The Date of Easter

The quirky study of the chronology of the Passion recently published by Sir Colin Humphreys claims that his "discovery" that the real date of the crucifixion was April 3rd solves the problem of the variability of Easter. Of course, as soon as Humphreys adds "Easter Sunday should be the first Sunday in April", you realize it was never going to be quite that easy. The first Sunday in April might well be before April 3rd, after all?

The date of Easter has been controversial almost ever since there has been an Easter. In the second century, at any rate, the first serious dispute erupted when Christians in different parts of the Mediterranean realized they had been interpreting the meaning of Jesus' death in two different ways. One group simply continued to celebrate Passover, but with the new meaning provided by the passion and resurrection of Jesus. This practice gave precedence to the lunar calendar which provides the months of the Jewish year, and on which observance of Passover must be based. Since they celebrated on the 14th day of the month Nisan (or its local equivalents), these Christians became known to others as Quartodecimans, "fourteenthers".

The other practice suggested that the days of the week, which roll forward independently of months and years, also needed to be accounted for, since Jesus was raised on the first day of the week, Sunday. Hence the celebration should be on the Sunday after the celebration of Passover. This pattern won the day, doubtless at some cost to the sincere and reasonable commitments of the losers, as well as with the loss of the more immediate connection with Passover - in fact, a desire to distinguish the now predominantly-gentile Church from Judaism may have been influential in this process.

The relationship between months and years, as well as months and weeks, has made the date of Easter complex. Since months in Roman reckoning lost their connection to the phases of the moon but were calculated variously according to local customs, it was deemed necessary to specify that the date of Easter not fall before the equinox (as well as to reiterate that it was a Sunday) - this was one of the results of the famous Council of Nicaea. Hence the familiar pattern: Easter is the Sunday following the first full moon (the 14th day of the lunar month) after the vernal equinox. However since the equinox and/or the moon might be observed differently depending on your location, the problem did not go away entirely until standardized tables were developed and circulated.

This held as a more or less universal way to set the date of Easter until the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the West in the 16th century. The Eastern Churches generally retained the older Julian calendar, with the result that Easter can again be on different days in the eastern and western Mediterranean, and elsewhere. Attempts to find a common date continue, but conservative elements of the Eastern Churches have already fulminated and split over modest attempts to re-align the calendar.

The idea of a fixed date is therefore doomed to founder on the lack of agreement that would arise among Christian groups. A fairly serious attempt to fix the date of Easter was made in the UK in 1928 but was abandoned as impractical - it is no closer to being realistic or appealing today.

There are, I suggest, at least three reasons Colin Humphreys' suggestion will be quickly ignored. One has already been given, i.e., that any fixed date will only find limited acceptance. A second is that his research is unconvincing, based on mistaken premises about the character of the Gospels as history and about related issues concerning Jewish sources. Third and most important, I suspect, is that Easter is not commemoration of an "anniversary" - it is the Christian interpretation of a feast more ancient than the death of Jesus, from which Jesus derived part of the meaning of his death. The obscurities of calculating this date are a reminder of the world from which this feast comes - not one of bank holidays, but of harvests, full moons, and the remembrance of ancient liberation.

Happy Easter.

Wait for it...

Many Anglicans join in the annual rituals of rolling our eyes when Easter eggs appear in the shops before Lent has begin, or when Christmas fare stocks the shelves in October.

The same people however are doing some odd and unreflective things about liturgical time. Most obvious is the tendency to anticipate feast days. In quite a few places, Churches appear to celebrate any major feast, or feast associated with their life like a patronal festival, anything up to a week before the actual day.

Is this a problem? Well it's not a problem like poverty or pain, to be sure. In dealing with liturgical questions like those Percy addresses, it's always important to keep things in perspective - God will cope.

The problem is worth analysing however, because it is symptomatic of some broader issues about the wider reality of liturgy and ritual. Time itself is an important medium in the structure of Christian life, and failure to appreciate the underlying logic of the liturgical year is at best a missed opportunity. At worst, it may even reflect and reinforce problems that have real ethical and theological weight.

The tradition of the Church is fairly clear. Feasts are not celebrated before it is time for them. Feasts are actually preceded by fasts, not preliminary feasts. We all know this in theory, because of Lent and Advent (a particular challenge, admittedly). The Prayer Book of 1662 contains a table of "Vigils, Fasts, and Days of Abstinence" whose significance seems not to be understood by the framers of some later books, but Vigils in theory precede most feast days.

All this is a bit counter-intuitive to us, and we might well ask why. Scott Peck, of The Road Less Travelled fame, suggests that "delay of gratification" is one of the fundamental disciplines necessary to live a good life. Peck's language in that book is not theological, but it was not hard for many readers (and later him) to see the connection with spiritual discipline.

The structure of liturgical time reflects the call to such discipline, and the creative tension between feasting and fasting. If graphed, liturgical time would not merely be a gentle curve rolling from feast to feast, but a more angular and challenging trajectory, with lows as well as highs and - most remarkably - the two linked. That is to say, liturgical time is supposed to be a medium within which the logic of cross and resurrection is mapped and lived. This is why it is not trivial.

As things are, time has become a rather tame and sad thing in the Church's life. Leaving aside the neo-puritan dismissal of its significance, the catholic remnant in Anglicanism tends to baulk at the demands and promises of time. We see the passage from season to season, or from fast to feast, as a move from one flavour of liturgical ice-cream to the other.

Percy will write further about the temptation to do everything on Sundays - a related but distinct problem.