Easter
Seasons Materials
"There would be no Christmas if there had
not been Easter. The babe Jesus of Bethlehem would be but
another baby without the redeeming Christ of Gethsemane and
Calvary, and the triumphant fact of the Resurrection." (Gordon
B. Hinckley, Ensign, Ensign,
Dec. 2000, 2).
| Welcome to my Easter Season Page! I hope
that you will enjoy our journey through the Savior's
last week as we analyze the events and reflect upon
their meaning together. Contents
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2011
Introduction
After many years of studying, writing, and sharing my thoughts on Easter Week, this year I had the opportunity to publish a book-length study of the Passion and Resurrection Narratives. If you are interested in my most recent work on the subject, I hope that you will take a look at God So Loved the World: The Final Days of the Savior's Life (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2011).
Copyright and other Intellectual Property considerations prevent me from sharing the expanded text and art from this publication on the web, but I have updated the reading schedule for each day from Palm Sunday to Easter morning on my original Reflections of the Savior's Final Week web site. In addition, I would like to share a conversation, Preparing for Easter, which I had on the Mormon Channel with my friend and colleague, Camille Fronk Olson, about ideas that individuals and families can consider for celebrating Easter.
However you choose to celebrate Easter this year, I hope that it is thoughtful, reflective, and joyous season for all of you.
Eric Huntsman, Holy Week 2011
2008
Introduction
I am convinced that if it were not for
commercial and cultural factors, Easter would be more important
to us than Christmas. As President Hinckley noted in the quote
above, Christmas is only significant because of the miracle of
Jesus’ atoning sacrifice and his glorious resurrection.
The term "Easter" only appears once in the King James Bible,
at Acts 12:4, where it is better translated as "Passover." In
fact, the scriptures nowhere enjoin us to celebrate the birth,
death, or resurrection of Jesus as holidays per se, although we
are commanded to remember him through ordinances and in our own
testimonies. In that sense the days on which we remember and
celebrate Christmas and Easter are not as important as the
events themselves. Indeed, for Christians every day should be
Christmas. Likewise, we remember and honor the suffering and
death of Jesus every week with the sacrament, and the fact that
we celebrate the sabbath on the first day of the week, the
Lord’s Day, means that for us every Sunday is Easter!
With Palm Sunday, the week before Easter, much of the
Christian world enters into a period of reflection and,
ultimately, celebration known as "Holy Week." Each of the events
chronicled in this last week cast light on Jesus’ true nature as
the Son of God, and reviewing them deepens the faith of
believers in his matchless love. While the LDS community does
not formally observe Holy Week, the period from Palm Sunday to
Easter morning present a wonderful opportunity for believers to
use the scriptures to reflect upon the last days of our Lord’s
earthly ministry.
In the bustle of day-to-day life, it is useful to employ
holidays to refocus our attention and our thoughts and, most of
all, celebrate together and with friends of other faiths the
events we all value. For some years now, my family and I have
benefited spiritually by using the gospel accounts of the
Savior’s last week as the focus of our family and personal
scripture study. It is a great way to truly celebrate Easter!
Accordingly, I am making these materials available to my
students and other interested parties, revised and expanded from
previous years as this little booklet entitled Easter
Meditations: Readings, a Chronology, Reflections, and Images of
the Savior’s Last Days and Hours.
Eric Huntsman, Holy Week, 2008
2009
Introduction
Dear
Family and Friends,
This note
is a forewarning of what many of you have come to expect
from me at this time of year: a succession of posts
reflecting on the Savior’s last week as my Easter gift. In
the past these have become a bit lengthy, so I am going to
do something a bit different this year. Tomorrow I will
send out a preliminary post with links to each of the days
of Holy Week. If
you do not want to receive further messages from me after
that, simply send me a reply asking me to take you off the
seasonal distribution list.
For those who elect to
stay on the list, I will send out much shorter daily
messages, simply noting the events with a list of the gospel
passages that they are based upon with links to my Easter
website where you can go for more extensive analysis,
reflection, and art.
Some of
you are used to my penchant for spiritual autobiography, but
for those who are new to my list, or for veterans who cannot
quite remember how I got into all this, let me give a brief
history of my love for the Easter holidays.
I grew up
singing in my mother’s ward choirs, year after year, and
even before the scriptures took the most prominent place in
my understanding of the Savior and his mission, I was
touched by sacred music that recounted the events and rent
my heart.
I fell in
love with the Bible when I was in high school. Moving to
Tennessee and being immersed in the Baptist Bible belt
probably helped. Perhaps that is where I picked up a bit of
my “evangelical” flair. I did not always agree with my
Protestant friends in details of doctrine, but I was always
moved by their commitment and love of Jesus Christ. Later
as I become more of a student of history, I became more
“high church” in sentiment as I became attracted to the
liturgical patterns of the older, more traditional Christian
communities. I came to appreciate their use of the
calendar, seasons, and scriptural events as teaching tools.
