The Case For Egg Hunts

Are pastels and Easter baskets a distraction? Is an egg hunt fitting for Resurrection Sunday?

This year, our church is having an egg hunt in between services on Easter morning. And as the announcement for this event went out to the church, it came to my attention that a number of people considered egg hunts inappropriate for after church on a Sunday morning. I realized I should have anticipated that more, especially with the commercialization of Easter bunnies and candy, which all seem so trite and plastic compared to the wonder of the bodily resurrection of the Son of God. As we come to terms with the fact that the new creation and the renewal of all things have begun in Jesus Christ, are pastels and Easter baskets a distraction? Is an egg hunt fitting for Resurrection Sunday?

These are certainly fair questions, and I wanted to give some rationale for my support of the event and why I think it fits squarely within the vision of CCB and (I hope) will be a blessing to our children. We wouldn’t let something like an egg hunt into our worship service, because the Lord has revealed what corporate worship properly includes (e.g., reading from his Word, singing, preaching, giving of tithes and offerings). In our tradition, the worship service begins with the call to worship and ends with the benediction. Between the two, we do not add elements of worship God has not authorized. But outside of that, we are free to do anything God's Word does not prohibit. With that basis established, we can consider three reasons for allowing this tradition.

Receive the Church’s Tradition

The first reason egg hunts are appropriate for our church is because they are part of the tradition of Christendom that has been passed down to us. The connection between eggs and Easter has roots in all three branches of the Church (Roman, Orthodox, and Protestant). In the PNW, we are in a culture with very little cultural heritage. We are a people who need more tradition, not less! Many of us feel that and long for more tradition to mark the seasons of every year, grounding us in the story of the gospel. Being a historically rooted church means we seek to retrieve the traditions of the past and reinvigorate them in the modern day, not discard them or invent new ones. 

In the Protestant church, the tradition goes back to Martin Luther himself, who, on Easter Sunday, would have the men in his church hide eggs for the women and children to find. It was to reflect the story of Mary Magdalene looking for Jesus when she came to the open tomb. My experience of Martin Luther is that he combined a fierce love for the gospel and the Word of God with a playful and exuberant spirit. An egg hunt matches that spirit, one I’d hope marks our community as well.

This article also highlights how in the Victorian period, these traditions began to move away from the church to the family as the English middle class became more prosperous. This is likely when Easter began to lose its religious significance. Taken together, this gives us reason to not relegate such traditions to the family but reclaim them for the church, keeping them close to the worship of the risen Savior on Easter Sunday.

Egg Hunts are Christian, not Pagan

Eggs themselves certainly are symbols of fertility and so have played a role in pagan culture. But here is a critical juncture: do we reflexively reject anything ever affiliated with paganism, or do we seek to discern and reclaim what properly belongs to Christians? Let me make two arguments for option two. 

Since God is creator of all, all culture can be transformed to bring glory to God

First, the pagans originally stole our symbols, not the other way around. God made this world, and so all the symbols of creation originally belong to him and therefore are a natural fit for the Christian. For example, pagan cultures usually emphasize the cyclical pattern of nature—death and rebirth—which can be symbolized by an egg. But that is very different from the Christian story of death and resurrection, which is a one-time event, not an eternal cycle. Does this mean that the pagans get to call all the symbolism from nature and the blooming flowers of spring theirs? Shouldn’t we say that the new life of spring was woven into creation by God, not as a sign of the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth but as a sign of the resurrection of the Son of God? Jesus himself used that image in his teaching to the Greeks at the Passover feast the day before his crucifixion. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Pagan fertility rites are the counterfeit, not the original. The Lord of nature, Christ himself, who first invented the seasons and then in his incarnation fed the five thousand and calmed the storm with a word—he is the original. We are to be reborn, not through reincarnation or through joining the oneness of nature but by union with him. As he told Nicodemus, “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The symbol of rebirth in the egg belongs not to the pagan but to us. 

Therefore, second, the symbols co-opted by the pagans need to be reclaimed by the Christians. We know this about Christmas trees, but even the name “Easter” comes from the old English for East and is associated with the pagan god of spring, Eastre. Christianity is about Christ claiming pagan lands and cultures for himself. Early Christians would transform pagan temples into churches. We take tools like the internet and use them to propagate the gospel. Human languages are often filled with pagan words and ideas. But since God is creator of all, all culture can be transformed to bring glory to God. Christians have been doing this throughout history. The end of the Bible envisions all the diverse cultures of the world bringing their glory into the kingdom of God (Rev. 21:24-26). Of course, there are some pagan symbols that a Christian would never co-opt (e.g., a swastika), but that is a wisdom issue and so, for the renewed heart in Christ, “all things are lawful” if they are used in love for God and neighbor. That means scores of human artifacts (even some previously used by pagans) will be offered to Christ in love by God’s people.

And this really leads to my final point about egg hunts.

Build Christian Culture

I can understand how someone might think that having an egg hunt on Easter waters down the message and takes the focus off of Christ. My concern with this way of thinking is that it can tend to be overly pietistic. What I mean by that is that we think that “taking Easter seriously” only looks like praying, listening to a sermon, reading the Bible, or singing a hymn. Certainly, all of these things are essential for honoring Christ on Resurrection Sunday. But pietism often divorces these spiritual activities from the physical, cultural celebrations of the rest of life. If we are building a Christian culture, we shouldn’t be stripping down our Easter celebrations but creatively expanding them in a dozen ways. 

Let there be chocolate and eggs and presents and singing and hams and games and drinks and laughter. The new creation has begun, and we have a share in it.

Christmas has far more tradition attached to it than Easter does, so Easter needs some bolstering. The best way for children to know what Easter is about is to have loud singing in the service, a strong sermon declaring the risen Christ, and parents talking theology all afternoon around a great feast. Let there be chocolate and eggs and presents and singing and hams and games and drinks and laughter. The new creation has begun, and we have a share in it. It’s like in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the long winter has ended and all the animals start feasting and celebrating. Our church and homes on Easter should feel like that. I want my children to think that the Lord’s Day is the best day of the week and Easter the best Lord’s Day of the year. 

I understand that we can do all these festive things on our own at home, but people need to learn that kind of culture from the church. Cultural traditions are powerful, but this only means that we should keep our traditions close to and anchored by a robust declaration of the truth. Our church’s egg hunt will certainly do that; the kids will know that Jesus is the risen Lord (not the Easter bunny). Especially in a place like the PNW, with barely any spiritual heritage, we need more Christian traditions, not less. I have developed traditions like riddle-making at Christmas (because the Incarnation is the great mystery). Bellingham and Whatcom County need a community overflowing with these kinds of Christian traditions. Building a city with rich traditions is near to the heart of our mission.

All this to say, egg hunts are certainly a third-tier topic in our church, meaning even our leaders may have differing views on them. But I wanted our community to know that everything we do is informed by our theology and a vision for Christ’s kingdom being built on earth. And that’s true even for something as simple as children looking for eggs on Easter morning.