If Teaching Kids About Easter Feels Awkward, Read This
These 5 Answers Might Be Why
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Easter is on the way, and experience tells me you might feel ambivalent about it.
Everyone is thrilled to think about Christmas: Twinkle lights! Babies! Animals! It’s all good.
Easter shows up like: Violence! Fancy theological jargon about what it means! A viral clip of a famous pastor telling kids the starting point is “You deserve to die”! (You can read my response here.)
There are 5 main assertions I hear over and over and over, from Easter lessons to Kids Bible stories:
What is Easter?
Easter is when Jesus died for our sins.
Why did Jesus come?
Jesus came to die because people had sinned and were separated from God.
Why did Jesus die?
Jesus died for our sins.
What does Easter mean for me?
You can accept Jesus as your savior and invite him to live in your heart.
How did Jesus’ resurrection help?
Jesus took the punishment we deserved for our sins by suffering on the cross.
So not only is the Easter story challenging, on top of that are the folks who claim the answers above are The Only Way to talk about Easter. So we tell kids those answers while filled with various levels of discomfort.
I’m going to take each question, one at a time, and suggest a different way to answer it with kids as well as why I propose that alternative answer.
Please hear me: I’m not saying the answers above are wholly untrue or all bad. (Except #5, the punishment one—that’s both bad and untrue—we’ll get there).
I’m saying these answers often:
fit better talking about Good Friday, not Resurrection Sunday, or
feel conceptual instead of story-based for kids, so they might not meet the criteria of “at a kids’ level”, or
tell kids a conclusion instead of inviting them into a conversation
and that doing some theological sifting, trying out a different starting point, or doing less on purpose can be really helpful.
By the way, if you’re feeling like, “Yes, yes, let’s unpack all the theology, but I really just want story guides I can borrow that won’t tell my kid they’re awful or give them every gory detail.” Wonder has 7 Easter stories ready for you.
1: What is Easter?
TRY THIS: Easter is when we celebrate that Jesus is alive!
INSTEAD OF: Easter is when we celebrate that Jesus died for our sins.
BECAUSE:
Good Friday and Easter are two stories--tell them as such. And, Easter is the only one of the two that stands on its own. Good Friday only makes sense, and only means anything, in light of the Resurrection. Jesus being alive matters no matter what. So let’s start with the meaning of Jesus’ new life.
So it’s more like, “Good Friday is when we remember that Jesus died for our sins. Easter is when we celebrate that Jesus is alive.” Kids love sorting and categories, so the distinction can be helpful.
On a related note: Good Friday details are for older ages. The story of Jesus’ death is heavy, hard, confusing, disturbing. It requires understanding the evil that comes when people idolize power and violence. It’s steeped in injustice and fear. A kid needs to be older to understand what is going on in it, both because of their emotional maturity and because having a firm foundation in God’s goodness and life are necessary before Jesus’ death can make sense.
Jesus’ Resurrection is the most important part of the story. Good people and failed messiahs were murdered by Rome all the time. The only reason the story of Jesus matters is that he is the only one God brought to life again. It’s the Resurrection, according to the whole New Testament, that changed everything. It’s the thing to celebrate. God’s dream is for life to explode throughout the whole earth; Jesus being alive is the key to it all.
2: Why did Jesus come?
TRY THIS: Jesus came to show us what God is like and say the time had come for God to make all things good.
He called it a kingdom, like a place where God was the good king and everything is just as good and lovely as God is.
INSTEAD OF: Jesus came to die because people had sinned and were separated from God.
BECAUSE:
Sin doesn’t separate us from God. We know this because God: directly talks to Abraham, wrestles with Jacob, talks again to Moses, leads Israel in a column of fire and cloud, dwells with the people in the tabernacle and then the temple, and, oh yeah, becomes human and lives among humans for 30+ years. Sin affects us. Sin harms the good creation God created. Sin makes God sad and mad and heartbroken. And even so, God is like the father who watches for his lost son to come home every day, runs to him, and throws a party at his return without the son saying a word. God is like a shepherd who searches for the lost sheep and brings it home. I’m pretty sure the sheep didn’t “pray the prayer” before the shepherd loaded it on his shoulders for the return trip.
The phrase “came to die” often causes us to lose sight of Jesus’ life. Jesus didn’t just come to die. He came to live, and in his life he showed us the character of the God we trust and love and follow. A God who cares for the widow and the orphan, the sick and the marginalized, the broken hearted and the lonely. A God who heals us and gives us life. A God of joy and abundance. A God of justice. Jesus came so that we might see the heart of God in the way Jesus lived, not just how he died.
3: Why did Jesus die?
TRY THIS: Because Jesus was talking about being king of a new kingdom, the Romans and their king, Caesar, were very upset. They wanted to kill Jesus for threatening the empire.
And because Jesus was talking about God’s kingdom, the religious leaders were very upset. They thought Jesus was not allowed to speak on God’s behalf – to say a new thing was happening. They wanted to kill Jesus for being disloyal to the way they were sure God wanted things.
INSTEAD OF: Jesus died for our sins.
BECAUSE:
The phrase “Jesus died for our sins” on its own lacks context, so kids often
Think it was their personal fault. I know that some traditions make a lot out of people wallowing in the guilt of their personal sins holding Jesus up on the cross, but I find this at best disturbing and at worst sadistic. I firmly believe that the better way to set a kid up for a lifetime of trusting Jesus is to make sure they understand the goodness and life he offers us, not that they understand how horrible and guilty they are.
