By His Wounds We Are Healed – Holy Week isn’t technically part of our series. By His Wounds We Are Healed was a look at the passion accounts and one of the lessons from the Sunday’s in Lent. This lesson on Palm Sunday is a look at some of the event of Holy Week.
We go through many of the events – not all of them, but there was one that I didn’t have a chance to address on Sunday morning. That was the matter of the Passover.
The Passover fell on a Friday the week that Jesus died. If that’s the case, why did Jesus celebrate the Passover Feast with his disciples on Thursday evening? That’s an easy one. For God’s Old Testament people the next day began at dusk not dawn. When the sun went down on the Maundy Thursday evening, it was the Passover.
Then there is the matter of the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Exodus 12). The Feast of Unleavened Bread was the week long celebration of God’s Old Testament people. The Passover meal was one part of the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
The next question is how do we schedule the Christian Festival of Easter? It doesn’t follow the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The FUB falls on sundown of Monday 4/22 and runs through sundown of Tuesday, 4/30. The reason the holidays of God’s people fluctuate is because God’s people followed a lunar calendar. This isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t jive well with our Gregorian lives.
The festival of Easter was set back in 325 at the First Council of Nicaea. This system has been tweaked over the centuries especially in the 16th century when we switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The short answer is:
Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox. Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25.
Want to hear more? Watch this week’s Bible study from our series By His Wounds We Are Healed – Holy Week.
Please click HERE for the Bible class slides.