Easter Sunday

In the year 325, the bishops gathered by the emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea settled an argument that had divided Christians for generations: on what day should the Resurrection be celebrated? Their answer still governs the calendar of most of the Western and Eastern churches seventeen centuries later. Easter Sunday, the day Christians hold that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, is the oldest and most important feast in Christianity — older than Christmas, the origin of the weekly Sunday itself, and the fixed point from which a whole cycle of movable observances is counted. It has no set date because the men at Nicaea tied it to the moon.

Why the Date Moves — the Computus

Easter is a movable feast, and the rule that moves it is one of the more elegant pieces of calendar-making in Western history. In its usual short form: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. The equinox is fixed for the purpose of calculation at 21 March, and the “full moon” is an ecclesiastical approximation drawn from tables rather than the real astronomical moon — the computus, the science of computing Easter, which occupied medieval scholars for centuries. The upshot is that Easter can fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April in the Western calendar, a swing of thirty-five days that drags Lent, Ash Wednesday, Shrove Tuesday, Ascension and Pentecost along with it.

The Eastern Orthodox churches use the same underlying rule but calculate the equinox and the moon against the older Julian calendar, which now lags thirteen days behind the Gregorian. As a result Orthodox Easter usually falls later, and coincides with Western Easter only in some years. The two dates converged in 2025, the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of Nicaea itself — a coincidence that revived long-running discussions about agreeing a common date. The lunar basis is inherited directly from the Jewish festival of Passover, during which the Gospels place the crucifixion, and it is the same kind of moon-reckoning that governs Vesak and the Hebrew feast of Hanukkah.

Where the Day Comes From

The events Easter commemorates are dated by the Gospels to the Passover of around the year 30 or 33 in Roman-ruled Jerusalem. Jesus, having entered the city to crowds a week earlier on what Christians keep as Palm Sunday, was arrested, tried before the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, and crucified on a Friday — Good Friday. The Gospel accounts then describe his tomb being found empty on the following Sunday morning, and appearances of the risen Christ to his followers over the weeks after. The Resurrection is the foundational claim of the entire religion; the apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians within a few decades of the events, stated flatly that if Christ had not been raised, the faith was empty. Easter is the annual keeping of that claim.

The word “Easter” itself is a curiosity of the English and German languages. The eighth-century English monk Bede recorded that the name came from Eostre, a goddess of the dawn whose feast fell in the spring month the Anglo-Saxons called after her. Most other languages instead derive their word for the feast from the Hebrew Pesach, Passover — hence the French Pâques, Italian Pasqua and Spanish Pascua — which keeps the link to the Jewish festival visible in a way English hides.

History and the Quartodeciman Dispute

The argument at Nicaea had roots going back to the second century, in what historians call the Quartodeciman controversy — from the Latin for “fourteenth”. Some early Christians, especially in Asia Minor, kept the commemoration of the Passion strictly on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, the date of Passover, whatever day of the week that happened to be. Others, led by Rome, insisted the Resurrection must always be celebrated on a Sunday. The dispute grew sharp enough that around the year 190 Pope Victor I threatened to excommunicate the churches of Asia over it, and was rebuked for his heavy-handedness by Irenaeus of Lyon. Nicaea in 325 came down decisively for the Sunday reckoning and for a calculation independent of the Jewish community’s own, ending the schism — though disagreements over the precise method of calculation rumbled on in the West for centuries, notably at the Synod of Whitby in 664, where the Anglo-Saxon church chose the Roman method over the Celtic one.

Why It Matters

For Christian theology, Easter is the hinge of the whole system, the feast on which the others depend. The Resurrection is understood as God’s vindication of Jesus, the defeat of death, and the promise of eternal life extended to believers. Everything else in the calendar orients toward it: the forty days of Lent are a preparation, Holy Week a re-enactment of the final days, and the fifty days of Eastertide that follow a prolonged celebration. The weekly observance of Sunday as the Christian day of worship arose precisely because it was the day of the Resurrection — every Sunday is, in effect, a small Easter.

