If you’ve ever flipped through the Bible looking for the part of the Easter story with the bunny in it – you won’t find it. But that’s not because the Easter Bunny is a new invention. In fact, it predates Easter itself!
The hare had been a sacred animal in northern Europe for thousands of years before Jesus was born. They’ve been found in religious burials dating back to the Stone Age. In 51 BCE, no less than Julius Caesar noted that the British considered hares too holy to eat.
The Easter connection comes from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility and renewal whose sacred animal was the hare. As Christianity spread through England and Germany, it absorbed her springtime festival, reoriented it toward the resurrection, and kept the hare. We even get the word Easter from her name.
By the 1600s, German children were hunting for eggs left by the Easter hare. German immigrants eventually carried that tradition to America, where it gradually became the rounder, friendlier bunny we know today.
So while the resurrection story we read this morning is ancient, it turns out that the bunny is even more so. Happy Easter!
