We don't always celebrate Easter the same day as everyone else. This year, while many people are having Easter egg hunts and eating chocolate bunnies, we Orthodox are celebrating Palm Sunday. My sons were born in Greece and I have always tried to keep up the Greek traditions for them. You might say that when in Rome, etc., but I have been Orthodox for more than 50 years and anyway am used to being different and not fitting in.
The main reason that Greek (and Russian, Serbian, etc.) Orthodox Easter sometimes falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter is that it must come after the Jewish Passover,which began last Wednesday and lasts for seven or eight days. The rest of the calculations for Easter, involving lunar calendars and something called a golden number, are really beyond me.
Added to this complicated business is the fact that many Orthodox did not accept the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced in 1582 (there is a reason for the word Orthodox) and still use the Julian or "old" calendar, which is 13 days behind. All Orthodox churches, however, celebrate Easter on the same day.
So on Saturday, Eastern Orthodox people will go to church around midnight and wait silently for the priest to bring out the candle which represents the new light and to announce "Christos Anesti" or whatever the word is in the local language. The Russian is something like "Christos Vaskreshi". The flame passes from candle to candle until every taper is lit, and the people try to keep the flame going until they get home, when they will smoke a cross over the doorsill and light the lamp in front of their own icon stands.
Our church stands on a hill in San Francisco. When the Easter service is over, you can wait at the bottom of the hill and watch a candlelit procession as some 700 smiling, sleepy people guard their little flames on the way to their cars. Driving home, usually at about two in the morning, you can sometimes see another small flame dimly illuminating a nearby car.
(Giotto, Palm Sunday)
4 comments:
You wrote:
"The main reason that Greek (and Russian, Serbian, etc.) Orthodox Easter sometimes falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter is that it must come after the Jewish Passover,which began last Wednesday and lasts for seven or eight days."
This often-repeated claim is false. The true reason that Julian Easter often comes one, four, or five weeks later than Gregorian Easter is that the Julian paschalion is so far out of true. The Julian paschalion's ecclesiastical full moon is 4 to 5 days behind the Gregorian callendar's and roughly 3 to 5 days behind the astronomical full moon. My eyes told me that the moon was full last week. Your church's paschalion says it's not full until tonight. So of course Julian Easter will always fall later than a Jewish festival that occurs at the time of the full moon.
I'll look it up, but as I said, Easter for the Orthodox church falls on the same day whether the observer uses the Gregorian calendar (as do most) or the Julian (usually restricted to monasteries and very old-fashioned people.)
This is a more controversial subject than I thought. The Wikipedia site is "under dispute" on the matter. Another site said "The two churches vary on the definition of the vernal equinox and the full moon. The Eastern Church sets the date of Easter according to the actual, astronomical full moon and the actual equinox as observed along the meridian of Jerusalem, site of the Crucifixion and Resurrection." It adds that "The Eastern Orthodox Church also applies the formula so that Easter always falls after Passover, since the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ took place after he entered Jerusalem to celebrate Passover."
Anyway, thanks for reading my blog, and happy Easter to you!
Thanks for your replies.
The "dispute" banner was put on the Wikipedia article by some who think that the content "needs to be sanitised of its Christian slant"! (Those are the exact words posted to the associated discussion board by one of them.) So the content about the spurious nature of the Zonaras Proviso is not in dispute. But since I wrote that part of the Wikipedia article, it isn't really a second opinion from the one I put in my previous comment here. Perhaps, however, you can believe His Eminence, Archbishop Peter, who writes as follows in his book The Church of the Ancient Councils (emphasis in boldface added):
"The refusal to celebrate Pascha "with the Jews" (meta ton Ioudaioun) meant that, in the ancient canonical texts, we were not to celebrate this feast by basing its date on the method of calculation of the Jews. But, contrary to what was believed later, this refusal in no way was aimed at avoiding an accidental celebrating of Pascha and Passover together. This is clearly shown by the fact that during the fourth century after Nicea, Christian and Jewish Paschas coincided several times...In the Middle Ages, when it became impossible to celebrate the Jewish and Christian Paschas together because of the loss of time in the Julian calendar, the idea that a concelebration of the feasts had been forbidden by church law was generally accepted; this idea, however, was based on a literal but erroneous understanding of the expression meta ton Ioudaion. Thus Zonaras in commenting on canon 7 of the Holy Apostles stated concerning the Jews that their non-festal Pascha must come first and then our Pascha should follow. Matthew Blastares, who summed up the knowledge and opinions of his time on the Pascha question, indicated that one of the norms to follow in determining the date of Pascha is the non-coincidence of Pascha and Passover. "
The idea that " The Eastern Church sets the date of Easter according to the actual, astronomical full moon and the actual equinox as observed along the meridian of Jerusalem" is another mistake that has taken on a life of its own, even though it is obviously false. If the Eastern Churches did indeed use the true moon, true equinox, and meridian of Jerusalem, Eastern Easter would almost always agree with Western Easter. What happened is this: A synod of Orthodox Bishops, under the presidency of the Patriarch of Constantinople, agreed in 1923 to use a paschalion based on the true sun, true moon, and meridian of Jerusalem. This was part of the original scheme of the Revised Julian Calendar. When the bishops got back home, however, they implemented only the solar part of the RJC. The lunar part was simply dropped. However, the fact of the bishops' agreement was reported in the western astronomical literature, and was incorporated into a standard reference work, the Explanatory Supplement to the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac. People read this work knowing nothing about Eastern ecclesiastical and cultural politics, and assumed that the bishops' agreement must have been put into effect, when, in fact, it hadn't. Thus was born the completely mistaken tale that the Eastern church uses precise astronomical computations at the meridian of Jerusalem.
Anyhow, have a blessed Holy Week and Pascha.
Post a Comment