Sunday is day Orthodox Christians mark Easter

Published 12:00 am Saturday, April 18, 2009

Anyone driving past St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church last Sunday morning, the day most Christians celebrated Easter, might have wondered why parishioners there were processing along Washington Street, holding palm branches and singing.

If you go

At St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church, 2709 Washington St.:

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Today, Great and Holy Saturday services

* Divine Liturgy — 10 a.m.

* Services of Pascha — 10 p.m.

Sunday, Great and Holy Pascha

* Agape Vespers — 3 p.m.

What’s the difference?

A simple explanation of the difference in Western and Eastern Easter can be found at www.holidays.net/easter/easterdates.htm

Wasn’t Palm Sunday the week before?

Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide — the congregation at St. George included — will celebrate Easter on Sunday, a week after their Western counterparts in Roman Catholic, Episcopal and Protestant churches. Though in some years — most recently 2007 — both East and West have celebrated Easter the same day, more commonly the two mark Christ’s resurrection on different days, sometimes as much as four or five weeks apart.

“It can get real complicated,” said the Very Rev. John Morris, pastor of St. George, “but the basic fact is that we follow Passover.”

Today, St. George will hold Holy Saturday Divine Liturgy at 10 a.m. and celebrate the Resurrection with Great and Holy Pascha services beginning at 10 p.m.

Passover, the ancient Jewish holy day, and its attendant Feast of the Unleavened Bread commemorate the night that God spared the Israelites when he sent the angel of death to slay the first-born of the Egyptians, the final plague on Egypt before Moses led the Israelites from slavery centuries before Christ was born.

Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday in order to observe the Passover, and died on Good Friday about the time the Passover lambs were being sacrificed. Thus, it is biblically accurate to date Easter immediately after Passover.

Easter is known as a moveable feast because its date is not fixed in relation to the calendar, as Christmas and Epiphany are. In Western churches it generally falls between late March and late April, and because of calendar quirks it can be as much as a month before the Jewish Passover. In Orthodox churches, Easter can fall from early April to early May, but as Morris said, it always follows Passover.

“The formula for Easter — ‘the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox’ — is identical for Western and Orthodox Easters, but the churches base the dates on different calendars: Western churches use the Gregorian calendar, the standard calendar for much of the world, and Orthodox churches use the older, Julian calendar,” writes Borgna Brunner in “A Tale of Two Easters” on www.factmonster.com.

Julius Caesar introduced the calendar named for him around 46 B.C. It was used by Europeans until 1582, when Pope Gregory instituted calendar reform to more closely align it with the actual passage of Earth around the sun, which takes slightly more than 365 1/4 days.

The Julian Calendar was too long by about 11 minutes per year, which added up to one day every 134 years. When much of western Europe adopted the Gregorian calendar, 10 calendar days had to be eliminated from the year. By 1752, when the American colonies adopted the Gregorian Calendar, 12 days had to be shaved from the year to bring it back in line.

British scholar and Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware calls the calendar issue a “vexed question” that results in difficulty and confusion, even among Orthodox Christians. But that Easter is the pre-eminent celebration in the Orthodox faith is unquestioned. “None can be present at this midnight service without being caught up in the sense of universal joy,” Ware writes in his book, “The Orthodox Church.”

“The center of the life of the Orthodox Church is the death, life and Resurrection of Christ,” said the Very Rev. David Ogan, also of St. George. “This is unlike some churches that emphasize the nativity of Christ. The highest celebration in the Orthodox Church is Pascha — Easter.”

In fact, Ogan continued, Orthodox churches celebrate the Resurrection not just on Easter Sunday, or even just during the “Paschal season” which lasts until Pentecost, but every Sunday of the year in the Divine Liturgy.

Beginning April 11 with a service recalling the raising of Lazarus from the dead, continuing through Palm Sunday and throughout the week, Orthodox Holy Week services have re-created the events leading up to the crucifixion and resurrection.

“The whole of Holy Week is basically a passion play, an Easter pageant, if you will,” Morris said. Each night during Holy Week, services have been held — including a healing and forgiveness service Wednesday, the complete reading of the 12 Gospel passages depicting Jesus’ betrayal, trial and crucifixion Thursday, and Friday night’s Lamentations, mourning the death and burial of Jesus with three long and mournful chanted dirges that precede a candlelight procession.

Morris pointed out that each Holy Week service anticipates in some way the triumph of the resurrection.

Midway through this morning’s liturgy the priests will change from dark to white vestments, and scatter bay leaves throughout the church, foreshadowing Christ’s victory over death, Morris said.

That victory will be fully celebrated tonight with candles, a procession, Holy Communion and the congregation singing, many times and in different languages, including Arabic and Greek, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”

And despite the date differences, all Christian churches celebrate that.

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Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com