Pascha

Pascha is the Orthodox Church's name for Easter, the night and day on which she celebrates the Resurrection of Christ. The date moves from year to year, and Orthodox and Western Christians often keep it on different Sundays.

For Inquirers

Imagine a family that has spent weeks in a dark house, living on plain food, speaking quietly, and then, one midnight, throws every door open, lights every lamp, and shouts the same three words at one another for the next forty days: Christ is risen! That is roughly what happens in an Orthodox church on the night of Pascha. The word is the one Greek-speaking Christians use for Easter, and it comes from the Hebrew word for Passover, which the early Fathers understood to mean "passing over." The church starts the night in darkness, the people go out with candles and circle the building, and they come back to the closed doors, where the news is first sung; then the doors open on a church ablaze with light.[^owiki-pascha]

What Christians claim happened is simple to say and enormous to believe: Jesus was killed, and on the third day he was alive again, and his friends touched him and watched him eat fish. Orthodox Christians treat this as the center of their year. A leaflet on Holy Week says that the whole calendar year of the Church has Easter as its center of commemorations, and Easter is called the Feast of Feasts.[^fa-holyweek] The services are long and sung from beginning to end, and they are meant to be felt in the body, with candles, the kiss of peace, and a meal at the end of a long fast.

People expect Easter to be on a fixed date, as Christmas is, and it is not. It floats across the spring, tied to the moon and the calendar, and Orthodox Christians and most Western Christians frequently celebrate it a week or more apart, sometimes four or five weeks. Families split across traditions can find this strange, but the two sides use the same formula to find the date and compute it from different calendars, so the two Easters are one feast counted two ways.[^owiki-pascha]

Overview

• Pascha is the feast of the Resurrection of Christ, kept on a Sunday whose date changes each year. The Church calls it the Feast of Feasts, and it is the end point of Great Lent and Holy Week and the beginning of a fifty-day season that runs to Pentecost.
• The word comes from the Hebrew pesach, "passover," and the feast is read as the fulfilment of the Exodus: Christ is the Lamb, and the Church passes with him from death to life (Exodus 12.11; 1 Corinthians 5.7; John 1.29). See Passover.
• The central service is a night vigil: the Midnight Office, a candlelit procession, Paschal Matins with the Canon ascribed to St. John of Damascus, the Paschal sermon of St. John Chrysostom, and the Divine Liturgy, all in one continuous celebration.
• The Church's chief hymn is the troparion "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." The feast presents the Resurrection as victory over death, and as the Church's baptismal night.
• The date is set by the Church's Paschalion, a set of rules attributed to Nicaea and worked out at Alexandria. Because most Orthodox churches still reckon with the Julian calendar, their Pascha normally falls one or five weeks after Western Easter, occasionally four, and sometimes on the same day.

Summary

Pascha is the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, who in all four Gospels is found risen on the first day of the week (Matthew 28.1-8; Mark 16.1-8; Luke 24.1-12; John 20.1-10) and whom Paul says "was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15.3-8). OrthodoxWiki reports that evidence of a Christian Pascha appears from the mid-second century,[^paschalion] and by the fourth century St. Gregory the Theologian could call it "a Feast of feasts and a Solemnity of solemnities" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.21).[^or45] The feast gathers three things into one night. It remembers the Exodus, when Israel passed from slavery to freedom; it celebrates the Resurrection, when Christ passed from death to life; and it is the night on which the Church traditionally baptised her catechumens, who passed from the old life into the new.[^oca-sat]

The Orthodox Church keeps this night with a service that the OCA says is "not merely an historical reenactment" of the Resurrection.[^oca-easter] The Paschal procession, the Canon, the sermon, and the Liturgy are meant to bring the faithful into the event, and the Canon's third ode, which echoes Gregory the Theologian's words "Yesterday I was crucified with Him; today I am glorified with Him," speaks of that crucifixion and glory in the first person (Select Orations — Oration 1 0.13).[^or1] The date of the feast has been disputed since the second century, from the Quartodeciman dispute, through the council of Nicaea, to the Julian and Gregorian calendars today.

Why It Matters

St. Paul puts the stakes plainly: "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15.17). He lists witnesses, Cephas, the twelve, more than five hundred at once, James, and himself, and he says that most of the five hundred were still alive to be asked (1 Corinthians 15.3-8). On Paul's logic the rest of the faith stands or falls with the Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15.14), and a missionary leaflet on Holy Week gives that as the reason the Church "set forth as the center of its worship and faith the Resurrection of its Lord."[^fa-holyweek]

The Paschal sermon attributed to St. John Chrysostom sets out what follows from that event, in an invitation addressed to anyone who has come late to the faith, or late to the fast, or late in life. "Let no one fear death: for the Saviour's death has freed us. By enduring it he quenched it."[^chrys-hom] The line puts in plain words what the troparion sings, that Christ is "trampling down death by death." The same leaflet says that Easter is the center of the Church's whole calendar year and that every Sunday is dedicated to the Resurrection of the Lord.[^fa-holyweek] See also Bodily Resurrection for what the Resurrection of Christ guarantees for everyone else.

