Stars and Soil

Why is the date of Easter different every year?

Philip Pfatteicher points out that the answer lies in the stars and in the soil.  First, the stars:

“Passover was originally a spring new moon festival, its date determined by the vernal equinox and the first full moon of the spring.  We cannot now know all that the moon meant for the origins of Passover, but that ignorance is reason enough to leave the date of Easter as it is and allow it to vary from year to year.  Ancient intuitions embedded in the mystery of the moon, three days dark, are fulfilled and perfected in Christ, three days in the darkness of the tomb.  The moving date of Easter, varying as does Passover, preserves the Christian connection with the tradition from which it came.  That connection with Judaism, Christianity’s elder brother and first to hear the Word of God, is essential for an understanding of who Christians are and what the Church is.” (Journey to the Heart of God 230)

Second, the soil:

“The ancient Hebrews counted seven weeks from the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Feast of First Fruits.  These were two agricultural festivals, the first the consecration of the grain harvest by waving a freshly cut sheaf of barley (Lev. 23:9-11), the second, the Feast of Weeks, fifty days later, ended the harvest.  After the destruction of the temple and the exile in Babylonia, a new awareness of the work of God in human history developed, and the festivals of the ancient Hebrew calendar were reinterpreted and associated with great historical events of past ages.  Events thus had meaning for the generation in which they occurred but also for all who followed afterward.  Every devout Hebrew was thus a participant in the formative events.  Passover became the anniversary of deliverance from slavery and thus had meaning for all who were in any kind of bondage.  The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), once a spring festival associated with the barley harvest, became the anniversary of Moses’s reception of the Law on Mount Sinai and a reminder of God’s will and human obedience to it.” (231)

Our Christian holy days are intimately tied to Hebrew holy days, just as the New Testament is intimately bound to the Old Testament.  And Hebrew holy days were intimately tied to cycles of the earth, and to changing seasons.  The value of this?  It reminds that it is inescapably part of human existence that the world around us does not accommodate itself to us, but that we learn the ways of the world, of the stars and the soil, and accommodate ourselves to laws of life that we can never change no matter how hard we would like to try.  We learn to look on the world and ask, not “how can I get all this to do what I want?” but “How do I use this wisely as my home, but also as a tool, not for what I want, but for what God wants?”