What's the Big Deal About an Early Easter?

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, March 14, 2008

Just in case you have been visiting your family off-planet somewhere, I’d like to officially inform you that Easter is only nine days from now! That’s right, this Sunday is Palm Sunday in the western Christian calendar, and the following Sunday – March 23 – is Easter!

I received several emails – actually the same email from several different people – highlighting the uniqueness of this year’s Easter timing. The email breathlessly announces that “this is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives!” Furthermore, “the next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).”

Now I am willing to join the hoopla of the earliest Easter I will ever see, but all this made me wonder how setting the date for Easter works in the first place. To find out, I had to go back to some of the earliest history of the Christian church. Back in 325 AD, church leaders gathered in a place called Nicea. They were there to hammer out agreements on quite a number of issues, including the process for determining when to celebrate the most important event in Christianity – the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Leaders from the eastern side of the Roman Empire preferred to schedule Easter with the Jewish Passover. All four gospel accounts – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – agree that Jesus was arrested, convicted and crucified during the week of Passover. In fact, John’s gospel makes deliberate parallels between the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb with Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Western Roman leaders, however, were more concerned with eradicating pagan festivals than retaining ties to Judaism. Tying the Resurrection celebration to the arrival of Spring seemed the best way to stop the pagan celebrations.

The only thing on which the two sides could agree was that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday. So for the next 200 or so years, Christians celebrated Easter based on local preference – there were MANY Easters every year! In the meantime, tensions between the East and the West accelerated, both politically within the Roman Empire itself, and in Christianity. The Empire split into two, and from that point on, Christian practices diverged along the same lines.

Finally, in 7^th century, Western Christians adopted a uniform method for determining when to celebrate Easter. And you guessed it – it was based on the arrival of Spring. Easter was to be celebrated on the FIRST Sunday after the FIRST full moon AFTER the spring Equinox. Got that??

If you thought that was confusing, just wait – it gets better! The calendar in use for centuries was the Julian calendar, and it was too long. Each year, the calendar moved ahead of the sun by 11 minutes, 17 and ½ seconds. That adds up to a full three days over 400 years. Easter had to be adjusted accordingly. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII approved a reform of the calendar that took away TEN ENTIRE DAYS to correct the error. The day after October 4 was declared to be October 15!

Flashing forward to modern times, we still use the combination solar/lunar timetable for determining Easter. So, the Sunday of Easter will vary by as much as five weeks – that’s 35 days. The odds of Easter landing on any ONE particular day in those five weeks is pretty low – hence the tremendous passage of time between one March 23^rd Easter and the next March 23^rd Easter. But when you think about it, that’s true for ANY day within the range of possible days for Easter. It’s no more remarkable to celebrate Easter on March 22 as it is on April 22. We just make a bigger deal out of the early date because it is on the edge rather than in the middle of the range.

And when I stop to think about Easter more deeply, I realize that the REALLY early Easter is the one for which we don’t have a date – that FIRST Easter morning when a group of women went to a tomb, hoping to care for the body of the person they loved, admired, and even dared to worship. Imagine the breathlessness in which Mary Magdelene told John and Peter that the grave was open and she couldn’t find Jesus’ body! Imagine the fear and dread they felt as they went back to the tomb to investigate the strangeness of the situation.

What a surprise to discover no on there – then suddenly someone WAS there! Mary was so upset that she failed to recognize Jesus at first. But then, she realized Jesus was ALIVE!! Now that’s a big deal! Huge!! World-changing, even!!! And ever since, Christians have celebrated that day – the day that death was conquered, sin overturned, and fear turned into joy. If you want to get excited about an Early Easter, then go ahead! I’ll join you, no matter what the date!!!