How It Applies

OrthodoxWiki counts twelve weeks of preparation before Pascha, made up of the pre-Lenten Sundays, Great Lent, and Holy Week, and says the faithful make the journey with repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and study; when the night comes the fast is broken after the Liturgy, often with food that was carried in baskets and blessed.[^owiki-pascha] The greeting "Christ is risen!" and the answer "Truly, He is risen!" replace "hello" for the next forty days until the feast of the Ascension.[^owiki-greeting]

St. Gregory the Theologian opened his own Easter oration by asking his congregation to forgive him and one another: "Let us forgive all offenses for the Resurrection's sake" (Select Orations — Oration 1 0.5).[^or1] The Paschal Matins echo him in a hymn sung while the congregation exchanges the kiss of peace: "Let us say, brethren, even to those that hate us, 'Let us forgive all things on the Resurrection.'"[^anastasis] Oration and hymn alike put forgiveness at the point where the Resurrection is announced.

The word Pascha, and Passover

The Greek pascha looks as if it comes from the Greek verb paschein, "to suffer," and some Christians took it to mean "the Passion." St. Gregory the Theologian corrects this in his Easter oration: "This great and venerable Pascha is called Phaska by the Hebrews in their own language; and the word means Passing Over" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.90). He adds that some, supposing the word to name the sacred Passion, Hellenised it, and custom confirmed the form.[^or45] St. Augustine, preaching on John's Gospel, makes the same correction: "Pascha (passover) is not, as some think, a Greek noun, but a Hebrew" (Tractates (Lectures) on the Gospel of John — Tractate 55 1.3), and he goes on to say that in its own language it means passover, because Israel first kept it when it passed over the Red Sea in flight from Egypt.[^aug55] Gregory's own gloss gives two senses, "historically, from their flight and migration from Egypt," and spiritually, as an ascent "from things below to things above."[^or45] Neither father places the passing where Exodus 12 does. The Brenton Septuagint quoted below has the Lord "protect" Israel's houses (Exodus 12.13) and "defended" them (Exodus 12.27), so "passing over" is the Fathers' reading of the Hebrew word, tied to the flight and the sea.

OrthodoxWiki traces the word through Greek and Aramaic back to the Hebrew pesach,[^owiki-pascha] and the Synaxarion read at Paschal Matins gathers the passings that the day contains: "this is the day on which God from the beginning brought the world out of non-existence. On this same day he also made the people of Israel pass over the Red Sea... Again it was on this day that he came down from heaven and dwelt in the womb of the Virgin. And now he has snatched the whole of humanity from the vaults of Hell and made it pass upwards to heaven."[^anastasis] The English word Easter is a different matter. OrthodoxWiki and the St. John Church parish site both note that it comes from the Germanic name of the spring month in which the feast usually fell, that some Orthodox avoid it, and that many English-speaking Orthodox use it freely.[^owiki-pascha][^sjc] Pascha is used here for the Orthodox feast, and Easter where the Western date is meant.

The Scripture behind the feast

Exodus 12 and the Lamb

The feast is built on the Passover chapter. In the Brenton text of the Septuagint the Lord tells Moses and Aaron that the month shall be "the beginning of months," that each household is to take "a lamb unblemished, a male of a year old," keep it until the fourteenth day, and kill it "toward evening" (Exodus 12.2; Exodus 12.5-6). The blood goes on the door-posts and the lintel; the flesh is eaten that night "roast with fire," with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, "your loins girded, and your sandals on your feet, and your staves in your hands." The chapter names itself in the same breath: "It is a passover to the Lord" (Exodus 12.7-8; Exodus 12.11). The Lord says "I will see the blood, and will protect you" (Exodus 12.13), and the day is to be "a memorial" kept "through all your generations" (Exodus 12.14). One regulation will matter later: the lamb is eaten in one house, and "a bone of it ye shall not break" (Exodus 12.46).

The Lamb of God, and Christ our Passover

The New Testament reads that chapter as a portrait. John the Baptist, seeing Jesus, says, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1.29). When John narrates the crucifixion he notes that the soldiers did not break Jesus' legs, "for these things happened that the Scripture might be fulfilled, 'A bone of him will not be broken'" (John 19.33; John 19.36), and the Jewish Annotated New Testament observes that the unbroken legs may point to his suitability as a Passover sacrifice, citing Exodus 12.46, and that Jesus is the Passover lamb in John's narrative.[^jant] St. Paul writes it as a plain statement to the Corinthians: "Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed in our place. Therefore let's keep the feast, not with old yeast, neither with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Corinthians 5.7; 1 Corinthians 5.8).

