KEY POINTS:
As Easter approaches it is inevitable that the perennial argument over shop trading hours should be raked over again.
But what amuses me most about the whole Easter business is that this festival survives at all as a public holiday. After all, we live in a thoroughly secular
society in an age which, many people insist, is the post-Christian era.
There are generations of Kiwis for whom Easter is simply a time to scoff Easter eggs and chocolate rabbits and hot cross buns and take four days off work _ the longest long weekend in the year.
That in itself is ironic, and perhaps indicative of the degree of hypocrisy which abides in our society: that an essentially Christian holiday is still observed by downing tools in a nation obsessed with material gain and in which God is seen at worst to be dead and at best to be irrelevant.
It would be much more honest for the powers that be, among whom are more than enough atheists, agnostics and secular humanists, to do away with the Easter holiday altogether and leave it to us Christians to make our own arrangements on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
None, of course, has either the gumption or the guts, so we continue to argue over whether shops should be allowed to open on those formerly sacred days.
The opening salvoes of this year's debate appeared on this page on Tuesday. One, by that pragmatic Newmarket mouthpiece, Cameron Brewer, made eminent sense.
The other came from Paul Moon, a professor of history at the Auckland University of Technology.
At first I wondered why a professor of history would enter the shopping debate, but it soon became clear that Dr Moon's argument was not about shopping but about Easter itself.
He reiterates the tired old argument that Easter (like Christmas) isn't really a Christian festival at all, that it is simply an adaptation of the ancient European fertility rites of Eostre.
But then he goes further: "Neither is there any injunction in the Bible for Christians to celebrate the birth, or death and resurrection of Christ," he writes. "These were later innovations adopted by conniving church politicians to help win over converts.
"So although the New Testament requires Christians to keep separate from infidels, some church leaders in the first millennium saw adopting pagan ceremonies and rites as making good strategic sense, and consequently averted their gaze from such biblical prohibitions."
Even if all that were true, and it isn't, my question is: what does it matter? The Bible might have nothing to say about the celebration of the death and resurrection of the Messiah, but then it has nothing to say about how we plan and conduct our church services, marriages and funerals or run our charitable enterprises, either.
Dr Moon's is a fatuous argument, and what makes it worse is the assumption that Easter was developed by "conniving church politicians to win over converts".
It would not, perhaps, occur to Dr Moon that Easter developed out of a genuine and heartfelt desire on the part of Christians to celebrate annually the culmination of the greatest series of events in the history of mankind, the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
These events, ironically enough, were considered so significant that they split history into two distinct periods.
As for the New Testament requiring Christians to remain separate from infidels, I cannot find the word infidel in any recognised translation of that book.
What we Christians are enjoined to do is keep ourselves separate from sin, but if we were to keep ourselves separate from infidels, then every missionary who ever lived would have been in breech of the scriptures.
Once again I ask: what does it matter? Every great movement from time to time adapts itself to the society in which it operates, and Christianity is no exception.
For those of us alive today, as it has been for Christians for the past 350 years, Easter is Easter, and for those of us who see our Christianity as being what we are, rather than what we do or say, the opportunity each year to celebrate the seminal event in the creation of our religion is entirely valid, irrespective of its history.
Dr Moon makes one excellent point, however, when he observes that while some churches still vigorously defend Easter, for which there is no scriptural licence, "they long ago threw in the towel when it came to the one day that both the Old and New Testaments required be kept sacred: the Sabbath".
Touche, Dr Moon. And all the more reason for us Christians to let the worldly have their way with Easter, and just do our own thing.
