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Here near the end of February we are already about
halfway through Lent. Probably
because Easter comes so early this year I have gotten more questions than usual
about the date of Easter. So I
decided to explain why Easter moves around so much. All the Gospels agree that Jesus died and was raised
during the Passover celebration. The
Israelites, like most people of the ancient world, used a lunar calendar (Our
word “month” comes from the word “moon.”)
Passover began on the fourteenth of Nisan, a month in the Jewish calendar
that happened in the spring of the year. The
date the month began was keyed to the full moon, so it changed from year to
year, since the lunar cycle is 29¼ days.
In order to keep its relationship to Passover the church decided that the
date of Easter would be calculated on a modified lunar calendar.
So the date of Easter is determined by both the full moon and the spring
equinox. It was also decided that
Easter would always fall on Sunday so that complicated it a bit more.
Easter, then, is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the
spring equinox. This year the spring
equinox is on March 20, the full moon is on Saturday, March 22, and March 23 is
a Sunday. Therefore, Easter is on
March 23 which is about as early as Easter can be.
At the other extreme Easter can be as late as April 25. A few years ago there was a movement to simplify things
and fix the date of Easter on the second Sunday of April.
One the arguments for that move was that it would be more convenient to
have a fixed spot on the calendar. People
could more easily remember when Easter was and wouldn’t have to constantly be
wondering. The proponents of the
change also claimed that for folk in the temperate zones of the northern
hemisphere the second Sunday in April would be more likely to be springlike than
late March. After all doesn’t it
feel more like Easter when the crocuses are in bloom and the birds have
returned. This is one time when I am
glad that the inertia of tradition won out over the modernizers. To set the date of Easter on the second Sunday of April
would have cut the (admittedly tentative) tie of Easter to Passover.
It would have been just another way in which we Christians have severed
our ties to our Jewish roots. In
John 4 Jesus said to the woman at the well that “salvation comes from the
Jews.” We Christians forget that
at our peril. It is too easy when we
focus only on the New Testament to spiritualize our faith right out of the
world. The Old Testament reminds us
in a very real way that God loves the world and is involved in it. Your pastor, John [For last month's column go to feb Column] |
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