Commontide
Paschal Cycle
Moveable feast
Easter Day is the feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the day on which the church confesses that the Lord, crucified under Pontius Pilate at the Passover in Jerusalem and laid in the tomb, rose from the dead on the first day of the week. In the West it falls on the first Sunday after the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after the vernal equinox, and so between 22 March and 25 April; the Eastern churches keep the same feast as Pascha, most of them computing it on the Julian calendar and so usually on a different Sunday. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) appoints four services for it: the Great Vigil, an Early Service, the Principal Service and an Evening Service. Most Christian languages name the day from the Passover, Pascha, and the Prayer Book's Proper Preface calls Christ the true Paschal Lamb. Easter Day opens the Great Fifty Days that run to Pentecost.
All four Gospels set the Resurrection at the Passover in Jerusalem, on the first day of the week after the crucifixion, and all four begin at the tomb (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20). The earliest written witness is not a narrative but the summary of the faith that Paul says he received and handed on to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 15:3-5), a formula commonly argued to be very early. Writing from Ephesus about 53 or 54, Paul also named Christ as the Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7), the earliest surviving Christian text to do so, though not yet evidence of an annual feast. No ancient source fixes the year of the event.
The feast cannot be traced to its beginning. It comes into view in the second century already established, and already kept differently in different places. About 155 Polycarp of Smyrna visited Anicetus of Rome, and the two discussed the day on which it should be kept. Neither persuaded the other, and Anicetus yielded to Polycarp the celebration of the Eucharist in his church as a mark of respect. Irenaeus recalled the meeting in a letter of the 190s, which Eusebius preserved more than a century later; in Arthur Cushman McGiffert's translation, Irenaeus writes that "they parted from each other in peace, both those who observed, and those who did not, maintaining the peace of the whole church." The earliest text written for the feast itself is the Peri Pascha of Melito of Sardis, usually dated about 160 to 170, evidently preached for a vigil on the night of the fourteenth of Nisan that held the Passion and the Resurrection together in one night. It recounts the Passover of Exodus 12 and then expounds it as fulfilled in Christ. Known only by its title until a manuscript was recovered in Upper Egypt in 1940, it says near its opening, in an English translation whose translator the hosting page does not name, that "The mystery of the passover is new and old, eternal and temporal, corruptible and incorruptible, mortal and immortal."
The churches of Asia kept Pascha on the fourteenth of Nisan whatever the day of the week; Rome, with synods in Palestine, Pontus, Gaul and Osrhoene, kept it only on the following Sunday. In the 190s Victor of Rome moved to cut off the churches of Asia. Polycrates of Ephesus answered him by naming those who had kept the fourteenth day and now awaited the resurrection, among them the apostle Philip, John who had reclined on the Lord's breast, Polycarp and Melito, and by appealing to the custom of his own family: Irenaeus, citing the precedent of Polycarp and Anicetus, urged Victor toward peace, and the excommunication was not carried through. No surviving text on either side calls the other heretical; the dispute concerned the day each church had received, never the Resurrection itself. Eusebius is the only substantial source for the controversy, and the name given to the Asian party, , from the Latin for the fourteenth, was applied by the side that prevailed.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) appoints readings for four services of Easter, the same in every year except at the Principal Service. At the Great Vigil the Old Testament lessons are Genesis 1:1-2:3, the creation; Genesis 3, the fall; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18; 8:6-20; 9:8-13, the flood and the covenant with Noah; Genesis 22:1-18, the binding of Isaac; Exodus 14:10-15:1, the crossing of the Red Sea; Isaiah 4:2-6; Isaiah 55:1-11, the invitation to all who thirst; Ezekiel 36:24-28, the promise of clean water and a new heart; Ezekiel 37:1-14, the valley of dry bones; Daniel 3:1-28, the three young men in the furnace; Jonah 1:1-2:10; and Zephaniah 3:12-20. The psalm is Psalm 114, the Epistle Romans 6:3-11, and the Gospel Matthew 28:1-10. The Early Service takes one of the Vigil's Old Testament lessons, with the same psalm, Epistle and Gospel.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps Easter with four services. The first, the Great Vigil, is the night liturgy that passes from Holy Saturday into Easter Day, and it has the four-part shape common to modern Western rites: a service of light, in which the new fire is struck, the Paschal candle lit and carried in, and the Exsultet sung; a service of lessons from the Old Testament, with psalms, canticles and prayers; Christian initiation, by baptism or by the renewal of baptismal vows; and the first Eucharist of Easter. The day itself is then kept with an Early Service, the Principal Service and an Evening Service, each with appointed readings. The book provides two collects for Easter Day and the Proper Preface of Easter, which gives the reason for the day's thanksgiving: "for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who was offered for us, and has taken away the sin of the world; who by his death has destroyed death". The canticle that later American books and the 2019 book call the Pascha Nostrum descends from the anthems the 1549 book set before Matins on Easter Day, drawn from Romans 6 and 1 Corinthians 15, which the 1552 book directed to be said at Morning Prayer in place of the Venite; the verse that gives the canticle its name, 1 Corinthians 5:7, was added in later books.
