Liturgy: The Church's Spirituality
Bruce T. Morrill, S.J.

SETTING A DATE FOR EASTER: NO SMALL TASK

Among the most complex, confusing and, indeed, controversial aspects of the Church year is the dating of Easter. Christians are widely aware of the fact that the Orthodox churches celebrate Easter most years on a different day (and even month) than Roman Catholics and other communions in the West. While the current difference in calendar dates from a relatively recent period in Church history, the establishment of Easter as an annual feast and, moreover, its meaning as a feast proved controversial almost from the start.

Christ’s Resurrection first celebrated each Sunday

The first few generations of Christians by and large seemed not to celebrate an annual feast of Easter. Liturgical time was marked by each Sunday, the celebration both of Christ's resurrection on "the first day of the week" (Luke 24:1; John 20:1) but also of the "Eighth Day," the first day of God's new creation, promising "a new heavens and a new earth" (2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1). By the second century, however, local churches definitely were celebrating an annual memorial of Christ's death and resurrection. As these practices spread, differences emerged concerning the timing and meaning of the Easter celebration.

Easter and the Jewish Feast of Passover

Common to all the churches was a concern to situate the event of Christ's death and resurrection in a paschal context, that is, in relation to the annual Jewish feast of pesach (in Greek, pasha) or Passover, which takes place each year on the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan (the moon). Churches in the regions around Rome and Palestine celebrated Easter on the first Sunday after the fourteenth of Nisan. They did so because they could not imagine commemorating the resurrection on any day other than the first of the week.

Other churches in Asia Minor, however, celebrated the feast on the fourteenth day of the moon itself, that is, on the exact day of the Jewish Passover (whatever the day of the week that might happen to be in a given year). They did this because they identified Christ's death on the cross as the fulfillment and meaning of the annual sacrifice of a lamb, the Jewish people's memorial of their passing over from slavery in Egypt to freedom.

In addition, a further paschal theology developed in North Africa, where the churches also followed the Roman-Palestinian date. In the City of Alexandria Easter came to mark the spiritual exodus of all baptized believers out of slavery to sin into life in the Spirit of Christ.

The Roman-Palestinian tradition for dating Easter ultimately won. In 325 the Council of Nicaea established the annual date for Easter to be the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Why the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Churches celebrate Easter on different days

A further discrepancy developed, however, when Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 decreed that a new calendar replace the ancient Julian calendar. Scientists found the Julian calendar to be inaccurate due to its inability to accommodate the discovery that the earth takes three hundred sixty-five and one quarter days to circuit the sun. The Orthodox Churches of the East, who had formally split from the Roman Church several centuries earlier, chose not to adopt the Gregorian calendar. Thus, while the Churches of both East and West both follow the principle of celebrating Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the spring equinox, they differ in how they determine when exactly that date comes about. The discrepancy can amount to several weeks in a given year, whereas occasionally the two calendars' dates for Easter coincide. The latter was the case for Easter Sunday this year, with Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians all celebrating the feast on the same Sunday.

In his twelfth encyclical, Ut Unum Sint ("That They Might Be One"), Pope John Paul II expressed his earnest desire that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches might find a way to resolve their differences and enter again into full communion with one another. The difference in Easter dates is a poignant symbol of the confusion and division that continues to impede the witness to resurrection faith that the Church universal has as its mission to a world so much in need of the Good News. The historical hurts and theological complications underlying the division are significant. Let us all pray in this Easter Season that the Spirit of the Risen Christ might soon bring about the healing of Christ's body, that is, the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, for the life of the world.

Jesuit Father Bruce Morrill teaches in the Department of Theology at Boston College.