Does Ash Wednesday seem early this year to you? Does to me.
This made me think of a post I wrote two years ago about the dating of Easter (which affects when Lent begins). So here is a repost for your start-of-Lent edification and amusement:
All during Lent the Christian blogs have been posting about Easter and Passion related themes. For my Lenten reflection I'd like to participate, but in my own way. I want to reflect on how to be a good Christian you need to be a great astronomer.
This topic came to mind as this week my sons, nephews and I did a little backyard astronomy with my 4.5 inch Dobsonian telescope (a wee thing, but good for backyard fun). We were looking at the full moon. It dawned on me, as we were looking at the moon, that this particular full moon was the Paschal Moon, the moon we use to select the date of Easter.
Easter, we all know, is a moveable feast. Notoriously so. What holiday makes you ask "When is _____ this year?" as much as Easter? But it's even worse than that. The dating of Easter is one of the great church controversies dividing the Western and Eastern churches.
Today, we date Easter this way in the West: Easter shall be the first Sunday after the first full moon (the Paschal moon we were looking at) after the spring equinox.
(Two notes: First, the equinox here is the Northern spring equinox, for the Southern hemisphere it is the autumn equinox. Second, the phrase "full moon" is vague. A "full" moon is relative to your position on earth. But this rule is close enough for our purposes. My point: See how good at astronomy you have to be to get Easter right?)
This year the Paschal Moon came just one day after the spring equinox which was also early this year (due to the leap year). This is why Easter is so very early this year. The last time Easter was this early was in 1913. And it won't be this early again in our lifetimes.
So you get my point: You have to be a pretty good astronomer to get Easter right. You need to be able to note the equinox (i.e., the point where the sun is at one of two opposite points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator and ecliptic intersect), the full moon, and manage the calendar (those leap years and such). The math behind all this is called computus and it requires, as best as I can tell, an advanced degree in mathematics and planetary astronomy.
The ancient Easter controversies have to do with the calendars. Here's an abstract of that story.
The events surrounding the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus occurred during the Jewish Passover celebrations. Obviously, this association is of great theological import. So the early church was keen to keep a close association between Easter and Passover. But the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar, fixing the celebration on the 15th day of the month of Nisan. This places Passover in the spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus, Easter is always in the spring.
However, after Constantine, as Christianity came to be centered on Rome, the Roman solar calendar came to dominate the celebrations of the church. It was unwieldy to manage a lunar calendar for religious feasts (e.g., Passover and Easter) and a solar calendar for civic functions. Plus, the 15th of Nisan doesn't always fall on the same day of the week. This complicated things for the church who wanted to associate the first day of the week, Sunday, with Easter. I mean, wouldn't it be odd to celebrate Easter on, let's say, a Wednesday?
So the early church made a compromise. It switched to a solar calendar but kept Easter in the spring. This allowed Easter to remain, seasonally speaking (i.e., Springtime), associated with Passover (and still, vestigially, following the phases of the moon). It also allowed Easter to occur on a Sunday. Problem solved!
Well, not so fast. This early solution was based on the Julian calendar. Julius Caesar introduced this calendar to Rome after seeing the advantages of the Egyptian solar year. I guess we have Cleopatra to thank for this.
(Side history: Most ancient societies used the moon as a clock. The moon's regular phases make it ideal for this purpose. The trouble is, a lunar year doesn't sync well with the solar year, and it's the sun that's in charge of agricultural events. The Egyptians were one of the first civilizations to break free of the moon and go with the sun, a much more difficult astronomical task. Most scholars think that the Egyptians were able to break with the moon because their lives were governed by another non-moon time-keeping device: The floods of the Nile.)
The Julian calendar gives us a year of 365 days. Which is remarkably close to the actual solar year. But the match is not exact. A solar year is closer to 365 and 1/4th days long. So with the Julian calendar you are drifting against the solar year by 1/4 day each year. This drift is not much to notice on a year to year basis but over a century your calendar is drifting about 25 days, almost a full month. Eventually, if you date Easter by the Julian calendar Easter ends up being in the dead of winter. And Santa starts showing up in Hawaiian shirts.
Now this Julian drift can and was dealt with by adding in days here and there to catch the calendar up with the sun. But these were regional and post hoc measures. This calendar thing just had to get fixed once and for all. And only precise astronomy--nailing the exact length of the solar year---could help. Eventually, all the frustrations and science fell into the lap of Pope Gregory XIII who, in 1582, created the Gregorian calendar. It is the Gregorian calendar that gives us the leap years which correct every four years for the 1/4 day drift (but again, it is much more complicated than this as a solar year isn't exactly 365 1/4th days. See how good at astronomy you have to be to to get Easter right?). The Gregorian calendar now governs most of the world. Problem solved!
Well, not exactly. The Eastern Orthodox church didn't go along with the Gregorian calendar reforms. They stayed with the Julian calendar. Consequently, to this day, there are two Easters in Christendom, each celebrated on different days.
So, when exactly is Easter? Well, you could track with Passover. But if you do so you might not be celebrating Easter on a Sunday. Or, you could track with the Julian calendar like the Orthodox. The trouble with this is that you'll be basing Easter on a calendar taken from ancient pagan Egypt and celebrating a Christian holy day on a day of the week that carries a pagan name: The Sun's Day. The Gregorian calendar fares no better.
So when is Easter? Hard to say. But I do know this. You'd have to be very, very good at astronomy to know.
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
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From the Prison Bible Study
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Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
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- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
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Blogging about the Bible
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- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
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- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
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- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
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- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
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- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
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- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
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- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
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Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
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- A Million Boring Little Things
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- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
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- Open Commuion: Warning!
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- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
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- The Reason We Gather
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- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
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- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
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- Atonement: A Primer
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Interacting with Good Books
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- Christ and Horrors
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- I Told Me So
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- Evolving in Monkey Town
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Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
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- Violence and Traffic Lights
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- The Wicked
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- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
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- On Snobbery
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- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
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- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
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- god
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- A New Apologetics
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- The Buddhist Phase
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Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
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- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
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- On Easter and Astronomy
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- Freud and Valentine's Day
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- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
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- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
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- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
Complex computations were needed to create the comutus. But once this one-time task has been done (it was done in the 16th century), the Gregorian computus can be handled by anyone capable of counting to 30.
Easter is always the 3rd Sunday in the Paschal lunar month. In 2010 the Paschal lunar month has 29 days, as it does in most years. Its first day is March 17th, and its last day is April 14th. The third Sunday in this 29-day period is April 4th. Simple.
In 2010 the Paschal lunar month has 29 days, as it does in most years. Its first day is March 17th, and its last day is April 14th.