The order of the night is itself the teaching. The congregation begins in the dark and receives the light before it hears a word of Scripture; it hears the history of deliverance, from the creation to the Red Sea and the prophets, before anyone is baptized or any vow renewed. A worshipper who renews the baptismal vows at the Vigil keeps it, as the fourth-century church did, as the night of baptism; then the newly baptized received the rites first and were taught their meaning in the week that followed. The day does not end in the morning. The Evening Service closes it with the two disciples at Emmaus, who walked with the risen Lord without knowing him and knew him at the table, in the breaking of the bread.
In the Eastern churches Paschal Matins begins in darkness shortly before midnight. Clergy and people leave the darkened church in procession with candles, cross, banners and the Gospel book, circle the building, and stand before its closed doors singing the Paschal Troparion, a hymn whose author and date are unknown and which was certainly in use by the fifth or sixth century: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!" The doors open, an image of the opened tomb, and Matins continues within. At its end the Paschal Homily is read, traditionally with no one seated. It has long carried the name of John Chrysostom, but Migne printed it among works wrongly ascribed to him, and Henry Savile and Bernard Montfaucon rejected the attribution; the text itself is ancient and is read every year in Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic parishes. It welcomes alike those who have kept the fast and those who have not, and near its close it cries, in the translation hosted by Anglicans Online, "O death, where is thy sting? O Hell, where is thy victory? Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!"
The medieval West gave the day its own music and drama. The sequence Victimae paschali laudes, attributed to Wipo of Burgundy in the eleventh century though other authors have been proposed, was the only Easter sequence kept when the Missal of 1570 reduced the sequences to four, and it is still sung in the Roman rite. The sung dialogue Quem quaeritis, between the angel at the tomb and the three Marys, entered the liturgy as a trope in the tenth century; Æthelwold of Winchester describes it at Easter Matins in the Regularis Concordia, and it is widely counted the root of medieval liturgical drama, though as liturgy it has long since lapsed. English parish churches kept an Easter Sepulchre, usually in the north wall of the chancel, where a cross and the reserved Host were laid from Good Friday until Easter morning. Most were destroyed or defaced at the Reformation and the custom has lapsed, though stone niches survive at Heckington and Hawton and rarer timber examples at Cowthorpe and Coity.
Later customs carried the feast out of doors. Before sunrise on Easter Sunday 1732 the unmarried young men of the Moravian community at Herrnhut, in Saxony, went up to the new burial ground on the Hutberg to sing, and the whole congregation joined them the next year; Moravian settlers carried the service to Salem, North Carolina, in 1772, and from there the sunrise service passed into general American Protestant use.