St. John Chrysostom, commenting on that verse, notices what Paul does not say: "He said not, has died, but more in point to the subject in hand, has been sacrificed."[^chrys-1cor] He then turns Paul's command into a statement about the whole of Christian time: "It is festival, therefore, the whole time in which we live" (Homilies on First Corinthians — Homily 15 6.4). The Church reads 1 Corinthians 5.6-8 at the Matins of Holy Saturday, which the OCA says is usually celebrated on Friday night.[^oca-sat]

The two chronologies

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus eats the Passover with his disciples: "I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer" (Luke 22.15; see also Matthew 26.17-19; Mark 14.12-16). In John, the next morning the accusers will not enter Pilate's praetorium "that they might not be defiled, but might eat the Passover" (John 18.28), and Pilate sits in judgment on "the Preparation Day of the Passover" (John 19.14). The Jewish Annotated New Testament says that in Mark the Last Supper is the Passover meal, while John has Jesus crucified on the day of preparation for Passover.[^jant] Fr. John Behr puts the same contrast: in the Synoptics Jesus eats with his disciples on the day the lamb was sacrificed, while in John the crucifixion falls on that day, "so that Christ is fully identified with the paschal lamb," a reading prepared by John 1.29. He lists the timing of the crucifixion among the "irresolvable discrepancies" of the four Gospels, and he notes that some early Christians took such discrepancies as divinely placed "stumbling blocks" that point the reader to the theological level of the narrative.[^behr]

St. Chrysostom, on John 18.28, offers two explanations: "Either he calls the whole feast the Passover, or means, that they were then keeping the Passover, while He delivered it to His followers one day sooner, reserving His own Sacrifice for the Preparation-day, when also of old the Passover was celebrated" (Homilies on the Gospel of John — Homily 83 3.49).[^chrys-john83] In his homily on the Supper he asks why Christ ordained the sacrament "at the time of the passover," and finds the answer in the pattern of the Law: "where the type is, there He puts the truth" (Homilies on Matthew — Homily 82 0.19).[^chrys-mt82] Socrates the church historian tells of Origen's teaching at Alexandria that there has been "one true Passover, which the Saviour celebrated when he hung upon the cross."[^soc522] None of these accounts has the last word on the dating of the Supper, and the Church's liturgy does not wait for one: it keeps the Mystical Supper on Holy Thursday and the Crucifixion on Friday (The Last Supper; The Passion).[^owiki-hw]

The third day

All four Gospels place the discovery of the empty tomb on the first day of the week. Matthew has Mary Magdalene and the other Mary coming "after the Sabbath, as it began to dawn on the first day of the week," and an angel who says, "He is not here, for he has risen, just like he said" (Matthew 28.1; Matthew 28.6). Luke records the evening appearance, in which the risen Jesus invites his friends to touch him and asks, "Do you have anything here to eat?" and "took them, and ate in front of them" (Luke 24.39; Luke 24.41-43). In John, a week later, Thomas answers, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20.28). The Church reads this last Gospel (John 20.19-25) at Vespers on the evening of Pascha day itself, and the first Sunday after the feast is Thomas Sunday.[^fa-holyweek]

The phrase "on the third day" is older than the Gospel narratives. Paul hands on what he received, that Christ "was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15.4), and he does not say which Scriptures. The Jewish Annotated New Testament notes that no text explicitly says the messiah should suffer and that Hosea 6.2 is sometimes claimed as a proof text, and its note on Matthew 16.21 lists Hosea 6.2 and Jonah 1.17 beside "on the third day."[^jant] The Brenton Septuagint reads, "After two days he will heal us: in the third day we shall arise, and live before him" (Hosea 6.2). The Canon's sixth ode gives the Church's own application of the figure to Jonah: "on the third day, like Jonas from the whale, you arose from the tomb."[^anastasis]

The Synaxarion that the Church reads at Paschal Matins faces the arithmetic of "the third day" directly. It reckons Thursday evening and Friday as one day, Friday night and Saturday as a second, and Saturday night and Sunday as a third, and adds a second calculation from the hours of the Crucifixion, "for the whole is understood from the part."[^anastasis]

Lent and Holy Week: the road to Pascha

The Orthodox year builds toward this night over twelve weeks, as OrthodoxWiki counts them, made up of the pre-Lenten Sundays, Great Lent, and Holy Week.[^owiki-pascha] Great Lent lasts forty days and, unlike Western Lent, counts the Sundays; it is followed by the Saturday of Lazarus, which OrthodoxWiki calls a paschal celebration, because the liturgy of that day glorifies Christ as "the Resurrection and the Life" ahead of his own death (The Raising of Lazarus).[^owiki-lent] Palm Sunday follows with Christ's entry into Jerusalem (The Entry into Jerusalem), and then Holy Week, which OrthodoxWiki says was already established by the fourth century on the evidence of the pilgrim Egeria.[^owiki-hw]

In the OCA's account of Holy Week each of the first three days has its theme: the barren fig tree on Monday, the wise virgins on Tuesday, and the sinful woman on Wednesday, with the Bridegroom services in the evening.[^oca-hw] OrthodoxWiki carries the week on, with the Mystical Supper on Thursday (The Last Supper), the Twelve Passion Gospels, the Crucifixion on Friday (The Passion), and the Vespers of Holy Saturday with the Liturgy of St. Basil, which the OCA's page on Holy Saturday describes below.[^owiki-hw][^oca-sat]

