Celebrated on one of the Sundays between March 22 and April 25, Easter is a Christian tradition that symbolically celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Although it has a different meaning, it is common to another great religion:Judaism. But Easter is also a holiday awaited by many atheists, out of habit, lack of taste or gluttony... It is therefore no exaggeration to say that nowadays Easter is the holiday that tends the most towards universality. From Exodus to the return of the bells, from the Resurrection to chocolate eggs, a look back at the founding texts and the different meanings of Easter celebrations.
Jewish Easter:Passover
The Jewish Passover, Passover, celebrates the Exodus, that is to say the flight of the Hebrew people from Egypt to the promised land under the direction of Moses. It is therefore the celebration of liberation, of the release from slavery! This festival lasts for a week and begins on Nissan 14, which in the Gregorian calendar falls at the end of March or April. The Jews offered during Passover the Paschal offering (one lamb sacrificed per house) but this rite has been suspended since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. The sacrifice of the lamb recalled the gesture that had protected the Hebrews from the tenth plague of Egypt. On the other hand, they continue to start the counting of the omer during this holiday, this counting leads to the Shavuot holiday.
During Passover the Jews also follow dietary prescriptions such as eating mantzot (unleavened bread) instead of hametz (leavened bread) which recalls the bread of the Hebrews of the Exodus who had fled Egypt without leaving bread time to rise.
All these prescriptions to the Jewish people are explicitly stated in the twelfth chapter of the book of Exodus.
From a symbolic point of view Passover invites all Jews to have the courage of their own internalized exit from Egypt, that is to say, to know how to go beyond the apparent limits. We can also see the promotion of unleavened bread as a promotion of humility.
Symbol and meaning of Christian Easter
For Christians, Easter does not have the same origin at all, although there are many historical and thematic links with the Jewish holiday. And for good reason, Jesus being of course a Jew, he went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover and was arrested on this occasion by the religious authorities, condemned by the Roman occupier and crucified. The Passion of Christ therefore coincides chronologically with the Jewish feast and Christians have drawn the parallel between the paschal lamb sacrificed by the Jews and Jesus sacrificed on the cross. Hence the references to what is called the Agnus Dei, the lamb wearing the halo and the cross:symbol of Christ.
The feast getting ready, the body of Jesus was then hastily placed in a tomb, closed with a stone. It was not until three days later (Easter Sunday) that the disciples of Jesus returned to the sepulcher to embalm the body. It was then that they would have seen the Resurrection of Christ. Jesus then reappears several times to the apostles, teaching them that his coming was announced in the Old Testament and that his Resurrection (supreme victory over death) is the concrete sign of his divinity and the inauguration of a new covenant in force between his return to the Father (celebrated during the Ascension) and the end of time.
Unlike the Jews, Christians therefore do not celebrate the Exodus at Easter but the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the founding act of their religion. It is therefore the most important feast of Christianity. Through the death of Christ, sacrificed like the lamb, humanity is washed from its sins and every man can aspire to holiness by following the teaching of Jesus.
The dating of Easter
For a long time, Easter was celebrated on very different dates in different regions of the Christian world. The reform of the Julian calendar in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, which led to the establishment of the Gregorian calendar, helped to facilitate the adoption of the date of Easter, as well as the organization of the ecclesiastical year; since 1752, when the Gregorian calendar was also adopted by Great Britain and Ireland, Easter has been celebrated on the same day throughout the western part of the Christian world.
However, the Eastern Churches, which have not adopted the Gregorian calendar, commemorate Easter on the Sunday preceding or which follows the date on which the West complies. These dates may occasionally coincide; the two most recent cases occurred in 1865 and 1963.
It was repeatedly considered to replace the mobile dates of the holiday with a fixed date, such as Christmas. The problem was submitted to the Holy See in 1923, which raised no objection in principle to this reform proposal. In 1928, the British parliament passed a measure authorizing the Church of England to commemorate Easter on the first Sunday following the second Saturday in April. However, Easter remains, until today, a movable feast.
Easter bells and eggs
For those who have no religious culture, Easter is first and foremost a public holiday and a celebration where you can eat chocolate at will and in various forms, in particular bells and eggs. They are sometimes unaware that even this facet of the holiday is deeply rooted in Christian tradition. Indeed, Easter marks the end of Lent, a period of forty days during which Christians fasted.
The Easter meal therefore marks the breaking of a long fast and results in the return of all products fatty and sweet which we had deprived ourselves of until then! As for the eggs, we suppose that at Easter we ate all the eggs set aside during Lent. The theme remained but the chicken eggs became chocolate eggs!
But Easter is also the end of Holy Week during which Christians commemorate the Passion of Christ from the entry into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) until the said Resurrection . But from Good Friday, which recalls the death of Jesus, and until Easter, the risen Christ, the Church is in mourning and the bells no longer ring. On Easter Day the bells ring again:that's why we talk about the return of the bells! For many children the bells that were "gone" suddenly return on the same day as the treats hence a popular imagery of winged bells spilling chocolate eggs in gardens!
But in the end, although recovered by a multitude of agri-food brands flooding supermarket shelves weeks in advance, although sometimes consumed without awareness of their origin , bells and chocolate eggs are above all the heritage of our Judeo-Christian culture!
To go further
- Christian festivals:History, meaning and traditions, by Edith Momméja. EDB 2012.