Commontide
Red-Letter Day
also known as Pascha, Resurrection Sunday, The Great Day, The Queen of Feasts
Easter is the feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the day on which the Church proclaims that the crucified Lord rose from the dead. It is the oldest and greatest of the Christian festivals, kept every year on a Sunday reckoned from the spring full moon, and it opens the Great Fifty Days that run to Pentecost. Western and Eastern Christians compute its date differently, and so usually keep it on different Sundays; it is one feast.
On this day the Church says that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, rose from the dead. That is the whole of it. Everything else the Church does in the year stands or falls with the claim made on this morning.
The earliest Christians reached for the Passover to say what had happened. Writing from Ephesus around the year 53, Paul told the Corinthians that "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us," and the sentence has never stopped working: the lamb whose blood turned away death in Egypt, and the man who went to his death at the Passover and did not stay dead, are held together in one thought. When the annual feast first becomes visible to us, that is the shape it already has. Around the year 160 a bishop of Sardis named Melito preached through the night on the Exodus and then on Christ, and his sermon survives; it calls the mystery of the passover new and old, eternal and temporal, mortal and immortal, old as concerns the law and new as concerns the gospel. He was preaching to people who had fasted, in the dark, waiting.
We cannot document the moment this feast began. What we can document is the moment it first comes into the light, and by then it is already old and already contested. Around 155 Polycarp of Smyrna came to Rome to talk with Anicetus about which day to keep it. Neither persuaded the other, and they parted, as Eusebius records the letter of Irenaeus, "in peace, both those who observed, and those who did not, maintaining the peace of the whole church." A generation later the argument grew sharp; a bishop of Rome tried to cut off the churches of Asia, and Polycrates of Ephesus answered him by naming the dead, the apostles and bishops of Asia who had kept the fourteenth day and now lay awaiting the resurrection. Even at its bitterest the quarrel was never about whether Christ was risen. It was about when to say so.
What the feast did with the rest of the year is the surest sign of what it meant. In the fourth century it became the night on which the Church made Christians. Tertullian had already called the Passover the most solemn day for baptism, adding in the same breath that every day is the Lord's and no hour lacks the grace. By Cyril's Jerusalem the whole of Lent was instruction for those who would be baptized on this night, and the meaning of what they had undergone was explained to them only afterwards, in Easter week, with the doors shut. The pilgrim Egeria watched it happen and wrote it down: the newly baptized, clothed and coming up from the font, were led with the bishop first to the Anastasis, the place of the Resurrection itself. Lent exists because of this night. So does the Church's long labour over the calendar, which produced Alexandria's festal letters, Bede's tables, and in the end the calendar the world now keeps.
And the day has always insisted on giving itself away. The sermon read every year at Paschal Matins in the East tells the negligent and the faithful alike to come in: let no one grieve at his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free. Augustine, preaching to people newly washed, told them that if they wanted to be the day which the Lord has made, they should live good lives. The Church's own prayer for the morning says it as plainly as it can be said: 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, and by his rising to life again has won for us everlasting life.
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.
You may come to this day carrying something that has not yet been undone: a grief, a habit, a fear of dying that no argument has touched. The feast does not ask you to bring anything but yourself. The sermon the Eastern churches have read on this morning for fifteen centuries makes a point of saying so, calling in those who kept the fast and those who did not, the first and the last alike, on the same terms. The oldest thing the Church did with this night was to baptize people into it and only afterwards explain what had happened to them, which is a way of saying that the day is meant to be entered before it is understood. What in you is waiting to be told that death has been destroyed?
The Resurrection itself lies outside the reach of historical method: no non-Christian contemporary attests it, and the year cannot be securely fixed. Two modern astronomical reconstructions propose Friday 7 April AD 30 and Friday 3 April AD 33, the only years in Pilate's prefecture on which 14 Nisan fell on a Friday; Humphreys and Waddington argued for AD 33 in 1983. These are modern reconstructions, not ancient testimony, and there is no consensus. A prior question is likewise unresolved: the Synoptic Gospels present the Last Supper as a Passover meal, implying death on 15 Nisan, while John has the authorities not yet having eaten the Passover at the trial and places the death at the hour of the lambs, implying 14 Nisan. Three harmonizations are proposed in the modern literature (two calendars in simultaneous use in Jerusalem; differing day-boundary conventions; a loose Synoptic use of "Passover" for the whole span), and none commands agreement.
