When Is Easter This Year? by Pastor Adam Moline
Have you ever wondered why the date of Easter is always changing? Why is it in March some years and in April other years? Why can’t we just pick a date? The answer is actually rather complicated, so buckle up.
First off, what do we know? Easter is a celebration of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. We know that He died on Good Friday, which was also the celebration of the Passover of the Jews. He laid in the tomb over the sabbath day of rest and rose on the Sunday morning. Can’t we just run the calendar backwards to calculate the exact date of Easter?
No. To understand why we cannot, we have to understand that our modern calendar is a recent invention. In Genesis 1:14ff., we hear that God made the sun, the moon and the stars to shine light on the earth and to inform us for days and seasons and years. The easiest of these is the length of a day – the Sun comes up, and a new day begins. Except the Sun doesn’t always rise at the same time, depending on the season and location with the earth’s orbit. On average, though, a day is 24 hours, right? Well close! The length of day also changes regularly based on plate tectonics, much like an ice skater spinning different speeds based upon whether their arms are in or out. Earthquakes change the center mass of the earth, thereby changing the length of a day.
Beyond this, things are even more complicated. We take for granted that there are 365 days in a year and 29 days between full moons. But the real numbers are even slightly different. A year is actually 365.2425 days on average, and the number of days between full moons is 29.5 days on average (though the moon cycle slightly varies due to the moon being tidally locked with the earth and due to tidal changes from low air pressure).
This inconsistency with calendars is a big issue. Even the total length of a year wasn’t precisely known until the last 500 years. Our modern calendar doesn’t solve the problem; the months will drift a day every 3030 years. In fact, the adoption of leap days in our modern calendar wasn’t done in England until 1752, and by that time, they had to eliminate 11 days from the month of September to make the months match the seasons again. Read about the Calendar Act of 1750 for more information!
The ancient Jews used the moon to calculate months. About every 12 full moons, they could use the stars in the sky to indicate that a year had passed (the same constellations were up as a year ago), and spring came. But their lunar calendar and the length of a year didn’t perfectly match up as 365.25 days in a year isn’t divisible perfectly by 29.5 days of the lunar cycle, so their months drifted overtime.
To compensate, the Jewish calendar added a leap month every 2-3 years. There was no rule to govern this. If the timekeepers in Jerusalem felt that the months were getting out of sync with the seasons, they would add a leap month. In those years, they had the month of Adar 1, and then the leap month Adar 2 afterward. Did you get to celebrate your birthday twice then? I don’t know!
A new Jewish month began based upon exact observations of the new moon from Jerusalem. Thus, the Passover was always connected to a full moon (Exodus 12:6). But due to leap months, there was no real consistency for when this month was. Sometimes, it would be a little earlier, sometimes a little later.
Christian celebration of Easter originally followed this calendar. Christians observed the resurrection of Jesus during the Jewish Passover time, as the Scriptures taught. But in 135 AD, the Bar Kochba revolt led to Jews being banned from the city of Jerusalem. This meant the new moon could not be perfectly observed in Jerusalem, disrupting the calendar. There were no longer priests in Jerusalem who could properly schedule leap months. So, when should Christians observe the resurrection of Jesus?
On top of what we have discussed so far, there is one more complication. The Jewish calendar was always lunar in nature, and new moons don’t always land on the same day of the week. That meant that Good Friday might actually not always occur on a Friday by our calendar’s reckoning. Easter might not always occur on a Sunday.
So, the Christians needed to make some decisions. Should Christians celebrate Easter according to a newly revised lunar Christian/Jewish cycle (known today as Quatrodecimanism), or should Christians simplify? The Christian church decided to make things easier. They were already meeting regularly each Sunday morning to celebrate the Lord’s Resurrection, and so they decided to celebrate Easter on Sundays as well, independent of the Jewish calendar. But which Sunday should they choose?
The Passover we know was in Spring, prior to the grain harvest. (Joshua 5 indicates the first Passover in Canaan was during the spring flood of the Jordan River, and 50 days after Passover is Pentecost – the first fruits offering). We know the Passover was always on the full moon. And again, we know Christ rose from the dead on a Sunday morning. Knowing this information, the Church decided to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. Thereby, the church could use the basic information from the scriptures (mentioned in this paragraph) to regularly calculate a date to celebrate Easter without the complexity of the Jewish calendar.
Whew! That’s why we celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, Charlie Brown.
But wait. Doesn’t that mean we aren’t celebrating on the exact day of Christ’s resurrection? Yes. It probably does. But it is more important to celebrate the Resurrection, no matter if it is on the right date or not. In fact, you could say we celebrate it every Sunday year-round by gathering with the church and receiving the crucified and risen body and blood of Jesus in the Lord’s Supper. That means we celebrate 51 little Easters throughout the year in addition to the big Easter every spring.
And truth be told, I think God made our calendar so complicated so that we couldn’t calculate the exact date of Easter. Instead, God desires that we would celebrate it regularly by gathering with other Christians as God teaches in His word (Hebrews 10:24-25). So, rather than getting caught up on the question of whether we are observing the exact correct day, we should focus on observing the resurrected Jesus as often as possible and be glad to celebrate Easter in the time the church has selected to remember Christ’s greatest miracle. The complexity of calendars cannot hide the joy of Christ’s resurrection.
In Christ, Pastor Moline