EASTER. Easter Sunday follows Holy Week and celebrates the passage from death to life of Jesus Christ. Learn all about the key dates of Holy Week and the meaning of Easter Sunday.
[Mis à jour le 4 avril 2022 à 13h32] Easter is celebrated on Sunday April 17, 2022. For Christians, it evokes the memory of Jesus Christ, who died and rose again in the year 30. This Easter Sunday is a day of rejoicing for all Catholics, because it comes after Holy Week, when Jesus took his last meal. with the apostles (Holy Thursday) before being crucified (Good Friday) and then resurrected on Easter Sunday.
The Holy Week is, for Christians around the world, the week before Easter. Beginning with the Palm Sunday, it commemorates the Passion of Christ. Several key dates punctuate Holy Week. After Palm Sunday which commemorates the day when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, acclaimed by the crowd, arrives the Holy Thursday, three days from Easter Sunday, which celebrates the last meal, the Last Supper, taken by Jesus with his disciples. Then there is the Good Friday which commemorates the day of the crucifixion, a day of fasting for Christians, and the Holy Saturdaya day of silence and meditation, before the Easter Vigil, in the evening, which precedes the celebration of his Resurrection on Easter Sunday.
Easter Sunday is on the 17th April 2022, followed by the public holiday of Easter Monday18 April. How is the date of the Easter holiday programmed each year? For a long time, Christians celebrated Easter at the same time as Passover, which could fall on a Sunday, Monday or Saturday. Passover is calculated on the lunar calendar (the month begins with the new moon) and falls on 15 Nissan, the first month of the year, straddling March and April. Corn in 325, the ecumenical council of Nicaea decided that Easter should henceforth take place on a Sunday, day of the resurrection of Jesus. For this, he establishes a clever calculation known as “Comput”. The day of Easter is fixed on the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the first day of spring… Like Ascension or Pentecost, Easter is therefore a movable feast, celebrated between March 22 and April 25. Another difference: for the Orthodox who use the Julian calendar and not the Gregorian calendar, the spring arrives on April 3, not March 20 or 21. Each year, the Orthodox Easter (which is also used in the singular) is therefore celebrated a few days later.
Holy Week is, for Christians around the world, the week before Easter. Beginning with the Palm Sunday, it commemorates the Passion of Christ. Several key dates punctuate Holy Week. After Palm Sunday this Sunday April 10, will arrive the Holy Thursday whose celebration takes place Thursday April 14, three days from Easter Sunday. Then there is the Good Fridaycelebrated on friday april 15.
Palm Sunday took place this Sunday, April 10, 2022. It is the first day of Holy Week which commemorates the day when Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, cheered by the crowd. According to catholic.church.fr, this day commemorates the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, six days before the Jewish Passover. The crowd cheers as he enters the city. She lined the ground with coats and green twigs, forming a royal path in her honor. It’s in memory of this day that catholics carry palms (of box, olive, laurel or palm, depending on the region. These branches, once blessed, are held in hand by the faithful who set off in procession: march towards Easter of the people of God at the following Christ. These words are sung as the opening antiphon at the place where the faithful have gathered. After a brief allocution, the celebrant blesses the branches and we read the Gospel account of the messianic entry of Jesus before going in procession to the church. According to Christian tradition, the blessed branches are taken away after Mass to adorn crosses in homes: a gesture of veneration and trust in the Crucified.
To fully understand Easter, we must first start from the heritage of Jewish, Christian and also pagan traditions and beliefs. Easter is one of the main Christian holidays today. But it borrows its name from the Jewish holiday, Passover, which takes place at the same time. Two celebrations that do not have the same meaning. In the Jewish religion, Passover is “the feast of feasts”. It commemorates the flight from Egypt of the Hebrew people, subjected to slavery at the time of Pharaoh. According to the Bible and the book of Exodus, on Easter day, the Red Sea would have opened to let Moses and the Hebrews pass, pursued by the troops of Pharaoh, thus allowing them to reach the Promised Land of Israel. . Easter therefore marks the birth of the people of Israel and is intended, more broadly, to be a celebration of freedom. In Hebrew, Passover is also called “Pessah” which means passage.
As to Easter Christian, they celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. According to the Gospels, the death and resurrection of Christ take place at the time of the Jewish Passover, which explains why the Christian holiday borrows the same name. For Christians, Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, three days after his death, and the “passage” to eternal life. But Easter, multiple, also commemorates for Christian believers the events preceding the rebirth of Jesus (Last Supper or meal, Passion of Christ designating his arrest and his death). It is one of the most important festivals of the year – for the Orthodox, the most important – which spans the whole of Holy Week. Easter is central to the Christian faith.
Easter Sunday, the date of the end of Lent, marks the end of a period of food deprivation for practitioners. In the past, this tradition was more respected than today. And during the 40 days of fasting, devotees did not eat eggs. At the end of the period, the believers offered themselves the productions of their hens which they had accumulated. Eggs that could be decorated, from the Renaissance. As for chocolate, it would have first appeared in eggshells before all-chocolate eggs emerged in the first half of the 19th century. Since then, with a little help from marketing, chocolate eggs have become the symbol of Easter in the collective unconscious, as are the galette de l’Epiphany or the Candlemas pancakes.
Easter Sunday is, for Christians around the world, a day of celebration during which all the prohibitions of Lent are lifted and the egg, symbol of life, is omnipresent. For all pagan cultures, the egg seems to have been the emblem of life, fertility and rebirth. Some sources report that the Persians already offered eggs 5,000 years ago when the spring. It was then the turn of the Gauls and the Romans. These traditions were then assimilated by Christianity. The resurrection of Christ is greeted with joy, so a traditional festive meal is prepared with the ringing of the bells.
Did you know that the egg has been a symbol of renewal for millennia? Among the Egyptians or the Romans, it was thus customary to offer an egg, to signify life, at the time of spring. If from the Middle Ages, the Church forbade eating eggs during Lent, they were kept and decorated at the end of the fast. In the XVIIIand century, the eggs were emptied to be filled with chocolate at the end of the Lenten fast. This is how the first chocolate eggs appeared, a tradition that has endured over time with techniques offering various flavors and shapes. Russian and Ukrainian Easter eggs nowadays are real works of art, with incredible patterns and colors, sometimes depicting the cross of Christ. They are blessed before being offered to loved ones.
It’s time to delight the children, who will be able to make personalized Easter eggs with decorations. Consult our fact sheet Easter egg: how to paint and decorate it? To your brushes!
Between Holy Thursday evening and Easter Sunday, church bells do not ring as a sign of mourning. But it is on the night of Saturday to Easter Sunday that they begin to chime to announce the joy of Christ’s resurrection. According to tradition, the children were told that the bells were going to be blessed by the Pope in Rome and that when they returned, at Easter, they would chime and spread eggs and bells in the gardens. The rabbit tradition comes from eastern France and Germany. The Easter Hare, called Osterhase, is symbolic of fertility and renewal in the Germanic pagan tradition. In German-speaking Lorraine and Alsace, it is the Easter hare that scatters the eggs in the gardens.