Dear Sisters, dear brethren, recently I heard someone surmise that the date of Easter was chosen by the pope wearing a blindfold drawing a random date from a tombola like a raffle ticket. Well, after all, the date of Easter over the last few years has swung back and forth from April 12th to April 4th to April 17th to April 9th to March 31st to April 20th. In 2008 Easter was as early as 23rd March, and in 2011 it was as late as 24th April. Whereas Christmas is as regular as clockwork, always falling on December 25th, Easter is to many people bewilderingly and seemingly unpredictable. Why should this be so? Furthermore, this wild variation of the date of Easter is especially odd when we remember that it is Easter, and not Christmas, that is the most important feast of the Church year; and not only that, but from it almost a third of the year’s other important feast days are determined. So, for example, the date of Ash Wednesday is precisely forty-six days before Easter, and the dates of Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart are all calculated to follow precisely the date of Easter in the current year. That is why, given that Easter was as late as April 20th this year, Pentecost fell as late as June 8th and the Sacred Heart was only a fortnight ago.
It is perhaps not surprising that some people, exasperated by this wide variability, want to fix Easter to the first or second weekend in April, and so to make easier things like planning for holidays (not to mention Mothering Sunday, or our Mothers’ Day, which is always three Sundays before Easter, the fourth Sunday of Lent – and I won’t explain why that is right now!)
Last week I mentioned that the Council of Nicaea, the 1700th anniversary of which falls this year, had tackled this problem from the point of view of Christians celebrating Easter on different days. The Roman Emperor Constantine, who had given freedom to Christians after three centuries of persecution, and would himself eventually be baptized, was troubled to realize that some Catholics were feasting and celebrating the resurrection at Easter, while others in the same street were still fasting in Lent. Could not all Christians at least be brought to celebrate Easter on the same day? That was one of the tasks that he asked the bishops assembled at the Council of Nicaea to resolve.
But that only raises the deeper question: why were different families of Catholics, all believing alike in the resurrection of Christ, nonetheless celebrating it on different days? This is actually a very interesting question and not merely of historical importance, as it has a direct bearing on the date of Easter in any year. So, first of all, what is the origin of the celebration of Easter? Yes, it is the day of the resurrection of Christ, but when was that in the year? What significance did that day have in the life of the Apostles and the earliest generation of Christians? The answer is clear from the four gospels: it was at the time of the greatest Jewish religious celebration of the year: the Passover. This feast commemorated the Exodus from Egypt and the entry into the Promised Land of the Hebrew people some 1500 years before the time of our Lord. Think of it – the Exodus was almost as remote in the past to our Lord as the Council of Nicaea is to us! The Jews celebrated the anniversary of this event annually at Spring time. How was the date of the festival determined? Well, it depended on two calendars: the solar and the lunar. This means that the date of the Passover was to be calculated from the date when daylight exactly equalled night, which we call the equinox, but also from the phases of the moon. Specifically, the moon had to be full for the Passover to begin. But of course, the date of the equinox and the date of the full moon don’t often coincide exactly. So what determined the date of the Passover? In a way it was relatively straightforward; it was the day of the first full moon following the spring equinox. Now whilst this naturally meant that the date of the Passover was always different from year to year in relation to the date of the equinox, we need to realize that the months always began with the new moon.
Now you know how the moon waxes and wanes over the course of a month, passing through the phases from new to half to full to half and back to new. This process takes pretty well twenty eight days, or four weeks. Well, this was exactly what a Jewish month was. The first day of the month was the new moon. The month lasted twenty eight days, no more or less, and therefore the middle day of the month, the fourteenth day, was the time of the full moon. Of course, twelve such months don’t add up to the 365 days of the solar calendar year we are used to, and for that reason the Jews had to invent various ways of filling up the gaps to harmonize the lunar and solar calendars. Although our months and named from the moon (the words month/moon are related), they do not often closely relate to the phases of the moon as in the Jewish month. Anyway, all this is to explain why the Jewish Passover was at the first full moon of Spring, and therefore on the fourteenth day of the month, which was always the date of the full moon.
So our Lord’s final Passover, including His Last Supper, death and resurrection, all take place around the fourteenth day of the month called by the Jews ‘Nisan’. This is why thereafter, at the same time of the year, the Apostles and the early Christians always celebrated the death and resurrection of the Lord at the time of the Jewish Passover, and to an extent that is still roughly what we do, but with a very important difference which I am going to explain in a moment.