All the while I was gaining a greater witness of and a
deeper commitment to the restored gospel, and my LDS
mission, my deepening love of temple worship, and a growing
interest in the scriptures as an avocation brought me again
and again to the focal message of the gospel: the good news
that Jesus Christ has made salvation possible through his
salvific suffering, death, and resurrection (see 3 Nephi
27:13–15) and that the restoration had brought a new level
of meaning and authority to that message.
When I was
serving as an LDS bishop, I came up with a Easter week
reading schedule for my ward, hoping to help better prepare
myself and the ward members for the commemoration of the
Lord’s sacrifice and resurrection. It was a fairly simple
affair and arose from the kind of gospel harmonization that
I now tend to avoid in my studies. Still, it focused me on
the pivotal events of the Savior’s last week and gradually
became an important part of my personal and family scripture
study.
Then in
2000 I read a Christmas message from then-President Hinckley
that changed the way I looked at Easter:
"There
would be no Christmas if there had not been Easter. The babe
Jesus of Bethlehem would be but another baby without the
redeeming Christ of Gethsemane and Calvary, and the
triumphant fact of the Resurrection." (Gordon B. Hinckley,
Ensign,
Dec. 2000, 2)
I have
always loved Christmas and its attendant celebrations.
Suddenly I realized that my observance of Easter was rather
pale by comparison, and I threw myself into trying to make
it a similarly meaningful holiday for me and my family.
About this time my background in Classical Studies was
drawing me closer and closer to my eventual move from
Classics to Religious Education here at BYU. My chairman at
the time had me teach a Greek class on the Pauline epistles
that whetted my appetite, but it was when I taught a second
NT Greek course, this time on the writings of John that my
interest became a love affair. I devoured all the NT
scholarship I could find and became, at that time,
particularly attracted to the works of Father Raymond Brown,
an ordained Roman Catholic priest who also served as the
president of the Society of Biblical Literature. I caught a
vision of what I aspire to be someday myself: both a
Christian and, to some extent, a scholar.
In the
end, however, my interest was not so much textual and
scholarly as it was a matter of the heart. My friend Craig
Jessop once had me explicate a piece
Ave Verum Corpus
for the Choir before we began to rehearse it. It was a
spur-of-the-moment thing, but as I talked about the image of
Mary holding her son’s body on her lap I grew quite
emotional. Craig kindly said afterwards, “Eric has a
passion for the Passion.” That is something, along with
being a good husband and father, that I want to be
remembered for, if for nothing else.
Since that
time my Easter posts have grown and grown. As some of you
know, a much-simplified version of them appeared in this
month’s Ensign
as a short (and necessarily edited) article entitled
“Reflections on the Savior’s Last Week.” Available on
my website this next week will be a much more involved
analysis of the events of the Last Week together with some
personal reflections and devotional materials. Much of the
material will be from last year’s posts, but I hope to
refine, at times correct, and, when moved, expand my earlier
studies, and I want to share them with you, my friends, as
you may have time and may find them useful.
Warmly,
Eric, Easter Season 2009
2010 Introduction
Dear Friends and Family,
Easter is around the corner, which means, as usual, a flood of holiday e-junkmail from Eric. I may joke about that, but I hope that most of you understand that this is, in fact, a labor of love for me. I love the story of our Lord’s passion and resurrection, and in a day and culture where these events are often lost, it means a lot to me to find a way to recall and reflect on them.
So, as usual, please let me know if you do notwant to be on my holiday distribution list this year. Otherwise, please check the spam filters on your email programs and make sure that eric_huntsman@byu.edu is listed as a “safe” address. I always blind cc my messages, so that others cannot use your email addresses for their own spam, but some programs automatically filter out emails that have long lists of email addresses, especially when they are hidden. (I am sending this out in many small chunks to avoid this, but as the week goes, on I will use just a few large lists).
After this message, I will send out my introductory post, which addresses some technical issues about chronology. Tomorrow I will send out two posts in advance: The Anointing at Bethany for Saturday and The Triumphal Entry for Palm Sunday. There will be a message a day after that through Easter Sunday.
I may try to send out simpler, abbreviated posts, but they will have links to my full Holy Week study on my Easter website. In case you would like those at a glance, here are the links:
Preliminaries
The Passion Week and the Resurrection
- 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
- Wednesday: The Anointing in Mark and Matthew; Judas agrees to betray Jesus
- 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: Jesus in the Spirit World
- Easter Sunday: The Resurrection
A simpler, more straightforward, and much shorter version of this study appeared in last year’s April Ensign as “Reflections on the Savior’s Last Week.”
I hope you enjoy these as we celebrate together the most important events ever,
Eric
Holy Week, 2010
Challenge: How can my family make Easter as
important as Christmas this year? Other
Easter links
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