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

The Fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost:
A JOYOUS WORK

One of the Church’s buried treasures uncovered and raised up by Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy was the church year. The Council called for a reform and renewal of the seasons in ways faithful to their ancient origins. General observation over these subsequent thirty-five years would seem to find much effort being made for the seasons of Advent and Lent—and with much success. Parish liturgy committees and worship directors develop sequential penitential rites or musical programs or environmental themes (banners, crosses, candles, wreathes) focusing assembly and sanctuary around a powerful image throughout the weeks of the season. On the other hand, local churches seem to struggle (or, worse yet, not even try!) to sustain robust celebrations of Christmas and Easter as entire seasons. It’s almost as if the Vigil Mass for Christmas—the "children’s Mass" in countless parishes across the land—and the crowded Easter Sunday morning Masses amount to one big bang, and the feast is done! A week after Easter Sunday one too rarely finds even one Easter hymn being sung in many parishes, and the Easter lilies in the sanctuary seem left carrying the entire load of exalting in the Risen Christ. As they wilt, so does the season. Why might this be?

The roots of the problem may grow from several different directions. Liturgical leaders and pastoral musicians often put so much effort into the seasons preparing for the great feasts of the church year that they’ve little energy left once the feasts’ initial celebrations are over. We also live in a social and economic culture that expends great energy anticipating holidays through commercial promotions (just think of Christmas shopping displays in October) and television specials, which altogether build an environment wherein the preparations far outpace the event itself. But this points to a deeper challenge to our faith: Do we, the Christian faithful, ourselves understand and embrace the sacred mysteries at the heart of our most important liturgical events of the year? In this and the next installment we shall concern ourselves with the greatest feast in the Church’s treasury, the Feast of Easter. What must we learn from the Church’s tradition about Easter such that our fifty-day celebration of this season properly outdoes our forty days of Lent?

"The fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost are celebrated in joyful exultation as one feast day, or better as one ‘great Sunday.’ These above all others are the days for the singing of the Alleluia." Thus reads article 22 of The General Norms for the Liturgical Year and the Calendar. So, Easter is at once fifty days and one day. That would seem mysterious, indeed! For the purposes of this introductory essay on the Easter Season, it shall be enough to answer briefly the questions, "Why fifty?" and "Why one?"

Why fifty days? Just as the date for celebrating Easter Sunday is related to the ancient timing of the Jewish feast of Passover, so also for the last day of the Easter Season. Pentecost was a Jewish festival appropriated from Judaism and given a new meaning in the early centuries of Christianity. In his Acts of the Apostles, Luke describes the apostles and other followers of Jesus (including his mother) assembled as faithful Jews on their feast of Pentecost, but only to experience an unprecedented event—the conferral of the Holy Spirit upon them. By the end of the third century local communities throughout the Church were celebrating Pentecost as the solemn, festive conclusion of a fifty-day Easter Season. Interestingly, in some cities this last Sunday of Easter commemorated not only the sending of the Holy Spirit but also the ascension of the Risen Christ to heaven. By the fourth century, however, churches by and large were following the sequence in St. Luke’s texts quite programmatically, celebrating the Lord’s ascension forty days after his resurrection (thus, Ascension Thursday) and the gift of the Holy Spirit on the fiftieth day (Pentecost Sunday).

But why call all of these weeks one day? Here we must let the playful power of symbolism, as well as the rich symbolism of our biblical texts have their way with us. Taking the Gospels’ stories of the resurrection and the events in the Acts of the Apostles in isolation from each other, let alone reading them apart from the tradition of the liturgies wherein they are proclaimed, can result in a sorely deficient theology of both the resurrection and the Church. In the Gospel of John, the risen Christ breathes the gift of the Holy Spirit into his disciples on the evening of his resurrection, whereas Luke links the Spirit-gift to Jewish feast of Pentecost. We cannot, therefore, view the formation of the Church as an event separate from the raising of the Crucified One—as if the Church only begins after Christ definitively ascends to the Father. On the contrary, throughout the Easter Season the first reading at each Mass is taken from the Acts of the Apostles. The Liturgy of the Word reveals to us that God’s raising Jesus from the dead in the power of the Spirit and the gift of the Spirit of the Risen Christ to the Church are one and the same event.

As for how we can experience this fundamental reality of our faith, therein lies the importance of celebrating the Easter Season well.

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