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