It was several hundred years before the early church established a pattern of celebrating what we now call Easter. The earliest celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which we commemorate at Easter, was probably a weekly event. The earliest Christians met on a Sunday, the day of resurrection, to remember Jesus’ death and to celebrate his resurrection. The Gospels narrate that Jesus’ resurrection took place early on a Sunday morning, so that was clearly the best time to recall Jesus’ death and resurrection.
As time went by, Christians began to set aside a time each year when Jesus’ death and resurrection could be especially celebrated. But the question was, when should this be? The most obvious time was to connect it with the Jewish Passover, which the Gospels tell us was the time in the Jewish calendar when Jesus’ death and resurrection took place. The Passover was held according to the cycles of the moon, and so varied during a period of around 4 weeks in early spring.
Eventually, probably in the third century, the early Christians developed a scheme for calculating in advance when Easter should be celebrated. They wanted it to be related to the moon – because Passover was always related to the occurrence of the full moon. But how early in the calendar year could Easter be?
One key decision that some early Christians made, probably in Alexandria in the fifth century, is that Easter Sunday should always be celebrated after March 21. So the earliest date that Easter Sunday can be is March 22 – with the actual date determined by when the full moon occurs on or after March 21. Easter was to be observed on a Sunday after the full moon, so the earliest possible date is March 22. I am very grateful to one of our PhD students at the University of Otago for making this clear.
Of course this was all debated and decided in the Northern hemisphere, where all Christians lived at the time. Why did they decide on this date in March? March 21 is the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. On that day, over a 24 hour period, the day and night are roughly equal in length – there are twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness. On March 22, the period of light is longer than the period of darkness. And with the full moon occurring too, that time of the full moon meant that this was the first time in the year when there was light for a whole twenty-four hour day. The world is flooded with light!
This was highly significant for the early Christians. The first full moon after March 21 symbolised the light of the sun and the moon conquering the darkness.
This was exactly what Christians believed about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Through Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection on the third day, God conquered darkness and death. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, God had actually entered into and shared human darkness and even death, but then in resurrection, light and life had overcome darkness and death. What better way to celebrate this than to do so at a time when light was visibly conquering darkness in the world around us. Easter was a celebration of light!
The way John’s Gospel tells the story of the resurrection emphasises this. In John 20: 1 we read: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.” The resurrection of Jesus had clearly already happened and the tomb was empty. So the resurrection occurred “while it was still dark”. In the midst of darkness, resurrection light breaks through. Resurrection life conquers.
John has a very similar theme near the beginning of his Gospel. John 1:5 reads: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” The light is the light of Jesus, the light of the world, shining in the darkness of the world. That the darkness did not overcome the light points to Jesus’ resurrection. The darkness of death could not hold Jesus – and God overcame darkness and death in raising Jesus to new life. But the Greek word translated as “overcome”, also means “comprehend” – and John clearly played on this ambiguity: the darkness did not comprehend or understand the light. The light was something powerful, new, and transforming breaking into our world, that the darkness could not understand and could not counter.
It is not as if the darkness of our world has disappeared. I hardly need to point to all the signs of darkness around us. But the death and resurrection of Jesus shows that there is transforming light present in our world too. And the promise of Jesus’ death and resurrection is that darkness has not had the final say, and will not have the final say. The light of Christ has come and continues to shine.
Over summer I was staying at a beach house near Nelson. Around 10pm one night we had a power cut. There was no moon that night and the sky was very overcast. The darkness was intense – you couldn’t see anything at all outside. It was a strange sensation – we’re so used to residual light in a city. The power of darkness was very real! And then the power company fixed the fault and the lights came back on and we could see! Into the darkness, the light has come!
Written by Paul Trebilco, who is a board member of Beacon Partnerships and a Professor of New Testament Studies in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Otago, Dunedin.