It can be over-focused on the individual “for me and my sins” instead of holistic global redemption. I’ve talked before about how the Bible far more often talks about Sin in the singular, as the systems and structures that trap us in cycles of injustice and violence and evil. Yes our individual choices and failures matter too, but they are a subcategory of the bigger Sin. The same is true on the positive side. Jesus’ hope is not that each of us would individually make better choices, but that the whole world would be made new, with new systems that reflect the goodness of God replacing the old ones animated by Sin.
This phrase is a conclusion. It’s the end of a line of thinking. We want to invite kids into conversation, not give them conclusions. We want to show our work, so to speak. So it’s not about the truth of the statement so much as the process we could engage instead.
4: What does Easter mean for me?
TRY THIS: Jesus is alive, and we can be friends with him. God dreams of a world that works in a way that matches who God is. Because Jesus is alive, we can join the team that helps make that dream come true more and more.
INSTEAD OF: You can accept Jesus as your savior and invite him to live in your heart.
BECAUSE:
Both ‘accept’ & ‘savior’ are new vocabulary for many kids. Becoming friends, joining a family or team, or following are all more accessible ways to describe how a person might respond to Jesus.
“Living in our heart” is abstract. Kids are concrete. The phrase tends to confuse many kids. How’s he get there? What if I want some privacy? (Unpacking “Jesus in your heart”? Read this.)
When we focus too much on our individual status before God, on Jesus as only our personal savior, we lose sight of the full invitation Jesus extends. Jesus’ resurrection means that the kingdom of God is here, and that we humans are invited to participate in it. We get to partner with God in extending God’s goodness and justice and life to the world we’re a part of, not just sit around twiddling our thumbs and waiting for God to beam us up and out of here.
5: How did Jesus’ resurrection help?
TRY THIS: Our world has hard and sad things in it, including death. There’s a gap between God’s dream and what is happening now. The Bible calls the gap ‘Sin’. Sin is anything that’s not what God wants. But the hard, sad things won’t last forever. Jesus won and Sin lost, all because he’s alive!
INSTEAD OF: Jesus took the punishment we deserved for our sins by suffering on the cross.
BECAUSE:
Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is just one of many ways to describe what Jesus does. Many of the other images–like winning victory by defeating death, for instance–are age accessible and easy to help kids find in the Bible.
Easter is good news for so many reasons:
having peace, hope, and God’s presence in the midst suffering;
giving us purpose for our real lives now, not just a future destination when we die;
demonstrating God’s true character of love and sacrifice;
freeing us from the power of Sin;
bringing hope for justice in a world of injustice;
and, most centrally, bringing life out of death.
BTW: There’s a 6-part series for members of the Kids + Faith Community called “Why is Easter Good News?” that walks through each of these, including a Bible story breakdown and “What’s that got to do with kids?” section.
Join the Kids + Faith community for $5/month—so you can read those and wrap up—or $30 a year to get even more resources on theology, the Bible, and kids.
Smooshing all these very Biblical ways of talking about Easter into one “punishment deals with sin” shaped box flattens the story into something much less good than it could be.
While many people would tell you that PSA is the One True Way to understand what Jesus did, it isn’t. At the very least, all the images and meanings I just listed need to be part of the story.
But beyond that, I would argue that PSA isn’t actually biblical at all. It only works if you change the entire meaning of the sacrificial system, the entire story of God’s engagement with humanity and the entire character of God Themself.
What is biblical? Here are four options:
Non-Penal Substitutionary Atonement ways the Bible talks about Jesus’ death and Sin:
Jesus died because of Sin.
The Bible talks about both the Roman Empire which killed Jesus and the Jewish leaders who handed him over and demanded his death as being driven by Sin. It’s the twin idols of Power and Violence at work.
Jesus died to free us from Sin.
Sin is often talked about like a force that enslaves people, forcing them to go its way. Jesus sets us free and offers us a new path that brings life.
Jesus died and suffered the consequences of Sin.
Sin has consequences, both for us and for the world around us. Anyone who has done lasting damage to a relationship through their own selfishness is aware of this. As is anyone who has seen the news headlines.
Sin has consequences, effects, forms humanity such that we see and/or experience oppression, broken relationships, violence, fear, and, yes, death. Effect is not the same as punishment for Sin; they are consequences, the inevitable byproducts. Consequences come whether or not there is some person bringing a punishment; they aren’t the same thing.
God does not require punishment to forgive Sin.
To use just one example, the prophet Jeremiah had a lot to say about Sin, especially of the idolatry and injustice variety. He had a lot to say about judgment that was going to come in the form of Babylonian armies because of people’s Sin.
He made it clear that it wasn’t too late to head off the worst.His solution? Repentance. To turn around and head a different direction, living justly and trusting in Yahweh alone, at which point God would forgive the people freely. No punishment required.
Medieval kings required death from those who crossed them. (This idea, conveniently, became popular around then. It’s helpful as the king if you can have god be just as violent as you.) Our God forgives freely and repeatedly.
. . . . .
God has made you a smart, compassionate adult who can think critically through these questions, various theological camps’ responses to them, and such, and so:
May you start in a place that is true and at the level of the real kids in your life. You can always build onto ideas later, adding complexity, depth, and nuance.
May you lean into conversation and questions over answers that have to simply be accepted.
May you feel confident that Easter need not be a Sunday when kids are expected to feel sad and bad but can rather celebrate that the resurrection means life and joy.
Amen.
Thank you so much for this post. It is so appreciated. As someone who teaches the kids in our church, while also deconstructing some of the things I learned growing up, it is really helpful for me to have things laid out like this.
Thank you so much for your thoughts here! My son would like to understand how Jesus is alive when he can't see or meet him. (He has asked if Jesus will show up at our church on Easter.) He is only three, and I am finding it difficult to put into words something age appropriate. Do you have a post about this topic?