Primary sources. Eusebius's Church History, Book V, chapters 23 to 25, in Arthur Cushman McGiffert's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 1 (1890), is at New Advent; it is the only substantial account of the second-century controversy and preserves the letters of Polycrates and Irenaeus, and his Life of Constantine, Book III, chapters 18 to 20, also at New Advent, carries Constantine's letter after Nicaea, the only surviving trace of the Council's ruling on Easter. Melito of Sardis's Peri Pascha, the earliest surviving sermon for the feast, is online at christianwritings.org in a translation whose translator is not named; Stuart George Hall's Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (Oxford, 1979) is the scholarly edition. Egeria's account of the Jerusalem vigil is in M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe's translation, The Pilgrimage of Etheria (SPCK, 1919), chapter XXXVIII, free at archive.org, an eyewitness description of the night in fourth-century Jerusalem. Gregory of Nazianzus's Oration 45, The Second Oration on Easter, in the translation of Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow (1894), is at New Advent, where Tertullian's On Baptism and Cyril of Jerusalem's lectures to the newly baptized may also be read. Augustine's Sermon 230 is in Edmund Hill's translation, The Works of Saint Augustine: Sermons III/7 (230-272B) (New City Press), full text at archive.org, with the translator's note on the sermon's disputed occasion. The Paschal Homily is at ; a different English translation is at the . Bede's chapter on the English months is in Faith Wallis, (Liverpool University Press), pp. 53-54, quoted with Roger Pearse's discussion at . The Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals of 1647 is at , the clearest record of the feast's suppression in England. The Prayer Book texts are free online: the 1549 Easter Week readings at , and the from the Anglican Church in North America.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 sought one date for the whole church, but no canon on Easter survives among its twenty, and the ruling is known only from the letter Constantine sent afterward to the churches, preserved in Eusebius's Life of Constantine. The letter asks that the feast be kept by all, everywhere, on one and the same day, and the reason it gives is separation from the Jews: it calls it unworthy to follow their practice in keeping the feast, says that they have impiously stained their hands with enormous sin and are justly blinded in soul for it, calls them a detestable crowd, and urges that Christians have nothing in common with them. Nor did the Council supply a method of reckoning. The nineteen-year lunar cycle was worked out at Alexandria in the decades that followed, and the bishops of Alexandria, Athanasius and after him Cyril, announced each year's date in their Festal Letters. Rome, using a different date for the equinox and a different lunar cycle, did not always reach the same Sunday until Dionysius Exiguus, about 525, extended the Alexandrian tables for Roman use.
The division between East and West that remains is one of calendars, not doctrine. Gregory XIII's bull Inter gravissimas, signed on 24 February 1582, reformed the calendar so that Easter might again be reckoned correctly, and 15 October followed 4 October that year. Most Orthodox churches kept the Julian calendar and the older tables, so that the two traditions, applying the same principle, keep Easter on the same Sunday in about three years in ten. Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar only under the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, which took effect in 1752 and annexed Easter tables computed by the Astronomer Royal, James Bradley (1692-1762), thereafter printed in the Book of Common Prayer. A proposal for a common date, made at Aleppo in 1997, was never adopted.
Long before the reckoning was settled, the night of the feast had become the church's chief occasion for baptism. Tertullian, at Carthage around 200, called the Passover an especially solemn day for baptism, adding in the same chapter that every day is the Lord's and every hour fit for it. In fourth-century Jerusalem Lent was given to instructing those to be baptized, and the lectures of about 348 to 350 that bear the name of Cyril of Jerusalem explain the rites to the newly baptized only in Easter week, after they had received them. The pilgrim Egeria saw the vigil kept there about 381 to 384. In M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe's translation, she records that "the children when they have been baptised and clothed, and when they issue from the font, are led with the bishop first to the Anastasis", the church of the Resurrection. At Hippo, Augustine preached through the eight days to the newly baptized, who kept their white garments until the following Sunday. In one sermon, whose occasion scholars have placed on Easter Day itself or in the octave, he takes up the psalm verse his hearers had been singing, that this is the day which the Lord has made, and tells them: "What you are singing, you see, is what you are, if you are living good lives."
In the West the vigil itself drifted. From the eighth century it was begun ever earlier, in the evening, then in the afternoon, and at last on the morning of Holy Saturday. A Roman decree of 1951 permitted its return to the night, at first experimentally, and the reform of the whole of Holy Week that took effect on Palm Sunday, 25 March 1956, followed; the stated reason was that the people might attend. The Great Vigil appears among the proper liturgies of the American Prayer Book of 1979, and the Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps it.
In the Reformation some asked whether the feast should be kept at all. The Westminster Directory of 1645 rejected festival days as without warrant in Scripture, and an Ordinance of Parliament of 8 June 1647 abolished Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide as festivals in England and Wales, granting in the same act a monthly day of recreation to scholars, apprentices and servants. Within Anglicanism the day itself was never in question. Easter has always been a red-letter feast, and the Prayer Book of 1662 restored it with the whole calendar of feasts.
