Showing posts with label Constantine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Constantine. Show all posts

When is Easter?

Posted by Randy | Labels: , , , , , , , , , | Posted On Saturday, April 23, 2011 at 10:28 PM

Easter is so late this year - April 24. In fact, we're only two weeks away from Mother's Day. Why did it happen this way, and why is it sometimes as early as March.

To answer this, I read some material by History professor Steve Ware from an article in The Christian Century, as well as information in the Wikipedia website. The short answer is that Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Huh? 

The equinox is when the equator is perpendicular to the sun. The center of the sun is in the same plane as the Earth's equator. At this point in time, if you were standing on the equator, the sun would appear directly overhead. It typically occurs around March 20/21 in the spring, called the "vernal equinox," and around September 22/23 in the fall, called the "autumnal equinox." The word "equinox" is derived from the Latin words aequus, meaning equal, and nox, meaning night. Although it's not exactly the case, we can think of the equinox as being the time when the length of the day and the night are approximately the same. The equinox marks the official change of seasons, from winter to spring or summer to fall.

The short version is that in 325 A.D., Constantine, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, convened the Council of Nicea. Among the business before the council was a desire to establish a uniform date for Easter. Out of the discussion and debate came the "Easter Rule," setting Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. However this decision was not unanimous. 

There was not yet what we now consider a Pope. Instead, there were bishops from across the church, though over time the Bishop of Rome in the western portion of the Church began to take on greater and greater preeminence, and eventually became what we today know as the Pope. The eastern bishops of the Church (more closely associated with Constantinople) at that time wanted to schedule Easter in conjunction with the Jewish Festival of Passover since, after all, Jesus went to Jerusalem, in the first place, to celebrate Passover. The Western bishops (more closely associated with Rome) preferred a date corresponding with the beginning of spring, because that was the time already established for a lot of pagan celebrations, and they wanted to offer an alternative. 

In fact, on this and other issues, the first split of the Church eventually occurred, around 1054/1055 AD, when the Church split into the Eastern Church, which today is made of multiple branches called the Orthodox Church, and the Western Church, which became known as the Roman Catholic Church of today. (Some five hundred years later the Protestant movement, under the leadership of Martin Luther and others, split from the Western or Roman Catholic Church). 

Most churches in America today are descendants of the Western line of the Church and use a different calendar than the Eastern Orthodox churches. Sometimes our celebrations of Easter fall on the same day, and sometimes they vary by as much as five weeks! Based on these calculations, Easter can fall between March 22 and April 25, so this year is the second latest day on which Easter can fall. Easter last fell on April 25 in 1943 and will not do so again until 2038.

So, for the record, this year (2011) the first full moon following the vernal equinox occurred on April 18. Easter falls on the first Sunday following April 18, which is April 24. This year both the Western and Eastern churches are celebrating Easter on the same day. The beginning of Passover this year falls on April 19.

Believe me when I say the actual computations for Easter are actual quite involved. If you want to dig deeper, google Easter for more information. However, for most of us it's enough to take the word of "the powers that be" and celebrate Easter this year on April 24. Happy Easter!

24 HOURS-Week 4: Pictures

Posted by Randy | Labels: , , , , , , , , , | Posted On Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 8:35 PM

In this post I'm sharing some present-day photos of historic sites of Jesus' last hours here on earth. Below is a portion of the Via Dolorosa (The Way of Suffering). This is believed to be a portion of the path Jesus walked from his time of torture with the Roman soldiers to Golgotha, where he was crucified. It was along this path that he carried his cross, and when he could do it no more, was aided by Simon of Cyrene.



Following his own conversion, Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire in 313 AD, in effect making it the religion of the realm. In the 330s he had a church built on the site that was believed to be where Jesus was crucified and buried. The church has undergone numerous construction projects, expansions, and even experienced destruction during the time of the Crusades. However, today the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands on this site. The picture below shows the area inside the church where it was believed Jesus was crucified.



Below is an outcropping of rock outside the old city of Jerusalem. In the 1880s a British general by the name of Charles Gordon discovered this formation and believed it had the appearance of a skull. Soon after, he discovered nearby an ancient garden tomb (see below). He therefore believed that this was the actual site of Jesus' crucifixion and burial. He believed Jesus was crucified on the hill overlooking this face of a skull (Golgotha in Aramaic or Calvary in Latin). This site is today called Gordon's Calvary.



For some fairly technical reasons, many, and maybe most, scholars do not believe this site is where Jesus was crucified and buried. The site located at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre seems to be the more likely spot to many scholars, yet Gordon's Calvary leaves you with a much stronger sense of actually "being there."


What I find very interesting is that today this rock outcropping actually sits above a bus barn in Jerusalem. My wife Susan and I visited the Holy Land and Jerusalem on a tour in 1990. As we walked up to this site, at first it seemed such a shame that this possibly significant Christian site stood near a noisy, smelly, highly trafficked area. But, as our guide pointed out to us, in many ways the original Golgotha, whether at this site or under the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, would have been a noisy, smelly, highly trafficked area. It would have been near the city on a main road. It would have been a spot where many people had been crucified, and most likely there would be bones and perhaps even the smell of decaying flesh. It would not have been a pretty site. So, we realized that in many ways this "Golgotha" was a modern-day equivalent of the original site.



Pictured below is the entrance to the tomb located near the rock outcropping immediately above. Notice in the lower left-hand corner of the picture there is a channel. This would have been the "track" in which the large stone used to cover the tomb would sit.

Below is the stone that rode in the "track" seen above.



Stepping back from the tomb entrance, you can now see why Gordon's Calvary became such a popular site for pilgrims. The tomb Jesus was buried in was in or near a garden, and the tomb found in the 1880s was located in a garden, which has been kept serene and beautiful. I found I could stand in this place and really imagine in the cool of the morning the actual events of Easter.
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