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Easter is the opening of the season of Eastertide. With the cry, “The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed”, the church celebrates the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The celebration of Christ’s resurrection continues for forty days, commencing with Easter itself and concluding with Ascension Sunday.
It is important to note that Easter is not the close of the Lenten season; it is the opening of the Easter season. Lent officially concludes at noon on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as the church keeps vigil, awaiting Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
Easter – the Feast of the Resurrection of Christ – is the greatest and oldest celebration of the Christian Church, both in the Western (Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant) and Eastern traditions. The long preparation of Lent and the resulting forty-day celebration of the resurrection following Good Friday indicate the central importance of Easter. It – and not Christmas – is the most important celebration of the Christian year.
The church has celebrated Easter and Eastertide in many ways. In the earliest church, catechumens were baptized early on Easter Day, joined the church and received their first holy communion. In the middle ages, the night before Easter was celebrated by the illumination of the churches awaiting the Day of Resurrection. In both the eastern churches and in many Reformation churches, the congregation would gather on Saturday night, as they waited for the dawn that would signal Christ’s resurrection. Picking up on the theme of awaiting the dawn, an Easter Sunrise Service was added to the church’s liturgy by the Moravians in the early eighteenth century, and that tradition spread across all of Christendom. The liturgical color for Easter is white.
What is the derivation of the name, “Easter”? The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) stated that it comes from an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess, “Eostre”. There is no doubt that, like Christmas, the church “baptized” a pagan spring fertility holiday, adapting it to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. The remnants of that pagan holiday are reflected today in “Easter bunnies” and “Easter eggs” – both reminders of fertility.
Unlike Christmas, the date for Easter is movable. It is determined by the Pascal Full Moon (or the date of the full moon in the latter part of March or in early April). Thus, Easter will fall in any given year between March 21 and April 25.
Pentecost is traditionally one of the three major holy days (“feast days”) of the Christian Year – the other two being Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. It’s title, “Pentecost”, simply means “fifty days”, as it occurs fifty days after Easter Sunday. Therefore, like Easter, it is also a “moveable feast”, not set, as is Christmas on a specific date. Another name for Pentecost is “Whitsunday” or “White Sunday” because it is traditionally a day for the baptizing of converts to Christianity who wear white robes. In reality, the color for Pentecost/Whitsunday is red, to symbolize fire and blood – the fiery descent of the Holy Spirit and the blood of martyrs.
The Christian feast of Pentecost is actually built upon the Jewish festival of the Feast of First Fruits (Deut. 16:9), which was also called “Pentecost” because the Feast of First Fruit comes fifty days after Passover! As the Christian Pentecost is one of the Church’s three most important festivals, so the Feast of First Fruits was one of ancient Israel’s three festivals.
The Feast of First Fruits (Deut. 16:9-12; Lev. 23:15-21) was to occur at the harvest of the spring wheat, seven weeks after its planting close to Passover. All were to gather at the Temple to make their offerings out of the abundance of their harvest and to thank God. After the offering was given at the Temple, the family was to gather for a celebratory meal.
But this meal was not for them alone. They were to invite to the meal “your male and female slaves, the Levites resident in your towns, the strangers, the orphans and the widows” with whom the family has a relationship in order to share your abundance with them. And why should each family share its abundance with the poor? “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (Dt. 16:12a); you were poor and powerless once yourself, so remember those who are now poor or powerless in your midst. Thus, the Feast of First Fruits was not only a religious holiday of thanksgiving, of celebration and of feasting; it was also a vehicle to reverse poverty and powerlessness in the community.
As the Jewish feast of First Fruits celebrated the liberation and empowerment of the nation’s poor, so the Christian feast of Pentecost is designed to celebrate the liberation and empowerment of God’s people through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is popularly called the “Birthday of the Church” (even though the church was birthed at the resurrection of Jesus, and even though its origins lay in the congregation of ancient Israel). It is so called because on this day, the Holy Spirit fell upon the gathered followers of Jesus with “tongues of fire”, and the church was launched into its mission of bringing the good news of liberation and salvation through Jesus to the world (Acts 2:1-21).
Thus, Pentecost occupies a very strategic place in the Christian Year, for it stands between that half of the year that celebrates the coming of Jesus Christ and the second half of the year celebrating the creation and mission of the church. It concludes the church’s celebration of the advent, birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. And it introduces the observance of the “church militant”, as we rehearse and encourage ourselves from June through November of a church deeply engaged in the world, bringing good news in sign, deed and word of God’s work to transform the world into the world as God intended it to be!