By Carol Fisher-Linn
Easter is when this year???? The why of this “moveable feast”…..
The Christian church has some crazy customs that we shake our heads and wonder about, but the “moveable feast” is one that gets calendar watchers a little crazy. And rightly so. After all, if Christmas is every December 25th (well, almost, depending on which calendar you use) and St. Patrick’s Day is always March 17th, then why can’t Easter, the BIGGEST holiday of the church, be on its own special date – forever set, never changing, amen. After all, in a nutshell, Easter is what it’s all about!
fi rst Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox,
which is around March 21st. .
The date for Easter changes each year but always falls in March or April. The timing is linked to the phases of the moon and the Jewish festival of Passover. Remember, we are talking 30AD here, so we’ve gone through lots of calendars.
Without getting too technical, here’s a little church calendar lesson that might clarify a few things about Easter. There’s a thing called The Paschal Triduum, meaning three days – Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. It is the apex of the entire liturgical calendar. Holy Week is the most solemn and glorious week in Christianity, the pinnacle of the liturgical year. Bet you didn’t know it is more sacred than Christmas! This is because Holy Week commemorates the final week of Our Lord’s life, the very purpose for which Christmas happened (sjs.com). This is, of course, followed by the most significant date on the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday, and the empty tomb.
But what and why a moveable feast, and why is Easter one of them? As a child learning catechism, I had a devil of a time saying “moveable” feast, always wanting to call it “removable.” The nuns brought out the ruler if they heard me say that forbidden word! And if the priest heard, I ran for cover! Seriously, let me try to sort out this conundrum for you.
Early Christians lived in many countries with different calendars, so it wasn’t practical to fix the date of Easter on just one calendar, such as the Roman one on which our modern calendar is based. (Although, why not?) Instead, the powers-to-be decreed it had to be calculated in a calendar-neutral way, using the Spring Equinox, then the first full moon after that, then the first Sunday after that. Since the phases of the moon vary in relation to dates on our solar calendar, the date of Easter varies accordingly from year to year. (Whew! did you get all that?) While in theory this calculation should have kept Easter close to Passover in timing, differences between the Roman and Jewish calendars over time have produced what we now see: sometimes they fall together, and sometimes they fall apart (news.nau.edu).
Here’s Wikipedia weighing in: First, during the 16th century Renaissance in Western Europe, progress was made on refining the accuracy of the calendar – e.g., this was when the leap year was established – and the previous Roman calendar, known as the Julian after Julius Caesar, was replaced by Pope Gregory XIII in favor of the Gregorian calendar; the one we use today. This change did not affect Eastern Christianity, whose liturgical calendar remains Julian rather than Gregorian. But this subtle refining of calendars would not have been enough to alter significantly the dates for Easter between East and West. In addition to this change, how the East and West calculate the first full moon after the vernal equinox accounts for the difference. How can that be, you ask? Well, in the West, the vernal equinox is what it is, and always falls on either March 20th or 21st of the Gregorian calendar. In the East, however, they “fixed” the vernal equinox to March 21st of the Julian calendar. Thus, in the East, the “vernal equinox” may not be on the vernal equinox, resulting in a different calculation for Easter than in the West. The result is that, in the East, Easter always falls between April 4th and May 8th, whereas in the West, it always falls between March 22nd and April 25th.
And then, this: When, after calculations are made, Easter falls on Passover, the Eastern churches move Easter to the following Sunday. Understand it now? Bottom line, watch your calendar, or The Villager every spring. We will keep you on top of everything Easter.