The feast has its own documentary record, and it begins later than the event. Paul's identification of Christ with the Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7, c. 53 to 54) is the earliest surviving Christian text on the theme, but it is typology, not evidence of an annual observance. The first hard evidence of the feast is Melito of Sardis's Peri Pascha, c. 160 to 170, an actual paschal homily rather than a later report; the manuscript was recovered in Upper Egypt in 1940, and before that the work was known only by title. The meeting of Polycarp and Anicetus, c. 155, reported by Eusebius quoting Irenaeus, implies that the feast and its regional divergence were older still. That the origin is unrecoverable should be said plainly.
The controversy of the second century turned on the day. The churches of Asia Minor kept Pascha on 14 Nisan whatever the weekday, claiming apostolic custom through John and Philip; Rome, with synods in Palestine, Pontus, Gaul and Osrhoene, kept it only on the following Sunday. A second flare-up at Laodicea, c. 170, set Melito against Apolinarius of Hierapolis. In the 190s Victor of Rome moved to excommunicate the Asian churches when Polycrates of Ephesus refused to conform; Irenaeus intervened, citing the Polycarp precedent, and the excommunication was not carried through. No surviving text on either side calls the other heretical: the fracture was disciplinary. "Quartodeciman," the fourteenth-day label, is a retrospective term applied by the side that prevailed. Eusebius is the only substantial source for the whole episode, and his witness must be graded in two parts: the letters he quotes are contemporary primary documents, his connecting narrative is interpretive and roughly 130 years later. No Quartodeciman text survives outside what he chose to quote.
Nicaea in 325 is routinely credited with more than the record will bear. No canon on Easter survives among the Council's twenty. The ruling is known only through Constantine's circular letter, preserved in Eusebius's , which says the feast "ought to be kept by all and in every place on one and the same day." The same letter gives a rationale that is not softened here: it declares it unworthy to follow the practice of the Jews, and says, "Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd." That is a primary imperial document contemporary with the Council, and the words are its own. Nor did Nicaea supply a formula. The nineteen-year Metonic computation is an Alexandrian achievement of the following decades, retrojected onto Nicaea's authority later; Alexandria, chosen for its astronomical school, computed the date and announced it by annual festal letter, and Rome, using a different equinox and different lunar mathematics, did not consistently agree with it until Dionysius Exiguus aligned the tables around 525. Regional conformity came later and locally: Oswiu of Northumbria ruled for the Roman computation at Whitby in 664, after his own household had kept Easter on different Sundays. Bede's account of that synod, written c. 731, is the standard source and is frankly partisan for the Roman side.
The Great Vigil is the feast's oldest engine, and the West nearly lost it. From the eighth century the night service drifted earlier, into the evening, the afternoon, and finally the morning of Holy Saturday, where it stayed for roughly eleven centuries until the decree Dominicae Resurrectionis of 9 February 1951 restored it to the night and the general decree of 16 November 1955 reformed the whole of Holy Week, effective on Palm Sunday, 25 March 1956. Its Western shape is fourfold: new fire and the Paschal candle with the Exsultet sung over it; the Old Testament lessons, twelve in the medieval and Tridentine books, seven in modern Roman use; baptism or the renewal of vows; and the first Eucharist of Easter.
In the East, Paschal Matins begins in darkness before midnight. The people leave the church in a candle-lit procession with cross, banners and Gospel book, circle the building, and stand before shut doors singing the Paschal Troparion until the doors open on the image of the opened tomb. At the end the Paschal Homily is read, traditionally with no one seated; its ascription to John Chrysostom was rejected by Savile and Montfaucon and placed among the spuria by Migne, though the text is genuinely ancient and is read annually in every Orthodox parish.