Some Christians followed exactly the timetable of the 14th day of Nisan for the date of Easter, keeping to the Jewish way of calculating time. But this had an important consequence. For it meant that Easter, whenever the 14th of Nisan fell, was not on the same weekday each year. For the Jewish feast that didn’t matter. But for the Christians there was a massively important consideration. All the Gospels tell us that in the year of our Lord’s Passover from death to life, the full moon, the date of the Passover, fell on a Sabbath day, or Saturday. Our Lord died on the day of preparation for the Sabbath, which that year coincided with the Passover. The Gospels also tell us unanimously that it was on the first day of the following week that the resurrection took place, and that the risen Lord appeared to His Apostles for the first time. For this reason, the first day of the week, or Sunday as we call it, immediately took on a huge significance for the Christians, who began straightaway to call Sunday ‘the Lord’s Day’, and to make it the principal day of the week for their celebration of what we call the Mass.
And so from the very outset of Christian celebration of Easter, there was a tension between those who wished to remain absolutely faithful to the Jewish date of 14th Nisan, whatever day of the week that might be, and those who held that Easter must be kept on the nearest Sunday to 14th Nisan, even though that would not be the same date as the Jewish Passover every year. This led to discussions between some bishops in the early Church. St Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of St John the beloved Apostle, kept Easter on 14th Nisan. He went to Rome in the middle of the 2nd century to discuss the proper date for keeping Easter with the Pope who kept the tradition of St Peter and St Paul, of celebrating Easter on the Sunday nearest to the 14th Nisan. They could not agree, since both claimed apostolic authority for their own custom.
So how could such a dilemma be resolved? Well, it would not be for nearly another two hundred years after the time of Polycarp. Constantine and Bishop Hosius decided to make this matter one of the issues to be addressed at the forthcoming Council of Nicaea in 325. It was important both to get all Christians to agree on a common date for Easter, but also to agree on the principles underlying the celebration of Easter. What is central to Easter? It is the Christian Passover, the Lord’s own Passover. Its culmination is the resurrection and that took place on the first day of the week, and St John tells us that it was primarily on that day that the Lord appeared solemnly to his Apostles in the Upper Room on two consecutive first days of the week.
This is why, from the outset of the Christian era, the Apostles effectively replaced the old Jewish sabbath day at the end of the week with the new Christian ‘Lord’s Day’ at the beginning of the week and this they did every week, because it was on this day that the Lord came to meet them. Sunday is the original weekly celebration of the Lord’s resurrection and an anticipation of our future resurrection on the Last Day when the eternal banquet of heaven will begin in earnest.
For this reason, therefore, not only was Sunday the original Christian holy day of the week, but the greatest of all days of the year, which every Sunday commemorates, the day of the resurrection, had to be on a Sunday. So the bishops at the Council of Nicaea were agreed on this: that Easter could not be on the same calendar date every year, like Christmas, because it would then be on different weekdays each year. No. It must always be a Sunday. But which Sunday?
Remembering that Easter is the celebration of the Lord’s Passover, it has to be at Passover time, in the early Spring. For this reason is must, like the Jewish Passover, be celebrated after the Spring equinox, that is, after March 20th/21st. But the entire Jewish tradition of calculating festivals also involved not just the solar calendar which gives us the equinox, but the lunar calendar, because the festival of the Passover must be at the time of the full moon. As we have observed, the lunar calendar does not coincide with the solar. For after the equinox, we must then wait for the next full moon, which can be a few days away or even a month away. But of course the full moon itself doesn’t necessarily fall on a Sunday, so we have to wait for the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the equinox. This is the reason why Easter can fall any time between March 22nd and April 25th. This is how the Bishops at Nicaea worked out the way of calculating Easter each year and this is what Christians thereafter have done. Of course, there are some Christians who observe Easter on a different date from us, notably the Orthodox, but that is for a different reason which I won’t bother you with now.
Next year at the time of the Spring equinox, look up at the moon if the skies are clear, and see what phase it is at: new, crescent, half, gibbous or full. When it is full, then you know that Easter will be on the Sunday following the full moon. In this way we keep to the ancient way of calculating when Passover time comes, but always bearing in mind that Easter must always be on the Lord’s Day, the day of the resurrection.
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