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Easter is to the year what the Lord’s Day is to the week.  It is significant that Christ was crucified and rose again at the time of the Jewish celebration of Pascha (Passover).  This was a time when God’s people celebrated deliverance from bondage in Egypt and the early Christians realized that now there was the ultimate delivery from the bondage of sin and death.

At least as early as the Second Century (and perhaps as early as the First — 1Cor. 5:7-8), the Church obseved the Pascha with a great annual Lord’s Day.  This was a time for baptism, laying on of hands and first communion for converts to the faith.  Initially, there was debate over whether the observance should fall on the Jewish dating of the Pascha, which falls on the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan and could be on any day of the week.  Early in the Fourth Century, consensus was reached that the Christian Pascha should always fall on a Sunday.  In the Western Church, the date is fixed on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21 — so Easter is on a different date from year to year: as early as March 22 or as late as April 25.  You’ve probably heard of Easter referred to as a “movable holy day” as opposed to Christmas, which falls on December 25 each year.  This is a result of the combining of the old tradition of a lunar calendar with the new tradition of following a solar calendar.

At first, Easter was celebrated on a single day, but during the course of the Fourth Century, the observance was spread out over a week — beginning with Passion/Palm Sunday, proceeding through the week to Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Eve and Day.  Again, we see the intersection of the old and the new in observances of Easter Eve, All Saints’ Eve, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve and the like.  In the Jewish tradition, days began at evening, in the new tradition of the Risen Lord, we focus on sunrise.

Second in importance to the Pascha in the early church was the observance of Pentecost.  Pentecost was also a Jewish feast day dating back centuries.  Originally is was a festival of the first harvest commanded in Lev. 23:16, “The day after the seventh sabbath will make fifty days, and then you shall present to the Lord a grain-offering from the new crop”.  It later came to represent the giving of the law at Mount Sinai.  The word “Pentecost” translates literally from the Greek as the “fiftieth day”.   Early Christians celebrated Pentecost as the anniversary of the Ascension of Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles.  Like Easter, it was a time for the baptism of new converts.  By the middle of the Fourth Century, the date of celebrating the Ascension had moved to the fortieth day following the Resurrection and we now commerate Pentecost as the day of the descent of the Holy Spirit.

Because of the connection to baptism, the laying on of hands and first communion for new converts, there developed a time of preparation for the newly converted to prepare for joining the Church.  Eventually this forty day period (excluding Sundays) came to be a time of reflection and penitence for all Christians in preparation for Easter — the part of the Church calendar we now observe as Lent.

Unlike the secular observance of Easter, the Church celebrates Easter beginning with the Resurrection through the fifty days to Pentecost.  The period from Easter to Pentecost is a time of joy and triumph and is like a yearly Day of the Lord, constituting approximately one-seventh of the year.  Together with Lent, this is referred to as the “Easter Cycle” in Church Time.