Easter service with a re-enactment of Jesus’ Crucifixion

Easter was a week late for us in Cambodia. It happened that Easter fell on the end of Cambodian New Year, which is the biggest holiday of the Cambodian year. We were not about to compete with that, so we became “Greek Orthodox” and gave ourselves a different date. It worked, and, as usual, the passion put into the preparations by a group of Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge holocaust was emotionally wrenching.

You see they don’t just do a resurrection celebration, they show the whole bloody, and glorious, story from Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday. They want the whole picture, and for a country where most people don’t connect the dots concerning the meaning of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, it makes sense.  At the end of the service everyone broke into spontaneous dancing, young and “old” alike.