The feast is also the traditional occasion for baptism. In the early Church, converts prepared through the whole of Lent and were baptised at the Easter Vigil on the Saturday night, entering the community as the great feast broke. Many churches keep that link today, and the vigil — with its new fire, its lit paschal candle and its readings tracing salvation from creation onward — remains the most solemn service of the Christian year.

How It Is Celebrated

Easter is preceded by the most intense stretch of the Christian calendar. Holy Week runs from Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday, commemorating the Last Supper, to Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion, kept with fasting and often with processions and the veneration of the cross. Then comes the Easter Vigil after nightfall on Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday itself, greeted in many traditions with sunrise services held in the open air, an echo of the women coming to the tomb at dawn. Churches are stripped bare and silent on Good Friday and banked with lilies and light on Easter morning; the contrast is deliberate.

Around the liturgy has grown a thick layer of folk custom, much of it fastened to eggs. The egg, sealed and seemingly lifeless yet holding new life within, became an obvious emblem of the tomb and the Resurrection. In Orthodox tradition eggs are dyed deep red for the blood of Christ; in central Europe they are decorated with astonishing intricacy, as in the Ukrainian pysanka. The morning feast breaks the long fast of Lent, and particular foods recur: roast lamb, recalling both the Passover and Christ as the Lamb of God, and rich breads and cakes that were forbidden during the fast.

Variations Across the World

The secular figure of the Easter Bunny is a German import, first recorded in the seventeenth century as the Osterhase, a hare that laid coloured eggs for well-behaved children — carried to America by German settlers in Pennsylvania and now global. In Sweden and Finland children dress as Easter witches and go door to door for sweets, a springtime cousin of trick-or-treating. In Greece the midnight service of Holy Saturday ends with the priest’s cry “Christ is Risen”, the church plunged into darkness and then flooded with candlelight passed flame to flame, followed by fireworks. On the Greek island of Corfu, crowds throw large clay pots from balconies to smash in the streets on Holy Saturday morning. Bermuda flies homemade kites on Good Friday, their crossed frames said to teach the shape of the cross and their rising to picture the Ascension.

Symbols and Their Meaning

The empty tomb and the cross are the two governing images, one of triumph and one of sacrifice. The lily, white and trumpet-shaped, has become the flower of the feast in the English-speaking world, its whiteness standing for purity and rebirth. The lamb runs through the celebration in both food and art. The paschal candle, lit at the vigil and marked with the year and the Greek letters alpha and omega, burns through the whole season as the sign of the risen Christ. And the egg — dyed, decorated, hunted, or made of chocolate — carries a symbolism of hidden life so intuitive that it long predates and outlasts its Christian meaning.

Fun Facts

• Easter is older than Christmas: the Resurrection was being commemorated annually from the earliest decades of the Church, while the fixing of 25 December as Christ’s birthday came only in the fourth century.
• Because of the moon-based rule, the earliest possible Western Easter is 22 March and the latest 25 April — a full thirty-five-day range, and both extremes are rare; 22 March last fell in 1818 and will not recur until 2285.
• The White House Easter Egg Roll, held on the South Lawn, dates to 1878 under President Rutherford B. Hayes, after egg-rolling on the Capitol grounds was banned to protect the lawn there.
• The world’s most elaborate Easter eggs were the jewelled Fabergé eggs made for the Russian imperial family from 1885, each a masterpiece of the goldsmith’s art containing a hidden “surprise” — a tradition that grew directly from the Orthodox custom of gifting Easter eggs.
• In 2025 Western and Orthodox Easter fell on the same day, 20 April, coinciding with the exact seventeen-hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea that first regulated the date — a convergence that will not become common for years yet.

A Closing Reflection

It is a strange and rather beautiful thing that the central feast of a religion built on a single unrepeatable event should be pinned forever to the moon, the most repeatable thing in the sky. The men at Nicaea could have chosen a fixed date and spared a hundred generations of monks their arithmetic. Instead they left Easter roaming, tethered to the spring equinox and the first full moon after it, so that the feast of resurrection always arrives with the lengthening light and the returning green — the astronomy and the theology saying, in their different languages, the same thing about the ending of winter and the beginning of life.