Can Somebunny Explain This To Me?

 I can't figure out the Easter Bunny.

Santa, I get. He's magical, but there's some consistency with his magic. He has an established characterization, consistent practices, a long history, and generally what we say about Santa in front of children won't run counter to what they already know about Santa.

But the Easter Bunny? I have no idea. We were at an Easter egg hunt last week and there was a person in one of those anthropomorphic Easter Bunny costumes (Side note: do I capitalize Easter Bunny? Is that the name of the bunny?) and it got me thinking what's that bunny's deal? Are they trying to get us to believe that this is just some person in a bunny costume? 

I don't get it, but at least it's better than...

We wrote a note to the Easter bunny (I guess I'll leave that lower case...) asking for the bunny to hide the eggs that were in the fridge, and then asking about the bunny's gender. I believe that if you have a question about pronouns that it is more polite to ask than to guess, but this question opened up an even more important question - can the Easter bunny write? We opted to say the bunny couldn't write (as it has no hands, I guess we landed on the fact that the Easter bunny is not anthropomorphized at all), but now I have to wonder that if the bunny has no hands then how does it hide the eggs? And if you say the eggs are hidden by Easter bunny magic, then why not let the bunny use magic to write? 

Would it be possible to convene some sort of conference to hash these things out? Someway to find an agreed upon mythology for it?

Like I said, I can't figure out the Easter bunny. 

But just like Santa, Christmas makes more logical sense than Easter. 

Christmas - Jesus is born. Got it. There's other things that happen in Christmas, but the core of it is that a baby was born. I can explain that. It makes sense, I've seen it happen.

Easter - Jesus dies and comes back to life. Now this, I've never seen before. He dies, he rises. That we can agree on. But it's a lot harder to agree on why that happened. Was it a necessary blood sacrifice for our sins? Was it a demonstration that God's love is stronger than our sin? Was it something else entirely? Did it need to happen? If so, why would it need to happen? If not, then why did it happen?

And like with the Easter bunny, we come to the answers that make the most sense to us. Maybe not the most logical sense, but the most sense based on what we know about who God is. The questions linger, and will continue to linger until the day when we figure them out decisively. By then, we won't really be able to share what we learned.

I don't think I'll ever know the official canon about the Easter bunny, and I feel compelled to respond with some degree of authority when asked what I know. Answers are desired, even if they are unsatisfactory due to my limited understanding of how a dang bunny can do all of those things.

I want to know what is or is not true about Easter, but I don't want to hear someone respond with definitive authority. I want to sit with the questions, and when we answer them together I want them to be discussed with the understanding that no one will ever have the real full answer.

Medium is the mystery of magic rabbits.

Great is the mystery of faith. 

Hoppy Easter!

Jeff Fox-Kline

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