When is Easter and why does it change every year? 
Sandy Dickson
 The annual festival of Easter to celebrate the rising again of Christ after His crucifixion changes from year to year but few understand why. They just know it has something to do with the moon.
So why does it keep shifting?
The standard international calendar is called the Gregorian Calendar, and it regulates the ceremonial cycle of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. A calendar established by Julius Caesar was revised by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, but slow to be accepted by all of the western world until the 1700’s.
The one thing that had been decided by the earlier council was to keep Easter on a Sunday, and the same Sunday throughout the world. However, to fix the Sunday so that it could be calculated in advance, special time tables were constructed to compute the Easter date in advance.
The usual statement is that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon. However the full moon involved is not the astronomical full moon, but an ecclesiastical moon.
Okay, what are the ecclesiastical rules? This is where it gets a bit confusing. They are - that Easter is the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after March 21( the day of the vernal equinox.) There are a couple other ones equally as complicated that wouldn’t be generally understood by a lay person, but it boils down to that Easter cannot occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The differences in annual Easter dates occur because the astronomical full moon is different then that of the ecclesiastical full moon, sometimes by a matter of hours, like in 1962, when it differed by six hours, but because Easter was to be on a Sunday, it put it into the following week.
The following is a chart for the next 18 years of Easter dates:
2007: April 8
2008 March 23
2009 April 12
2010 April 4
2011 April 24
2012 April 8
2013 March 31
2014 April 20
2015 April 5
2016 March 27
2017 April 16
2018 April 1
2019 April 21
2020 April 12
2021 April 4
2022 April 17
2023 April 9
2024 March 31
Copyright © 2007 Sandy Dickson. All rights reserved.
Visit Sandy's Corner
www.goflo.com/sd
or visit Sandy Dickson's WEBSITE |
