Since the heathen festival of Easter depends partly on the lunar calendar rather than solely on the solar calendar, it is a moveable feast.  In fact, some historians claim that the calendar calculations required for Easter are what kept literacy and mathematics to at least a rudimentary level among the elites of the Catholic priesthood during the darkest parts of the Dark Ages.

Despite the fact that Easter is not a genuinely Christian Holy Day [1], as Christ rose from the grave on Saturday evening after three days and three nights in the earth, as He had prophesied [2], we may fairly consider Easter to at least be a calendar marker of a genuine biblical Holy Day that is commanded to occur on the first day of the week, namely the wave sheaf offering.  Since Jesus Christ was the wave sheaf offering, the first of the firstfruits to be raised from death and to enter the Kingdom of God, we may note uncharitably that the wave sheaf offering of Jesus Christ to God (the “first ascension,” if you will) was during the evening portion of the first day and not at the heathen sunrise festival where Easter is now celebrated.  Nevertheless, there is at least some small fragment of Easter that has a genuine biblical worth, if largely unrecognized by those who celebrate it themselves.

But therein lies the rub.  In order to preserve any aspect of the heathen festival of Easter (with its pagan trappings of fertility worship like fecund bunny rabbits and eggs) as representing even a shred of genuine biblical worship, one must conduct it on the right day.  And this is where we find an interesting distinction to be made between the Western Church and the Orthodox Church.  In fact, we may compare three different church traditions and see that they follow a general pattern of falling away from true worship from East to West.

Starting in the East, we have the obscure and largely forgotten Church of the East.  They speak Aramaic, have a dramatic (if largely forgotten history), and some of them have preserved a genuinely Christian understanding of law and grace, obedience to the biblical Sabbath and Holy Days and food laws.  At least among that portion of the Church of the East that still has a proper biblical understanding (namely that portion responsible for the Aramaic-English New Testament), I consider them to be full brethren, despite the fact that their own history is very different, and nearly entirely unrelated, to my own.  Their beliefs and practices spring from the same biblical ground, and so there is the full recognition for brotherhood for those people.  Notably, they celebrate the Days of Unleavened Bread and not Easter.

Further to the West we have the Orthodox Christians, starting from the Armenians and Georgians, going to the Greeks and Russians and Ukrainians and Romanians and Serbs and their federated churches.  Despite the fact that these people are heathen in that they celebrate Easter as opposed to the genuine biblical Holy Days, they invariably celebrate Easter on the proper day of the wave sheaf offering, the first day of Pentecost.  They do this because they have a proper understanding of the lunar calendar and how to translate the moveable feast into their solar calendar.  Therefore they celebrate Pentecost correctly as well.  A correct understanding of the lunar-solar calendar upon which the biblical feasts spring leads to a correct observance.

The Easter celebrations of the Western world, namely Catholics and Protestants, are even further off the mark.  In fact, it is only about 5% of the time (once every nineteen years, when the lunar and solar calendars link up) when Easter Sunday happens to coincide with the biblical wave sheaf offering.  Why is this the case?  The heathen Western church was less careful about their understanding of the biblical calendar, and therefore usually ends up missing the right days and week, sometimes by as much as a month.

Calendars have long been a mystery to me.  The Bible shows daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and multi-year cycles that are far different from anything we see in the world around us.  It is strange to live in a sort of double-consciousness, aware of two entirely different and nearly unrelated ways of looking at time that only rarely happen to coincide.  It’s a bit unnerving, really, as if one lives in a slightly parallel universe.

It is clear, though, that the amount of calculation dependent to obey God’s Holy Days requires a high amount of literacy among believers.  If you seek to obey God you cannot be a person of images and ceremony, but you must be a person deeply interested in texts, able to read and calculate, and profoundly interested in connections and symbols.  There is clearly a lesson in that–God’s law is demanding on believers, and requires enough literacy and education that a society that wishes to obey God must be literate and civilized in a fairly egalitarian fashion, since God wishes us to understand what we believe and not do so blindly or stupidly because of mere tradition.  To understand requires attention paid to intellect by all segments of society, not merely the elite.  This requires parents devoted to educating their children and aware themselves of the importance of knowledge.  The fact that Western Europe was long controlled by elites who controlled access to biblical truth and corrupted the faith suggests that the relationship between the education of the common person and the chance for correct biblical practice is a high one.  Those societies with higher respect for the ordinary commoner and more egalitarian systems of leadership are likely to have higher orthodoxy (correct belief) as a result of their egalitarian orthopraxy (correct practice).  There is much to ponder here, and Holy Days only begin to scratch the surface of the deeper levels of meaning underneath.

[1] http://www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn57/threedays.htm

[2] http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/was-jesus-in-the-grave-for-three-days-and-nights.html