Easter , also known as Resurrection Sunday , celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Jesus was crucified on Good Friday , and rose from the dead after three days on Easter Sunday.
Easter Sunday marks the end of Lent , a day period of fasting, prayer and penance, and is followed by a day period called Eastertide , which ends with Pentecost Sunday. Borrowing from the Jewish tradition, a liturgical day begins at sunset, and thus the Easter Vigil begins between sunset on Holy Saturday and sunrise on Easter Sunday. The Easter Vigil service moves from darkness to light, symbolically re-enacting the Easter story of Jesus rising from the dead.
The service begins outside the church where the priest lights and blesses a fire. A Paschal candle , representing the Risen Christ, is lit from that fire. The candle is processed through the church, and the Exsultet , Easter proclamation, is sung. Passages from the Bible are read, the Gloria and Alleluia are sung, and the Eucharist or Holy Communion is celebrated. In many churches, this is also a time when new members are baptized into the Church in accordance with ancient tradition.
The " Sunrise Service " is similar, but held outside early in the morning on Easter Sunday, so that attendants can see the sun rise. However, not all Christians observe Easter Sunday. Small groups like the Quakers and Jehovah's Witness do not observe Easter believing the celebration to be unbiblical.
Easter Sunday is preceded by Holy Week , which is the last week of Lent. However, most often the two dates coincide, and between the year and there are only 18 differences between the dates calculated using the two methods. A well-known method of calculating the date of Easter was given by Carl Friedrich Gauss, however a simpler method was described by Jean Meeus in [1]. The first Christians followed the biblical Hebrew calendar and timed the observance of Easter in relation to the date of the Jewish Passover.
Passover was celebrated by the Israelites to commemorate their deliverance from the slavery in Egypt. The Passover meal was eaten at sunset on the 14th day of Nisan Aviv. Jesus was crucified on the 14th and rose from the dead some time before sunrise on the 16th day of Nisan. Because the Jews got away from the biblical Hebrew calendar in AD and further in AD , and because the Christians wanted the date to be independent of the Jewish calendar, the First Council of Nicaea AD established the independent and uniform calculation of the Easter date.
In many countries, Easter is a public holiday , and as it always falls on Sunday, some countries also have Easter Monday as a public holiday, including Australia, Germany and Ireland. Although, Easter is the most important Christian holiday it is not as popular as Christmas. It joins two important events of which the first is profoundly sad and dramatic while the other is just the opposite.
The first one is, of course, the Crucifixion and Death of Christ after which his body was placed in the tomb. Three days later he Resurrected beating death. Resurrection is a triumph of life and even more astonishing than the miracle of Christ birth. In addition to religious celebrations involving Church services, Easter is celebrated in several ways in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world.
Some of these celebrations have little to do with the Christian meaning of the holiday. The most popular include family meals, Easter eggs decoration, hiding the decorated eggs for children to find and giving children baskets with candy. In the USA, the Spring break for high school and college students usually occurs about Easter time, hence many families leave the cold of northern states to visit amusement parks or sunny beaches in the south.
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