The Fifty Days of Easter

We are now in Holy Week, the last week of Lent, and approaching Easter. The fifty days of the Easter Season - Easter Sunday through to Pentecost Sunday - constitute the oldest liturgical season known to Christians, corresponding to the interval between the Jewish Passover celebration (the feast of Unleavened Bread) and the Feast of First Fruits (the Feast of Weeks). We are familiar with the Twelve Days of Christmas, but Easter has fifty days!

The early church celebrated these fifty days as one long Sunday of the resurrection, eliminating all fasting or kneeling at its liturgical celebrations from that joyful time. Only gradually did those fifty days separate the celebration of the triumph of Jesus over death from the commemoration of his ascension and the sending of the Holy Spirit on the disciples.

In its origins, this season saw these three moments of the divine irruption into history as aspects of the same saving mystery. Immediately before that great celebration of Jesus' resurrection, the church started with at least one day of fasting, a day that corresponded to Holy Saturday in today's liturgical calendar.

Gradually, as the fourth and fifth centuries saw the expansion of the church in the declining Roman empire and beyond, the fast of Holy Saturday extended backwards, taking on the contours of the forty days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness of Judea.

In this way, all of Lent may be construed as a pilgrimage through the desert into the Promised Land of Easter. So let Him 'Easter' in us!

The First Easter
In that historic dawn
there was a stirring
slight at first
and a world long given
to dreams of death awoke
to find strange meaning in an
empty tomb.