Monday in the Octave of Easter
For Christians Easter is like Ohio, “the heart of it all.” Every chapter, every verse, every word of the New Testament is permeated with Easter. “We are Easter people and Alleluia is our song” (Saint Augustine). But do we put more energy into Lent than Easter? We spend 40 days preparing, and then celebrate Easter as if it’s a single day.
Easter isn’t just a day. In our liturgical life it is a season that lasts 50 days. In other words: the next 50 days should be celebrated as a single joyful feast. The celebration ought not temper down, rather it’s only just begun.
Our ancestors in the faith found great symbolic meaning in these 50 days of Easter. 50 days is seven weeks — a week of weeks plus one day. That extra day was the Eighth Day — the day of resurrection, the day that symbolizes eternity. It’s not just the start of a new seven-day week but the beginning of a whole new creation.
Fifty days is also one-seventh of the whole year, so these 50 days hold the same relationship to the year as Sunday does to the week. That’s why the 50 days of Easter are known as one Great Sunday of the entire year.
In our early centuries, the neophytes (newly baptized) wore their white baptismal garments throughout this week, and after Christians gained influence, this whole week was a legal holiday in the Roman Empire.
The roots of this Christian custom grew deep from Jewish soil. The first day of Passover came seven weeks before Shavuot, or the Feast of Weeks, or Pentecost. (“Pentecost'' is from the Greek word meaning “fiftieth day.”) So, as Jews connected Passover and Pentecost giving meaning to the days in between, so did Christians when it came to the days between Easter and Pentecost.
So let us rejoice and celebrate long after the last jelly bean is gone!
-Timothy J. Cronin