Easter is a moveable feast. This means it does not take place on the same day every year. Technically, this is a product of the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, which determined that Easter day would take place the Sunday immediately following the Paschal Full Moon.
While this is the “real” explanation for the movement of Easter’s date each year, there are also many similarities between Easter as an idea and Jesus himself.
The idea that Easter would always change – or always move around – regardless of any human calculation, is suggestive of the nature of Jesus, whose death and resurrection are the subject of the feast day.
Christians call Jesus a divine human, meaning not wholly of the earth. This suggests that there is at least somewhat of a strain on his attachment to humanity. Jesus disappeared for a chunk of time, or so it would seem based on the fact that our record of his life skips from about age 12 to his early thirties.
There are ideas about what Jesus did in those years, but the idea of an Easter egg hunt somewhat emulates this sense of journey and searching that he may have been experiencing. Children go out in search of something specific, and they fill their bags with the eggs they find worthwhile to keep.
Sometimes the prize is a golden egg filled with money; however, the point is that children learn it’s okay to pick and choose what looks, or tastes, good to them, and they learn this on a day with a direct relationship to Jesus Christ.
Easter helps us to understand the idea of Cafeteria Christians, or those who simply build their own version of their faith by picking and choosing the pieces they like best to adhere to.
Christian faith is “blessed” with a wide variety of things to believe or not believe, as a result of Jesus’ own fickleness, in terms of what he did, where he went, and what he said.
How convenient it must be that Easter, the primary feast day, gives children a perfect exercise in how to determine what to believe.
What day does Easter fall on this year?
March 31st, for crying out loud. Heck, Ash Wednesday fell two days before Valentine’s Day, and the Pope dropped out of office not too long after that. True, these are only Catholic Church-specific incidences, but the point is that the Christian faith is constantly evolving.
There is not necessarily one authentic “Christian view” on how to live the faith.
Jesus did many different things and contradicted himself a time or two, and followers must be free to choose what to think and how to act.
Easter is the perfect holiday for demonstrating just how flexible the faith is and how accommodating it is for the people who belong to it. Easter is never on the same day, it provides exercises for picking and choosing, but it never veers too far from the subject of the feast.
In any case, perhaps this argument was better in theory than in eggsecution.
Paige Pelonis is a sophomore journalism and international studies double major and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er.