The pre-Easter fast was not uniform. Socrates, writing in the fifth century, notes that Rome fasted three successive weeks before Easter, while Illyria, Greece, and Alexandria fasted six weeks, "which they term 'The forty days' fast.'"[^soc522] St. Cyril of Jerusalem, instructing candidates for baptism, tells them they have "forty days for repentance" (Catechetical Lectures — Prologue 4.11), which he says about their preparation for baptism and not about a general fast,[^cyril-proc] and OrthodoxWiki says that the original purpose of the pre-Pascha fast was the fasting of catechumens being prepared for baptism, before it became the season of preparation for all.[^owiki-lent]

Holy Saturday and the baptismal night

The Church keeps the Saturday that Orthodox call the Blessed Sabbath with services that begin on Friday evening. The OCA describes the Vespers of Good Friday, in which the epitaphios is carried to the tomb in the middle of the church, and the Matins of Holy Saturday, in which Psalm 119 is read with a verse praising the dead Saviour after each of its lines, and the Church "does not pretend, as it were, that it does not know what will happen."[^oca-sat] The Saturday is, as the Kontakion says, "the most blessed Sabbath on which Christ sleeps, but to rise again on the third day." It is also the Sabbath of creation's rest, on which the Word through whom all things were made "rests as a dead man in the grave."[^oca-sat]

The Vespers and Liturgy of St. Basil on Saturday itself, the OCA says, already belong to Pascha: "Originally this Liturgy was the Easter baptismal liturgy of Christians." After the entrance, fifteen Old Testament readings are chanted, all of which relate to God's work of creation and salvation. The OCA names selections from Genesis on creation and from Exodus on the "passover-exodus," and from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, Zephaniah, Jonah, Joshua, and the Books of Kings, with the Canticles of Moses and of the Three Youths (Book of Exodus; Isaiah; Jonah; Book of Daniel).[^oca-sat]

In place of the Thrice-Holy Hymn, the baptismal verse sings, "As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Alleluia" (Galatians 3.27), and the epistle is the baptismal passage from Romans: "We were buried therefore with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also might walk in newness of life" (Romans 6.4; see also Romans 6.3-5). At the Psalm 82 verses the clergy and the church change from the dark vestments of the Passion to the bright vestments of the Resurrection, the Gospel is the Great Commission with its baptismal formula (Matthew 28.19), and the Cherubic Hymn is replaced by "Let all mortal flesh keep silent."[^oca-sat]

Why baptism at Pascha

The pairing of Pascha and baptism is attested early. Tertullian says that "The Passover affords a more than usually solemn day for baptism; when, withal, the Lord's passion, in which we are baptized, was completed" (On Baptism 19.1), and goes on to name Pentecost as the next most joyful time.[^tert] He gives it as the most fitting day and does not make it a rule. St. Leo the Great, rebuking the bishops of Sicily who baptised on the Epiphany, writes that "it is appropriate that the power of baptism should change the old into the new creature on the death-day of the Crucified and the Resurrection-day of the Dead" (Letters — Letter 16 1.25), and he observes that the threefold immersion imitates the three days in the tomb.[^leo16] Local practice could be stricter than either of them. Socrates, who calls it "another peculiarity in Thessaly," reports that "they baptize there on the days of Easter only," and he adds that as a result "a very great number of them die without having received baptism."[^soc522] Cyril of Jerusalem, for his part, tells the candidates what comes after: "after Easter's Holy Day of salvation, you shall come on each successive day" for further lectures explaining what has been done to them (Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 18 33.1).[^cyril18] The OCA says of the Liturgy of St. Basil that it "remains today as the annual experience for every Christian of his own dying and rising with the Lord."[^oca-sat] The same logic ties the night to Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist.

The night itself

The Midnight Office and the procession

A little before midnight on the Blessed Sabbath, the OCA says, the Nocturne is chanted, and the celebrant goes to the tomb, removes the winding-sheet, and places it on the altar table, where it remains for forty days until the Ascension. OrthodoxWiki, which distinguishes Slavic from Byzantine practice, says that in the Slavic use the priest does this at the Midnight Office, while in the Byzantine use the epitaphios has already been removed at the Lamentations on Friday evening.[^oca-easter][^owiki-pascha] At midnight the procession begins. The people leave the church "singing: 'The angels in heaven, O Christ our Savior, sing of Thy resurrection. Make us on earth also worthy to hymn Thee with a pure heart,'" and circle the building, returning to the closed doors, which the OCA calls "the procession of the holy passover, from death unto life, from earth unto heaven."[^oca-easter] Archimandrite Ephrem Lash's Anastasis text, whose rubrics speak of "the brethren," has the priest take the Gospel, the deacon the censer, and the brethren go into the narthex with lit candles while the Lamplighter alone remains inside to light the lamps.[^anastasis] OrthodoxWiki records local variations at the closed door: in Greek use the Gospel of the empty tomb is read, and in Syrian use the priest knocks and dialogues with someone inside the doors in the words of Psalm 24.[^owiki-pascha]

