This Being Easter Sunday

We will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar, said an announcement in a church bulletin for Easter Sunday. This shows that the church as an institution isn’t exempt from language lapses, dangling modifiers and all, just like classrooms, offices, and those eager, or bored, students in English classes.

And while we’re at eggs, how did this humble, ubiquitous and at times almost unaffordable food become a symbol of Easter?  Nowadays, it would be easy to credit the Western world, especially the US and Canada, with their practice of Easter egg hunts, foremost of which is the large Easter Egg Hunt by children on the White House lawn.  But the practice of giving eggs as gifts can actually be traced back all the way to the ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans.  For these peoples, the egg was a symbol of life.

It was a sacred symbol of the restoration of mankind after the Great Flood for the Egyptians.  For the Jews, the egg is the symbol of their departure from slavery from the Egyptians.  Christendom meanwhile regards the egg as the symbol of the Resurrection.

It may be noted that the egg, spring as a season, the idea of rebirth, the Passover, and the Resurrection are synonymous with Easter.

The Jewish Passover (or the archaic Pasch, from the Greek Paskha), the festival itself that commemorates the exodus of Hebrews from Egyptian captivity, happens to have a movable date because it is dependent on the phases of the moon.  As the Christian Church adopted this festivity in its biblical context and Christ’s Resurrection, together with the pagan spring festival, thus is Easter a movable feast.

As Easter dates varied and eventually became a contentious issue in the Early Church, the Middle Ages saw Easter observed on the Sunday after the vernal equinox, or the Sunday after the first full moon.  Still this was deemed imprecise because the moon referred to was the Paschal full moon of the ecclesiastical moon, which is quite apart from the astronomical moon.

One may note thus that the astronomical vernal equinox is a natural phenomenon with variable dates while the ecclesiastical full moon is fixed at March 21.  Hence the date of Easter was determined on ecclesiastical rules approximately calculating the astronomical phenomenon of the moon.

Thus the Christian world observes Easter as a movable Sunday feast whose dates cover as early as March 22 to as late as April 25 in the reckoning of the Gregorian calendar used by Western Christianity.  Eastern Christianity, which uses the Julian calendar (with a 13-day difference from the Gregorian calendar), also celebrates Easter as a movable feast on any day from April 4 to May 8.

This deviation of dates between Western and Eastern Christianity started in 1582 when the Catholic Church adopted the Gregorian calendar while the Eastern Orthodox Church continued to use the Julian calendar.  Thus today, 23 March 2008, Western Christianity, to which we as a predominantly Catholic country is affiliated, is Easter Sunday, while to the Eastern Orthodox Christians Easter Sunday will be observed on 27 April.

Interestingly, the 35 possible dates (covering 22 March to 25 April) for Easter Sunday show that the last time Easter was celebrated at the earliest possible date of 22 March was in 1818.  The next time that Easter will fall again on this date will be in 2285.  Today’s Easter is thus the second earliest, being on the 23rd of March.  The year 2160 will again see Easter Sunday on 23 March.

Easter’s latest possible date of 25 April was observed last in 1943.  This will happen again in 2038.  The second to last possible date of 24 April will be observed in 2011.

More confounding is that the Easter dates cycle repeats only after five million and seven hundred thousand (5,700,000) years.  The date that repeats as a day of Easter observance more than the other dates is April 19, which is celebrated two hundred twenty thousand and four hundred (220,400) times in one Easter date cycle, compared to the average of one hundred eighty-nine thousand and five hundred twenty-five (189,525) times of the other dates.

We may no longer be around for the next 23rd of March Easter Sunday, still and all there will always be the Pope’s annual Easter address of Urbi et orbi.  To the city and to the world…  Dateless.  Eternal.

(23 March 2008)