Easter Sunday

Extract

Easter Sunday is not a feast day standing by itself. It is the culmination of a celebration which may be said to begin on Palm Sunday and which continues through Low Sunday and beyond to Ascension Day, and even to Whit Sunday and its octave. All this is the Pasch or Passover, which we call Easter. It is the Spring Festival, in a sense the New Year—the New Year not of our arbitrary calendars but of nature and of life, vegetable, animal, human and divine.

Easter is the centre and climax of the whole Christian year. But in a sense it is not only a Christian feast, nor does it originate with Christ or in Christendom. We know that the word Pasch or Passover is not a Christian name, nor originally it was a Christian feast: it is a Jewish name and a Jewish feast. By the time of Christ it had come to mean for the Jews principally a commemoration of their passage from the slavery of Egypt to the Promised Land ‘flowing with milk and honey'.