At the closed doors the troparion is first sung, with the verses of Psalm 68 that will open every service of the Paschal season: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life."[^oca-easter] The doors are opened and the people enter a church "brightly lit and adorned with flowers," and the celebrants are in white. In the middle of the church stands the icon of the Resurrection, which shows Christ breaking the gates of hell and raising Adam and Eve (see The Descent into Hades and Icons).[^owiki-pascha][^oca-easter]

The Canon of St. John of Damascus

Paschal Matins is "entirely sung," as the OCA says, and its backbone is the Canon that the OCA ascribes to St. John of Damascus (St. John of Damascus), with the troparion as its recurring refrain; Lash's Anastasis texts head the Canon "a composition by John of Damascus" in one place and "A Composition by Monk John" in another.[^oca-easter][^anastasis] Its first ode opens the feast with the words that give the day its tone: "The day of Resurrection, let us be radiant, O peoples! Pascha, the Lord's Pascha; for Christ God has brought us from death to life, and from earth to heaven, as we sing the triumphal song."[^anastasis]

That opening states the whole feast as a crossing, and the Canon goes on to sing the Exodus as accomplished in Christ. The fourth ode names him "our Passover without stain" and "a cleansing Passover," and the fifth sings of those held by Hades' bonds who "press forward to the light... praising an eternal Passover."[^anastasis]

The third ode contains a line that echoes St. Gregory the Theologian's first Easter sermon: "Yesterday I was buried with you O Christ, today I rise with you as you arise. Yesterday I was crucified with you; glorify me with you, Saviour, in your Kingdom."[^anastasis] Gregory had written, "Yesterday I was crucified with Him; today I am glorified with Him; yesterday I died with Him; today I am quickened with Him; yesterday I was buried with Him; today I rise with Him" (Select Orations — Oration 1 0.13).[^or1] In both the speaker is placed inside Christ's death and rising, from "yesterday" to "today."

The eighth ode gives the feast its titles: "This chosen and holy day is the first of Sabbaths, the Queen and Lady, the Feast of Feasts and the Festival of Festivals on which we bless Christ to all the ages."[^anastasis] The name is one Gregory had already given the day in the fourth century, with the comparison that explains it: "This is to us a Feast of feasts and a Solemnity of solemnities as far exalted above all others... as the Sun is above the stars" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.21).[^or45] The Paschal stichera that follow at Lauds sing the same newness: "A sacred Pascha has been revealed to us today, a new and holy Pascha," and the Church exchanges the Paschal kiss to the repeated troparion.[^anastasis]

The Paschal sermon and the Liturgy

The sources place the Paschal sermon that the service ascribes to St. John Chrysostom differently. Lash's Anastasis text has it read after the kiss of peace; the OCA places it at the end of the Hours, before the Divine Liturgy; and the Holy Week leaflet has part of it read at the end of the Liturgy.[^anastasis][^oca-easter][^fa-holyweek] The OCA says that "taken literally, the sermon is the formal invitation offered to all members of the Church to come and to receive Holy Communion," and that in some parishes it is literally obeyed.[^oca-easter]

The sermon, in the Anastasis translation, is addressed to every kind of latecomer, and promises that the Lord receives the last as the first. It then draws the circle round the rich and poor, the fasters and non-fasters: "Rich and poor dance together. Sober and slothful honour the day. Fasters and non-fasters be glad today."[^chrys-hom] The invitation turns to triumph over death, in a taunt from 1 Corinthians: "Where, death, is your sting? Where hell, is your victory? Christ has risen and you are abolished!... Christ has risen, and there is no corpse in the grave!"[^chrys-hom] The echo is from 1 Corinthians 15.55 and from Isaiah as the sermon reads him. The sermon closes on another Pauline phrase, that Christ "has become the first fruits of those who sleep," and its Hades, which "received a body, and came face to face with God," is the scene the icon of the Resurrection paints (The Descent into Hades).[^chrys-hom]

The Divine Liturgy follows without a break. The troparion opens it and is repeated throughout; the baptismal verse again replaces the Trisagion; the epistle is the first verses of Acts, with its report that Jesus "showed himself alive after he suffered, by many proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days" (Acts 1.3); and the Gospel is the prologue of John, read, as OrthodoxWiki says, in several languages. The OCA quotes it: "In the beginning was the Word..." (John 1.1-17). "In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness hasn't overcome it" (John 1.4; John 1.5).[^oca-easter][^owiki-pascha] The OCA reads the choice as a return to the beginning, in which the Church hears God's creation and re-creation of the world through the Word. The Liturgy is that of St. John Chrysostom, and the troparion of the Resurrection is sung "again and again" while the faithful partake.[^oca-easter]

