Each year around this time my Orthodox friends and I exchange Easter wishes. Most years our Easter celebrations do not coincide due to our different ways of setting the date according to our different methods and calendars. There are the rare occasions when our dates match exactly by coincidence — it is always a joyous coincidence. That certainly will not happen this year. Our Western Christian date was April 4th and the Orthodox Easter is not until May 2nd. It’s odd and sad that the two great ancient churches do not celebrate the central feast of our shared faith on the same day.
How we got this point in our setting the date of Easter is complicated and perplexing. I’ll try to boil it down to the essentials.
Early Christians grappled with the setting of the date for Easter (Pascha — as our Orthodox friends refer to Easter). Since the death and resurrection of Christ certainly coincides with the Jewish Passover in Sacred Scripture, though the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke) differ a bit from John, in their rendering of exactly when the Passover was the year Jesus died and rose, so most early Christians simply dated Easter on the Sunday following the Jewish Passover, while others celebrated it on Passover, regardless of what day of the week it fell on.
Passover is a lunar festival set by first full moon of the vernal equinox, and set on the Jewish Calendar as the 15th of Nisan (Exod 12:1-6). Because the lunar calendar sometimes fell out of step with the solar year, Jews sometimes had to add a month to their calendar. This produced some historical confusion for Jews over the centuries. Because of the early Christian reliance on confusing Jewish calculations of Passover were problematic, it was added to a list of controversies to be dealt with by the early church.
Christians grappled with the dating of Easter at the First Council at Nicaea convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine to resolve this and other more vexing problems facing the early Church. It was decided at the Council at Nicaea that Easter would be fixed to the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. This solution held to the early church’s desire by many to keep it close to the Jewish Passover yet not slavishly being tied (or identified) by the 15th of Nisan.
Even with the great strides that were made in setting a common date for Easter in antiquity, there still lingered some problems in calculations. Because Alexandrea, Egypt, was the center of astronomy in the ancient world, they were charged with making those calculations to set the date. However, they used their own Egyptian calendrical dates and translated them to the Julian calendar of antiquity. Even back then there were disagreements as to the technical details, methods or calendar by which the vernal equinox and vernal full moon should be determined.
While Orthodox and Roman Catholics (and Protestants) continue to follow the formula of Nicaea for the dating of Easter/Pascha, the differences in their respective dates of celebration stem largely from the use of different calendars (Julian/Gregorian) and different methods of scientific calculation so as to ascertain the vernal equinox and vernal full moon.
Last month, Cardinal Kurt Koch, the president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, supported a suggestion by Orthodox Archbishop Job Getcha of Telmessos, representative of the Patriarch of Constantinople to the World Council of Churches, that the year 2025, which will be the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, would be a good year to introduce calendrical reforms to fix a common date for Easter.
Cardinal Koch said, “It will not be easy to agree on a common Easter date, but it is worth working for it. This wish is also very dear to Pope Francis and Coptic Pope Tawadros.”
Bishop Brian Farrell, secretary of the pontifical council for unity, is already working with the other church leaders to prepare for the Nicene anniversary. He said, “It would be a great thing if all Christians, on the same day, celebrated the fundamental truth of our faith. That would be hugely important.”
Let us pray that when the churches of both East and West celebrate and commemorate the great Council of Nicaea in 2025, like then, we will once again find a way to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ together on the same day moving into the future as we jointly wait for his return in glory!
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