Older Western customs have fared unevenly. The Easter Sepulchre, a chancel recess in which the cross and reserved Host were laid from Good Friday until Easter morning, was widespread in English parishes and destroyed or defaced at the Reformation; stone examples survive at Heckington and Hawton, rare timber ones at Cowthorpe and Coity. The sung dialogue Quem quaeritis, between the angel and the three Marys, entered the liturgy as a tenth-century trope and is widely credited as the root of medieval liturgical drama; Æthelwold of Winchester describes it in the Regularis Concordia, in a manuscript of about 980. The Easter sequence Victimae paschali laudes, attributed to Wipo of Burgundy, was the only Easter sequence to survive the Tridentine reduction of 1570 and is still sung.
Much of the feast's keeping migrated to the table and the household, and almost all of it is fast-breaking. Polish families bring a basket of eggs, bread, salt and meat to be blessed on Holy Saturday for Święconka; Slavic households bless kulich and paskha; Greek households dye eggs red on Holy Thursday, crack them point to point on Easter Sunday, and break the fast on magiritsa after the midnight liturgy. Ukrainian pysanky, wax-resist dyed eggs, are recognized by UNESCO as intangible heritage. The chocolate egg is late and commercial: Fry's of Bristol solved the hollow mould in 1873 and Cadbury followed in 1875. The Easter hare is older in print than the rabbit is in English, first attested in Georg Franck von Franckenau's dissertation of 1682 among Protestant communities of Alsace, the Palatinate and Hesse.
The quotations above are drawn from the following. Paul on Christ our Passover is 1 Corinthians 5:7. Melito's "new and old" passage is the introduction to Peri Pascha; the online text used names no translator, and the work should be re-sourced to Stuart George Hall, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (Oxford, 1979), or to Alistair Stewart's translation, before an edition is named. Irenaeus on Polycarp and Anicetus parting in peace is Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica V.24.17, and Polycrates' letter is at V.24, both in the translation of Arthur Cushman McGiffert, NPNF second series vol. 1 (1890). Constantine's letter is Eusebius, Vita Constantini III.18 to 19, NPNF second series vol. 1. Tertullian on the Passover as the day for baptism, and on every day being the Lord's, is De baptismo 19. Egeria on the newly baptized led to the Anastasis is the Itinerarium ch. XXXVIII, in the rendering reproduced in Louis Duchesne, Christian Worship (English edition, apparently drawing on M. L. McClure). The Paschal Homily is quoted from the Anglicans Online text; a second and materially different English translation exists at the Orthodox Church in America, and the two must never be blended. Augustine's "live good lives" is Sermon 230, translated by Edmund Hill, O.P., in The Works of Saint Augustine, Sermons III/7 (230 to 272B), New City Press; the translator notes that the sermon's occasion is disputed. The Proper Preface of Easter is The Book of Common Prayer (2019), Supplemental Texts, Proper Prefaces, PDF p. 162. The Paschal Troparion is the standard liturgical English, with no single named translator; its author and date are unknown. Bede on Eosturmonath is De temporum ratione ch. 15, translated by Faith Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning of Time (Liverpool University Press, 1988), pp. 53 to 54. The Westminster Directory and the 1647 Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals are quoted from the primary texts (the latter in Firth and Rait, via British History Online), and the Quaker rule from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Rules of Discipline of 1806. Humphreys and Waddington, "Dating the Crucifixion," is Nature 306 (1983), 743 to 746.
