Easter
Is a spring festival that celebrates the central event of
the Christian faith: the resurrection of Christ three days after his death by
crucifixion? {1} Easter is the oldest Christian
holiday and the most important day of the church year. All the Christian
movable feasts and the entire liturgical year of worship are arranged around
Easter.
Easter Sunday is preceded by the season of Lent, a 40-day period of fasting and
repentance culminating in Holy Week, and followed by a 50-day Easter Season
that stretches from Easter to Pentecost. The origins of the word
"Easter" are not certain, but probably derive from Estre, an
Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring {2}. The German word Ostern
has the same derivation, but most other languages follow the Greek term used by
the early Christians: pascha, from the Hebrew pesach (Passover).
In Latin, Easter is Festa Paschalia (plural because it is a seven-day
feast), which became the basis for the French Pâques, the Italian Pasqua,
and the Spanish Pascua. Also related are the Scottish Pask, the
Dutch Paschen, the Danish Paaske, and the Swedish Pask. {3} The method for determining the
date of Easter is complex and has been a matter of controversy (see History of
Easter, below).
Put as simply as possible, the Western churches (Catholic and
Protestant) celebrate Easter on the first Sunday following the first full moon
after the spring equinox. But it is actually a bit more complicated than this.
The spring equinox is fixed for this purpose as March 21 (in 2004, it actually
falls on March 20) and the "full moon" is actually the paschal moon,
which is based on 84-year "paschal cycles" established in the sixth
century, and rarely corresponds to the astronomical full moon. These complex
calculations yield an Easter date of anywhere between March 22 and April 25.
The Eastern churches (Greek, Russian, and other forms of Orthodoxy) use the
same calculation, but based on the Julian calendar (on which March 21 is April
3) and a 19-year paschal cycle. Thus the Orthodox Easter sometimes falls on the
same day as the western Easter (it does in 2004), but the two celebrations can
occur as much as five weeks apart.
In the 20th century, discussions began as to
a possible worldwide agreement on a consistent date for the celebration of the
central event of Christianity. No resolution has yet been reached. {4} Recent and upcoming dates {5} for Passover (Judaism), Easter
(Western Christianity), and Pascha (Eastern Christianity) are: There is
evidence that Christians originally celebrated the resurrection of Christ every
Sunday, with observances such as Scripture readings, psalms, the Eucharist, and
a prohibition against kneeling in prayer. {6} At some point in the first two
centuries, however, it became customary to celebrate the resurrection specially
on one day each year.
Many of the religious observances of this celebration
were taken from the Jewish Passover. The specific day on which the resurrection
should be celebrated became a major point of contention within the church.
First, should it be on Jewish Passover no matter on what day that falls, or
should it always fall on a Sunday? It seems Christians in Asia took the former
position, while those everywhere else insisted on the latter. The eminent
church fathers Irenaeus and Polycarp were among the Asiatic Christians, and
they claimed the authority of St. John the Apostle for their position.
Nevertheless, the church majority officially decided that Easter should always
be celebrated on a Sunday. Eusebius of Caesarea, our only source on this topic,
reports the affair as follows:
A question of no small importance arose at that time [c. 190
AD]. The dioceses of all Asia, as from an older tradition, held that the
fourteenth day of the moon, on which day the Jews were commanded to sacrifice
the lamb, should always be observed as the feast of the life-giving pasch,
contending that the fast ought to end on that day, whatever day of the week it
might happen to be. However it was not the custom of the churches in the rest
of the world to end it at this point, as they observed the practice, which from
Apostolic tradition has prevailed to the present time, of terminating the fast
on no other day than on that of the Resurrection of our Savior. Synods and
assemblies of bishops were held on this account, and all with one consent
through mutual correspondence drew up an ecclesiastical decree that the mystery
of the Resurrection of the Lord should be celebrated on no other day but the
Sunday and that we should observe the close of the paschal fast on that day
only. {7}
With this issue resolved, the next problem was to determine which
Sunday to celebrate the resurrection. The Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia
held their festival on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover (which itself
varied a great deal), but those in Alexandria and other regions held it on the
first Sunday after the spring equinox, without regard to the Passover. This
second issue was decided at the Council of Nicea in 325, which decreed that
Easter should be celebrated by all on the same Sunday, which Sunday shall be
the first following the paschal moon (and the paschal moon must not precede the
spring equinox), and that a particular church should determine the date of
Easter and communicate it
throughout the empire (probably Alexandria, with their skill in
astronomical calculations). The policy was adopted throughout the empire, but
Rome adopted an 84-year lunar cycle for determining the date, whereas
Alexandria used a 19-year cycle. {8} Use of these different
"paschal cycles" persists to this day and contributes to the
disparity between the eastern and western dates of Easter. Over the centuries,
these religious observances have been supplemented by popular customs, many of
were incorporated from springtime fertility celebrations of European and Middle
Eastern pagan religion. Rabbits and eggs, for example, are widely-used pagan
symbols for fertility. Christians view the Easter eggs as symbols of joy and
celebration (as they were forbidden during the fast of Lent) and of new life
and resurrection. A common custom is to hide brightly colored eggs for children
to find
