Pesach, Paques and Pasqua (EASTER)
The point is often made that, if we can establish December 25 as the day for celebrating Christ birth, why can’t we set a date for Easter, the commemoration of His Resurrection? In some years, the clamour to have a fixed date becomes louder, because Easter is either very early or very late. In fact, in Western countries the feast can occur at any weekend between March 22 and April 25.
Originally, Easter had nothing to do with the Christian calendar. Our word for the festival comes from Eastre or Ostara, the goodness of spring among Germanic tribes of northern Europe. Pagan tribes rejoiced at the coming of spring, which is why many of our Easter customs, such as the giving of eggs, have pagan not Christian origins.
Many Europeans take their word for Easter from the Hebrew word Pesach, which means Passover, the French for example call the festival Paques and the Italians Pasqua. Jews celebrate the Passover, an eight-day festival, to commemorate their fight from slavery in Egypt. Easter is associate with the Jewish Passover, because Christ was arrested, tried and crucified that time. The Jewish calendar is based on lunar (not solar
) months, and the Passover always begin on the day of the first full Moon after March 21, the northern spring equinox.
Easter’s date fluctuates, because it is linked with the Passover. For centuries, the date has caused argument and doubt even among leaders of various churches. Early Christian celebrated Easter during the Passover, Later clerics wanted to give Easter’s holy days special significance, and tried to separate them from Jewish festival. AD 325, the day marking Christ’s Resurrection, would always be a Sunday but after the start of the Passover.
Because some churches use different calendars, Easter’s date may vary from country to country by a matter of weeks. According to the Gregorian calendar, which most of us follow, Easter Day is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon on or after March 21. If there is a full Moon on Sunday, March 21, Easter is the following Sunday.
However the Eastern Orthodox Churches, strongest in Eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, use the Julian calendar to decide when Easter falls. (For fixed feast such as Charisma’s they follow the Gregorian calendar.) The Orthodox Easter can occur up to five weeks after the Western.
Church leaders have tried many times to solve the problems caused by this movable feast. An obvious solution would be to fix the date, but Easter could then fall in the middle of the week. In 1963, The Roman Catholic Church recommended a set date, but none of the other denominations agreed with the suggestion.
Another, more sweeping, proposal is for the world to have a new calendar by which, year in and year out, any date would fall on the same day of the week. By this system, Easter would always be Sunday, April 8, about midway between it’s current extremes. To many people that sounds like a perfect compromise, but to the world’s decision makers the idea has all the appeal of a stale HOT CROSS BUN.