In many places a meal follows the Liturgy, and in the afternoon the faithful return for Vespers with candles, the Gospel of John 20 read in various languages, and the day that the Holy Week leaflet calls the "Sunday of Agape."[^owiki-hw][^fa-holyweek] OrthodoxWiki and St. John Church describe three customs that belong to the day. Foods given up in Lent are brought in baskets and blessed, the priest blessing them, St. John Church says, "at the conclusion of the Resurrection service"; red eggs are exchanged, which OrthodoxWiki reads as a sign of renewed life through the Blood of Christ and St. John Church links to the blood of the crucified and risen Christ; and the Artos, a loaf stamped with the Cross or the Resurrection, is consecrated at the close of the Paschal Liturgy and broken and distributed the next Saturday in place of the antidoron. Both sources call these traditions that gather around the end of the Paschal service.[^owiki-pascha][^sjc]

The theology of the night

Trampling death by death

Fr. Behr remarks that, whatever refractions Holy Week's services and the iconography of Crucifixion and Resurrection introduce, "it is still this victory on the Cross that is celebrated at Pascha, during which we sing repeatedly that Christ has trampled down death by death."[^behr] OrthodoxWiki calls Chrysostom's sermon an example of the "Christ Victorious" model of the Atonement and links it to the festal hymn.[^owiki-homily] The writer to the Hebrews supplies the scriptural base: Christ shared flesh and blood "that through death he might bring to nothing him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might deliver all of them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Hebrews 2.14; Hebrews 2.15). The Cross is treated at length in The Passion.

In his second Easter oration St. Gregory the Theologian asks to whom the Blood of Christ was offered. If to the Evil One, he says, "fie upon the outrage!" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.202); and if to the Father, he asks how, since the Father was not the one oppressing us, and concludes that the Father "accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.206).[^or45] The reason he gives lies in the Incarnation: Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God, so that God might deliver us Himself and overcome the tyrant.

In one run of short clauses Gregory gives the logic of the whole drama: "We needed an Incarnate God, a God put to death, that we might live. We were put to death together with Him, that we might be cleansed; we rose again with Him because we were put to death with Him; we were glorified with Him, because we rose again with Him" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.294; Select Orations — Oration 45 0.295).[^or45] Pascha is a feast for the whole Church because the Resurrection is something that happens to those who are joined to him. The same oration says that "a few drops of Blood recreate the whole world" (Select Orations — Oration 45 0.298).[^or45]

The eighth day and the day without evening

OrthodoxWiki and the OCA both insist that Pascha is not a historical reenactment. The OrthodoxWiki article says it "reveals the mystery of the eighth day," and that the paschal order is repeated through Bright Week and kept through the forty days until the Ascension, which "are, as it were, treated as one day."[^owiki-pascha] The Epistle of Barnabas already says that God will "make a beginning of the eighth day, that is, a beginning of another world," and adds, "Wherefore, also, we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead."[^barnabas] St. Justin Martyr reads the eight people in Noah's ark as "a symbol of the eighth day, wherein Christ appeared when He rose from the dead" (Dialogue with Trypho 138.3).[^justin138] For Justin the number points to the day of the Resurrection itself, and so in his First Apology he notes that Christians gather on Sunday because it is the first day on which God made the world, and "Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead" (The First Apology 67.6).[^justin67]

St. Basil the Great, in his Hexaemeron, speaks of "this day without evening, without succession and without end," which Scripture knows, and which "the Psalmist calls the eighth day, because it is outside this time of weeks" (Hexaemeron — Homily II 8.31).[^basil] The Paschal Matins take up the image in a petition: Ode 9 prays, "Grant that we may partake of you fully in the day that has no evening of your Kingdom."[^anastasis] The OCA says the same of the feast: it is "the Day of the Kingdom of God, the day 'which has no night' for 'its light is the Lamb'" (Revelation 21.22-25).[^oca-easter]

The Pentecostarion and the fifty days

The Pentecostarion carries the feast forward. A missionary leaflet defines it as the book of the services from the Sunday of Holy Easter to Pentecost and lists the Sundays between: Thomas, the Myrrh-bearers, the Paralytic, the Samaritan Woman, the Blind Man, and the 318 Holy Fathers, with the Ascension on the Thursday after the sixth Sunday (The Ascension of Christ) and then Pentecost.[^fa-holyweek] OrthodoxWiki says the Paschal order is kept through Bright Week, and the Anastasis rubric adds a note that during this "week of Renewal, which is reckoned to be one radiant day, we have permission for everything."[^owiki-pascha][^anastasis] The posture of these days is an old one: Nicaea's twentieth canon ordered that on the Lord's Day and in the days of Pentecost "prayer be made to God standing" (The Canons 20.1), a rule discussed in Nicaea I.

