The trouble with Easter

Overheard on a bus. “When is Easter? Shouldn’t it be here already?”

Jon Kudelka

Overheard on a bus. “When is Easter? Shouldn’t it be here already?” The woman was speaking in a tone that suggested Easter had missed the bus and she sounded even less impressed when the person on the other end of the phone informed her exactly when Easter was due.

We don’t have much patience for Easter’s calendar. Either it’s too early — “whoa, summer has hardly finished” — or it gatecrashes Anzac Day and both are diminished by the proximity.

About the only thing certain about the holiday is that if you’re going camping, it will rain.

Easter is treated like a mischievous imp and every year someone — usually a lobbyist in a suit — will declare that the dates should be fixed.

A few years ago the churches claimed mea culpa when the Archbishop of Canterbury said he was going to speak to other churches about it and he hoped they’d nail down a date within five years (he might not have used that expression). And maybe churches should fix it, because they’re to blame.

First, the Bible refers to Christ’s crucifixion only as happening around the time of Passover, and even when the Gregorian calendar settled on a formula 500 years ago, not all the Christian churches adhered to it and the formula went something like this — the first Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox.

Simple, right.

If we loosen up a bit I think we can learn to appreciate the vicissitudes of the celebration. So, before the lobbyists get into their pulpits, let me make a case for the movable feast of Easter.

Easter is history revisited every year. It was pagan before it was Christian, and for early Europeans it was a season worth celebrating.

You’d survived another winter; your broccoli was sprouting and you could throw off the animal hides and remember who was a man and who was a woman. Even when it became Christian, Easter’s dates were controversial, especially around AD664 when one of the kings in England found himself celebrating on a different Sunday to his wife.

The wrangle over Easter dates has lasted longer than the War of the Roses, the Crusades, or even a call to Centrelink.

As a history lesson, Easter is a reminder of a time when religion ruled lives. A time when the tallest edifice on the European horizon was a church. A time when church bells marked periods of work, pray and rest. A time when your ­period on earth was just a precursor to the real life to come, when painted boiled eggs were considered a treat and murals in church were as ­exciting as a night at the movies.

For most of its time on the calendar, Easter has been a peaceful meeting of the pagan and the Christian. Eggs and crucifixes. Death and renewal. Church services and camping rituals. Even if its name sounds a lot like the goddess of spring, Eostre, but apparently owes nothing to her (another controversy).

Easter reminds us that time is mutable. We can move the hands around the clock face without fading curtains and we can juggle the dates for the autumn camping holiday without wrecking the economy. Besides, uncertainty isn’t as bad as its press suggests, especially when it means you can get a 10-day holiday with only two days’ holiday leave.

Easter is late this year and in five years (spoiler alert) it will be early. But it comes in its own time — a time that’s measured by the sun and the moon and the best guesses of ancient and not terribly well-informed clerics — and it certainly doesn’t run to a school timetable, a business diary or a bus schedule.

[e-mail]