Latin, Greek and most Christian languages call the feast by a form of Pascha, from the Aramaic for the Passover, so that its name confesses Christ as the Passover lamb. For the English word the only ancient witness is a sentence of Bede's The Reckoning of Time (725), which in Faith Wallis's translation says that the month Eosturmonath "was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month". The translation goes on to say that the season is now called by her name; Roger Pearse has argued (2024) that the sense is rather that the season took the name of the month. No other ancient source mentions such a goddess, and the question touches only the English and German name, not the feast. Preaching about 383, Gregory of Nazianzus gave the church's estimate of the day, in the translation of Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow: "The Lord's Passover, the Passover, and again I say the Passover to the honour of the Trinity. This is to us a Feast of feasts and a Solemnity of solemnities."
At the Principal Service the psalm, Psalm 118:14-17, 22-24, and the second reading, Colossians 3:1-4 or Acts 10:34-43, are the same each year, but the first reading and the Gospel follow the three-year cycle. In Year A the first reading is Acts 10:34-43 or Exodus 14:10-14, 21-31, and the Gospel is John 20:1-10, which may continue through verse 18. In Year B the first reading is Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 25:6-9, and the Gospel is Mark 16:1-8. In Year C the first reading is Acts 10:34-43 or Isaiah 51:9-11, and the Gospel is Luke 24:1-12. The Evening Service appoints Daniel 12:1-3, Psalm 136, 1 Corinthians 5:6-8, and Luke 24:13-35.
The Vigil lessons tell the history of salvation from the creation through the deliverances of Israel to the promises of the prophets, and those read come before anyone is baptized. Among them, as in every modern Western form of the Vigil, is the crossing of the Red Sea, which Psalm 114 sings and which Year A may read again on the morning itself. Romans 6 then interprets the night's baptisms, as burial with Christ into his death so as to walk with him in newness of life, and Matthew brings the women to the empty tomb. At the Principal Service Colossians asks those raised with Christ to seek the things that are above, and Acts gives Peter's preaching of the Resurrection to the household of Cornelius. Psalm 118 supplies both the stone the builders rejected and the verse, this is the day which the Lord has made, which Augustine took up in his Easter preaching. Because each year reads a different evangelist, and the Vigil reads Matthew, the congregation hears the four Gospel accounts of the morning side by side over the cycle, with their differences in detail over who came to the tomb and what was seen there. The Evening Service turns to the end of the day: Daniel's promise that those who sleep in the dust shall awake, Paul's naming of Christ as the Passover lamb, and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who knew the risen Christ in the breaking of the bread.
The core of this selection is old. The first Prayer Book of 1549 appointed Colossians 3:1-7 and John 20:1-10 for Easter Day, and for the Monday after it Acts 10:34-43 with Luke's account of the road to Emmaus, so that the 2019 book's Acts and its Evening Gospel both continue the readings of the first English Easter week. The pairing of Colossians 3 with John 20 is reported through 1662 and the American books of 1928 and 1979 to the present book, where it stands in Year A, a span of some 470 years. What the modern books added is choice: an Old Testament lesson or Acts as the first reading, a cycle of Gospels across three years, and the lessons of the Vigil.
Much of the feast's keeping at home is the breaking of the fast. In the account of the old Catholic Encyclopedia, eggs, forbidden through Lent, came back to the table on Easter Day and were colored red as a sign of Easter joy. Greek households still dye eggs red on Holy Thursday and crack them against one another on Easter Sunday; in Poland baskets of eggs, bread, salt and meat are blessed on Holy Saturday for the Easter breakfast; and in the Orthodox Slavic world kulich and paskha are blessed before the Paschal liturgy. The chocolate egg is recent: Fry's of Bristol made hollow chocolate eggs in 1873, and Cadbury followed in 1875. The Easter hare first appears in print in 1682, in a dissertation describing a belief among Protestants of Alsace, the Palatinate and Hesse.
Further reading. Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992; 2nd ed. 2005) describes the Easter Sepulchre rite in the late medieval English parish, and is recommended for the English customs that the Reformation ended.
Online resources. The Catholic Encyclopedia's articles on Easter and the Easter Controversy, though dated and written from within one tradition, gather the evidence for the feast's names, customs and reckoning. The Gospels of the day are available at Bible Gateway in the English Standard Version: Matthew 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-8, Luke 24:1-12, Luke 24:13-35, and John 20:1-18.
Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may, by your life-giving Spirit, be delivered from sin and raised from death; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.