The date of Pascha

The Quartodeciman dispute

The Church was not agreed from the start on when to keep the feast. Socrates, writing in the fifth century, summarises the early picture: "In Asia Minor most people kept the fourteenth day of the moon, disregarding the sabbath: yet they never separated from those who did otherwise, until Victor, bishop of Rome, influenced by too ardent a zeal, fulminated a sentence of excommunication against the Quartodecimans in Asia." Irenaeus of Lyons rebuked Victor, "telling him that although the ancients differed in their celebration of Easter, they did not desist from intercommunion," and Polycarp of Smyrna kept the fourteenth while remaining in communion with Anicetus of Rome.[^soc522] The Quartodecimans said their practice came from the apostle John; the Romans and the West said theirs came from Peter and Paul; and Socrates observes that neither party could produce written testimony.[^soc522] Others in the East kept the feast on the Sabbath after the equinox and refused to celebrate with the Jews, while the West kept it after the equinox from a very ancient tradition.[^soc522] Socrates' own view is that the apostles did not legislate on the matter and left each region to its custom: "The aim of the apostles was not to appoint festival days, but to teach a righteous life and piety."[^soc522]

The Apostolic Constitutions, a church order that purports to be the work of the apostles through Clement of Rome and that OrthodoxWiki ascribes to a Syrian compiler living near Antioch at the end of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth, tell the faithful to "observe the days of the passover exactly, with all care, after the vernal equinox, lest you be obliged to keep the memorial of the one passion twice in a year,"[^ac5][^owiki-antioch] and a canon attached to the work says that any bishop, presbyter, or deacon who celebrates the passover "before the vernal equinox with the Jews" is to be deprived.[^ac8] Both put the earliest limit at the equinox and both set the feast apart from the Jewish reckoning. The fifth book is less tidy about the Jews themselves: it advises, "Do not you yourselves compute, but keep it when your brethren of the circumcision do so," and a few lines on says to "no longer be careful to keep the feast with the Jews," because of their error in the calculation.[^ac5] The compiler is not of one mind about how the Jewish date should figure, but he is clear about the equinox.

Cyril of Jerusalem places the Resurrection in the spring: "And this is the season, the first month with the Hebrews, in which occurs the festival of the Passover, the typical formerly, but now the true" (Catechetical Lectures — Lecture 14 10.7), and he notes that the equinox had come a few days earlier.[^cyril14]

Nicaea

The Council of Nicaea in 325 took the question up. Athanasius, writing to the bishops of Africa, says that the council was summoned "because of the Arian heresy, and because of Easter, in that they of Syria, Cilicia and Mesopotamia differed from us, and kept the feast at the same season as the Jews" (Ad Afros Epistola Synodica 2.12), and that the result was a harmony "not only as to the Faith, but also as to the Sacred Feast" (Ad Afros Epistola Synodica 2.13).[^ath-afros] The emperor Constantine's circular records the decision in these terms: "it was resolved by the united judgment of all present, that this feast ought to be kept by all and in every place on one and the same day," and appeals to the practice of Rome, Africa, Italy, Egypt, Spain, Gaul, Britain, Libya, Greece, and the dioceses of Asia, Pontus, and Cilicia, which he names as already agreed.[^vc318] The emperor's letter also contains a contemptuous passage about the Jews, which the entry on Nicaea I discusses; the council's own letter to Alexandria, as that entry notes, speaks only of the East's former following of the Jewish custom and its new agreement with Rome and Alexandria.

Neither the council's letter nor the emperor's circular states a rule for finding the day, and the twenty canons do not mention Pascha.[^nic] The circular fixes an aim, one day for all, and the later sources read that aim as independence from the Jewish reckoning; they do not agree on how much more the council settled.

OrthodoxWiki's article on the Paschalion says that the rules are attributed to Nicaea, that the tables built on them rest on Alexandrian prototypes of the third and fourth centuries, later transposed into Julian dates by Dionysius Exiguus, and that its principles are that Pascha follows the vernal equinox, follows but does not coincide with the first full moon of spring, falls on a Sunday, and does not depend on the Jewish dates.[^paschalion] An essay in Public Orthodoxy, by contrast, says that Nicaea "issued a clear formula," Pascha on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox, while leaving the calendar and the method of finding the equinox and the moon open.[^pubo]

Leo the Great, in 451, asks a bishop to inquire "in those quarters where you are sure of information" about a point in "the table of Theophilus," which the translation's heading sets over against the Roman reckoning as the Alexandrine. That table had Easter for 455 on April 24, a week later than Rome's cycles, a date Leo called "quite contrary to the rule of the Church."[^leo88] The letter shows two churches, each with its own table, a week apart, and Leo sending the question to those learned in the calculation.

Why East and West differ today

OrthodoxWiki and the St. John Church parish site give the same account: East and West compute with the same kind of rule from different calendars. The Julian calendar's solar year runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian, and its lunar reckoning four to five days behind, so that Pascha normally falls one or five weeks after the Western date, occasionally on the same day, and in certain years four weeks later.[^owiki-pascha][^sjc] OrthodoxWiki's Paschalion article adds the history. The Roman Church adopted the Gregorian reform in 1582; the Eastern churches refused it on the ground, as the article puts it, that the new Roman tables sometimes placed Pascha on the day of the full moon rather than after it as the Nicene principles required; and in 1583 a council at Constantinople forbade the new calendar and Paschalion.[^paschalion] A congress of Orthodox bishops in 1923 proposed computing the date astronomically from the meridian of Jerusalem, and a consultation under the World Council of Churches at Aleppo in 1997 recommended the same method for all; neither was implemented, and the article says the Orthodox reluctance is apparently rooted in respect for the belief that March 21 on the Julian calendar was set by the Nicene Fathers, and to the fear of a merely cosmetic unity.[^paschalion] These are OrthodoxWiki's judgments. An essay in Public Orthodoxy weighs the matter differently: it argues that the Orthodox computation, which uses the Julian calendar with a fixed March 21 equinox and an approximated full moon, drifts from the astronomical equinox and full moon, and that faithfulness to the spirit of Nicaea calls for computing the date astronomically.[^pubo] Socrates had already observed, of the churches of his own day, that Christians "who agree in faith, differ among themselves on questions of usage."[^soc522]

