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Orthodox Christians are Celebrating Easter on May 5

Main entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem.

Collected and Written by Zia H Shah MD

Most of the Muslims know about the Catholic and Protestant Christians, but, fail to recognize the Orthodox Church, her precise beliefs and her historic relationship with the Roman Catholic Church.

Most of us know very little about the fact that the Church of Rome was once in communion with the Orthodox Church, but the two were split after the East-West Schism, during the eleventh century and thus it is no longer in communion with the Orthodox Church.

I thought that Easter this year may be a good time to learn about Orthodox Christians.

The differences among the different Churches as regards the nature of Jesus, may peace be on him, may also hold the key to bring Judaism, Christianity and Islam to a better understanding of Monotheism.  But, that is a subject for another day.

His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide. He resides in Istanbul, Turkey.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople

His All Holiness, who loosely is also a spiritual leader for the Church of Jerusalem, wrote in an article in the Huffington Post today:

While many Christians celebrated Easter over a month ago as a result of differing calendar calculations, Orthodox Easter takes place much later this year, falling on May 5. Thus, at midnight on Saturday, May 4, the night that our fourth-century predecessor on the Throne of Constantinople, St. Gregory Nazianzus, described as “brighter than any sunlit day,” some 300 million Orthodox Christians will swarm churches to hear the words: “Come, receive the light!”

On that night, throughout the world, entire congregations previously waiting in darkness and filled with anticipation will light up, their faces shining with joy and hope. Together they will all chant in numerous languages, depending on geography and culture, the triumphant hymn familiar to young and old: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death, and granting life to those in the tombs.”

The Orthodox Church is a communion comprising the fifteen separate autocephalous hierarchical churches that recognize each other as “canonical” Orthodox Christian churches. There is an essentially political disagreement over the autocephaly of one of the churches—the Orthodox Church in America.

There is no single earthly head of all the Orthodox Churches comparable to the Pope of the Catholic Church. The highest-ranking bishop of the communion is the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is also primate of one of the autocephalous churches. These organizations are in full communion with each other, so any priest of any of those churches may lawfully minister to any member of any of them, and no member of any is excluded from any form of worship in any of the others, including reception of the Eucharist. Each local or national Orthodox Church is a portion of the Orthodox Church as a whole.

In the early Middle Ages, the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church was ruled by five patriarchs: the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; these were collectively referred to as the Pentarchy. Each patriarch had jurisdiction over bishops in a specified geographic region. This continued until 927, when the autonomous Bulgarian Archbishopric became the first newly-promoted patriarchate to join the original five.

The patriarch of Rome was “first in place of honor” among the five patriarchs. Disagreement about the limits of his authority was one of the causes of the Great Schism, conventionally dated to the year 1054, which split the church into the Catholic Church in the West, headed by the Bishop of Rome, and the Orthodox Church, led by the four eastern patriarchs. After the schism this honorary primacy shifted to the Patriarch of Constantinople, who had previously been accorded the second-place rank at the First Council of Constantinople.

Orthodox Churches are also distinctive in that they are organized into self-governing jurisdictions along national, ethnic, and/or linguistic lines. Orthodoxy is thus made up of 15 or 16 national autocephalous bodies. Smaller churches are autonomous and each have a mother church that is autocephalous.

The Orthodox Church includes the following churches:

Most Orthodox are united in communion with each other, though unlike the Roman Catholic Church, this is a looser connection rather than a top-down hierarchy (see primus inter pares).

Let us learn a little more about the The Church of Jerusalem.

Despite the strife, persecutions and meager population, bishops continued to be elected or named. Eusebius of Caesarea provides the names of an unbroken succession of thirty-six Bishops of Jerusalem up to the year 324. The first sixteen of these bishops were Jewish—from James the Just to Judas († 135)—and the remainder were Gentiles.[4] The Metropolitans of Caesarea continued to appoint the bishops of Aelia Capitolina until 325.

At the First Council of Nicaea in 325, though the bishop of Aelia Capitolina was still subordinate to the Metropolitan of Caesarea, the Council accorded the bishop a certain undefined precedence in its seventh canon.

In a decree issued from the seventh session of the Fourth Ecumenical Council (the Council of Chalcedon) in 451 the Bishop of Jerusalem was elevated to the rank of Patriarch, ranked fifth after the Sees of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. (see Pentarchy) Since then, the Church of Jerusalem has remained an autocephalous Church.

Going back to Easter the topic of our learning today.

Easter[nb 1][nb 2] (Latin: Pascha; Greek Πάσχα Paskha, from Hebrew: פֶּסַח‎ Pesaḥ[1]) is a Christian festival and holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day after his crucifixion at Calvary as described in the New Testament.[2][3] Easter is the culmination of the Passion of Christ, preceded by Lent, a forty-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance. The last week of Lent is called Holy Week, and it contains the days of the Easter Triduum, including Maundy Thursday (also known as Holy Thursday), commemorating the Last Supper and its preceding foot washing,[4][5] as well as Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion and death of Jesus.[6] Easter is followed by a fifty-day period called Eastertide, or the Easter Season, ending with Pentecost Sunday.

Easter is a moveable feast, meaning it is not fixed in relation to the civil calendar. The First Council of Nicaea (325) established the date of Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon (the Paschal Full Moon) following the March equinox.[7] Ecclesiastically, the equinox is reckoned to be on 21 March (even though the equinox occurs, astronomically speaking, on 20 March in most years), and the “Full Moon” is not necessarily the astronomically correct date. The date of Easter therefore varies between 22 March and 25 April. Eastern Christianity bases its calculations on the Julian calendar, whose 21 March corresponds, during the 21st century, to 3 April in the Gregorian calendar, in which the celebration of Easter therefore varies between 4 April and 8 May.

Additional Reading

The Christian Theology and Nature of Jesus

Easter: Can Resurrection of Jesus be Precisely Defined?

Jesus never said in the Gospels: “I was dead and now I am  alive!”

Would You Believe Stories from 2000 Years ago or Albert Einstein  and E = MC2?

Is Jesus Man, Is he God, or Both?

Did Jesus rise in a physical body or a spiritual one?

 

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