The modern split is calendrical, not theological. The Gregorian reform of 1582 recalibrated the solar calendar and the lunar tables in the West; the East retained the Julian calendar and the older tables, whose reckonings of equinox and full moon now run behind the sky. It is often said that Orthodox practice adds a rule that Pascha must follow that year's Passover; it does not. Nicaea's own direction was that the date be computed independently of Jewish reckoning, and the supposed rule is a twelfth-century inference of the canonist Zonaras from Apostolic Canon 7. The two calendars now coincide in roughly thirty per cent of years. Britain came onto the Gregorian calendar under the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, effective in 1752, which annexed Easter tables computed by the Astronomer Royal James Bradley (1692 to 1762), the ancestor of the tables still bound into Anglican prayer books. Reunification has been attempted and not achieved: the Aleppo proposal of March 1997 sought a common astronomical computation from the Jerusalem meridian, explicitly rejecting a fixed calendar date, and was never adopted; conversations resumed from November 2022 toward the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea in 2025, with no unification implemented.
The English name is a separate and much smaller question than it is usually made to bear. Most of the Christian world calls the feast by a form of Pascha, from the Aramaic, which carries the Passover claim in the word itself. English and German do not. The sole ancient source for a goddess behind the English name is one sentence of Bede's De temporum ratione, ch. 15, which in Faith Wallis's translation says that Eosturmonath "was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month," and that the English "now designate that Paschal season by her name." Roger Pearse has argued (2024) that the sense is rather that the season took the name of the month, so that English "Easter" descends from the month-name. There is no corroborating ancient attestation anywhere; some scholars suspect Bede was guessing at an obscure name. The question is genuinely open in both directions, and it concerns a name in two languages, not the content of the feast.
Whether the feast should be kept at all was contested in the Reformation era, and the suppression records are among the best evidence of what people thought it was for. Calvin held that set holy days led easily to superstition. The Westminster Directory of 1645 was blunter: "Festival days, vulgarly called Holy-days, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued." In Scotland the fifth of the Five Articles of Perth (approved 25 August 1618) required the observance of Easter and was bitterly resisted; the Glasgow Assembly of 1638 declared the articles null and prohibited both their defence and their observance. In England the Ordinance for Abolishing of Festivals of 8 June 1647 recited that the feasts "have been heretofore superstitiously used and observed" and decreed that Easter and the rest "be no longer observed as Festivals or Holy-dayes"; the same ordinance legislated a secular substitute, a monthly second Tuesday of rest for scholars, apprentices and servants. Quakers went furthest, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's Rules of Discipline of 1806 barring participation in feasts and holy days "devised in man's will." The Prayer Book returned with the monarchy in 1660, and the 1662 book restored the whole festal calendar. Wesley's Sunday Service of 1784 abridged 1662 and struck most of the holy days, but kept Easter, which falls on a Sunday in any case.
Within Anglicanism the day itself was never in question; Easter has always been a red-letter feast. Its propers show an unusual stability: Colossians 3 and John 20 stand as the Easter Day Epistle and Gospel in 1549 and remain the primary pairing in 1662, 1928, 1979 and 2019, a span of some 470 years. The Easter Day collect descends from the Gregorian Sacramentary through Sarum to Cranmer's translation of 1549, sharpened at 1662, and substantially revised in 1979 in a direction closer to the older Gelasian form, which ACNA adopted in 2019. Behind that lies a gap worth naming: the Verona Sacramentary, the oldest surviving Roman liturgical book, has lost the three quires covering 1 January to 14 April, so the earliest Roman book is silent on the oldest feast.
Some local keepings are singular. Florence's Scoppio del Carro sends a firework cart hauled by white oxen to the Duomo on Easter morning. In the Philippines the Salubong brings two dawn processions together and a child dressed as an angel removes Mary's mourning veil. The sunrise service, now a generic American Protestant form, has a precise origin: the single young men of Herrnhut went up to the new burial ground before dawn on Easter Sunday 1732 and sang there, the whole congregation joined the next year, and Moravian settlers carried it to Salem, North Carolina, in 1772.
British (Received Pronunciation): Polycarp /ˈpɒlɪkɑːrp/; Pascha /ˈpɑː.skə/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Acts 10:34–43 or Exodus 14:10–14, 21–31Psalms 118:14–17, 22–24Colossians 3:1–4 or Acts 10:34–43John 20:1–10(11–18)
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.