Pascha in the life of the Church

Holy Week's Friday is kept in The Passion, and the descent that the icon of Pascha paints in The Descent into Hades. The Resurrection hope for all the dead is the subject of Bodily Resurrection, and the Spirit given fifty days after the feast is the subject of Pentecost. The Eucharist at which the faithful receive the Lamb is described in Divine Liturgy and Eucharist. St. Athanasius' thirty-ninth Festal Letter, written for 367 "on the Paschal festival," is the letter in which, as its heading says, he defines canonically what the divine books are.[^fl39] In answering the charge that he held a communion in an unfinished church, Athanasius also records an Easter when the churches were too few for the crowd: "it was the feast of Easter, and the multitude assembled together was exceeding great" (Apologia ad Constantium 14.9).[^apol-const]

Pascha is the night on which the Church sings that Christ has trampled death by death, enters the baptismal water and the Liturgy with him, and greets everyone she meets for forty days with the news. The Exodus (Passover), the Cross (The Passion), and the font (Baptism) are the three things the night gathers up, and the Pentecost that closes the season is where the Spirit sends the news outward.

Sources

[^or45]: Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian), Oration 45 (Second Oration on Easter), §1, §2, §10, §22, §28, §29. [^or1]: Gregory of Nazianzus (the Theologian), Oration 1 (On Easter and His Reluctance), §1, §3, §4. [^chrys-hom]: John Chrysostom, Paschal (Catechetical) Homily, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, in the Anastasis Pascha text; the same homily is read at Paschal Matins. [^anastasis]: Archimandrite Ephrem Lash (trans.), Pascha: Matins, Hours, Liturgy and Vespers, Anastasis (anastasis.org.uk): the Paschal Canon, the Synaxarion, the Paschal stichera, and the rubrics for Bright Week. [^oca-easter]: Orthodox Church in America, "Easter Sunday: The Holy Pascha," in The Church Year. [^oca-sat]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Saturday," in The Church Year. [^oca-hw]: Orthodox Church in America, "Holy Week," in The Church Year. [^owiki-pascha]: OrthodoxWiki, "Pascha." [^owiki-greeting]: OrthodoxWiki, "Paschal greeting." [^owiki-lent]: OrthodoxWiki, "Great Lent"; "Lazarus Saturday." [^owiki-hw]: OrthodoxWiki, "Holy Week." [^owiki-homily]: OrthodoxWiki, "Paschal Homily." [^paschalion]: OrthodoxWiki, "Paschalion." [^pubo]: "Some Common Misperceptions about the Date of Pascha/Easter," Public Orthodoxy. [^owiki-antioch]: OrthodoxWiki, "Antiochene Rite." [^sjc]: St. John Orthodox Church, "Great and Holy Pascha: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ." [^fa-holyweek]: "Holy Week in the Eastern Orthodox Church," Missionary Leaflet E59b (available at fatheralexander.org). [^jant]: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (eds.), The Jewish Annotated New Testament (Oxford University Press), notes on Matthew 16.21, Matthew 27.62, Mark 14.12–25, Luke 24.46, and John 19.31–37. [^behr]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2006). [^chrys-1cor]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 15 (on 1 Cor. 5.6–8). [^chrys-john83]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 83. [^chrys-mt82]: John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Homily 82; compare Homily 81. [^soc522]: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 5.22. [^aug55]: Augustine of Hippo, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 55.1. [^cyril-proc]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, Procatechesis 4. [^cyril18]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 18.33. [^cyril14]: Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 14.10. [^tert]: Tertullian, On Baptism 19. [^leo16]: Leo the Great, Letter 16 (to the bishops of Sicily), §§2–4. [^leo88]: Leo the Great, Letter 88, §4 (NPNF translation). [^barnabas]: Epistle of Barnabas 15. [^justin138]: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 138. [^justin67]: Justin Martyr, First Apology 67. [^basil]: Basil the Great, Hexaemeron, Homily 2. [^ac5]: Apostolic Constitutions 5.17. [^ac8]: Canons appended to Apostolic Constitutions 8 (ANF numbering, canon 8). [^ath-afros]: Athanasius of Alexandria, Letter to the Bishops of Africa (Ad Afros) 2. [^vc318]: Constantine, letter to the churches, in Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine 3.18–19. [^nic]: See the entry on Nicaea I and its treatment of Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.5, 3.14, 3.18, and the synodal letter in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 1.8. [^fl39]: Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39 (367). [^apol-const]: Athanasius of Alexandria, Apology to Constantius 14.