the four Sundays of
Advent but also on each evening of December leading up to Christmas our family
gathers around our Advent wreath to hold a short Christmas devotional (see
below). My son, who struggles with some
of the challenges of autism, loves this tradition, so recently I decided to
come up with something similar—an Easter wreath, if you will. A bright, flowery
seasonal wreath, it sits on our living room coffee table and sports three
candles: a purple one for the kingly portion of Holy Week, a red one for the
priestly portion, and a white candle for Easter Sunday.
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| First attempt at a Lazarakia |
Finally, in
addition to the usual decorating of Easter eggs, we have adopted some other traditional
customs, such as making Lazarakia bread on the Saturday before Palm Sunday and
hot cross buns on Good Friday. It is fun
to bake together, and, in the process, talk about what the treats represent.
Daily Easter Devotionals
We have for
some time had the tradition of holding daily Christmas devotionals each day in
December leading up to Christmas. Gathering
each evening for a Christmas story, a scripture, and a carol has become a
treasured Yuletide custom, one that
helps us keep Christ the focus ot that season. I soon realized that we could do something similar
for Easter, at least for one week.
I first came
up with the idea of putting together a reading schedule for my ward when I was
a young bishop. Preparing it became the
genesis of an annual study of the last days of the Savior’s life, which served
as the genesis of my published treatment of the Passion Narratives (see God So Loved the World, 2–3). That book hoped to serve as a resource not
only for individual study but also as the source of ideas for family
devotionals.
So while I
try to read and study all the gospels’ accounts of the Savior’s final days in
the week before Easter, each evening during that week our family gathers around
our “Easter wreath,” reviews the events of that day of the Savior’s life, reads
one or two representative passages from the gospels, sings a song, and has
family prayer.
For those who might be interested in holding similar devotionals themselves, I have made blog posts for the days leading up to Easter on my Latter-day Saint Seasonal Materials blog. The ordering of events are done according to a working chronology that I have produced that looks at the sequence of events in the New Testament Gospels, which also takes into account the traditional liturgical observances of these events:
-
-
-
Palm Sunday: The Triumphal Entry; the Cleansing of the
Temple
-
Monday: The Marcan Cleansing of the Temple; Teachings in the
Temple
-
Tuesday: More Teachings in the Temple; the Olivet Discourse
- "Spy" Wednesday: The Anointing in Mark and Matthew; Judas agrees to betray Jesus
- Holy or "Maundy" Thursday: The Last Supper; Farewell Discourses;
Gethsemane; Before the Jewish Authorities
-
Good Friday: Jesus in the Hands of the Romans; the
Crucifixion; the Burial
-
Saturday: Soldiers Guard the Tomb; Jesus in the Spirit World
- Easter Sunday: The Resurrection
For more in-dept study, I have also gathered all of the gospel accounts into one convenient document, which has been formatted in a "reader's edition" and organized day-by-day: http://erichuntsman.com/documents/HolyWeekReadings.pdf
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| In the tradition of the medieval verdant
cross. Often the cross was green in stained glass windows, and
sometimes paintings depicted it sprouting leaves, flowers, and even
fruit. The idea was that the dead tree of cursing (the instrument of
Jesus' death) became a new Tree of Life (the instrument of our salvation
and resurrection). |
Passion and Easter Music
Just as
Christmas music adds to the spirit of that season, so does appropriate music
add to mood of Holy Week. In God So Loved the World, I selected hymns
that went along with the topics and moods of each day. On the focal days—Thursday through Sunday, I
also tried to identify music to listen to from great composers and arrangers
such as Bach, Handel, Cundick, and Wilberg.
Since some of
this musical literature is not as familiar to many Latter-day Saints, in 2011 I
interviewed Craig Jessop, former music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,
and Andrew Unsworth, one of the Tabernacle organists, for a special Easter program for the Mormon Channel. They
reviewed the tradition of Passion and Easter music and gave suggestions for
listening that will add to the season.
While much of
this traditional music is solemn and even sad, I have found that listening to
this reflective music, just like reading the serious gospels texts leading up
to the suffering and death of Jesus, only adds to the joy of Easter morning,
providing not just a contrast but also stressing what a victory it really was.
Along those lines, in 2014 the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has released a 5-track CD for Easter, beginning with "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and then ending with 4 glorious tracks celebrating the resurrection.
A few more photos of Holy Week at the Huntsmans' 2014.
Easter Quick Links
Preliminary Materials
The Passion Week and the Resurrection
