From the Parish Priest

And that’s it — Christmas has passed for another year!

As far as religious festivals go, there’s no doubt that Christmas is regarded as the most important event in the Christian year, with Remembrance Sunday and Harvest Thanksgiving somewhere not far behind. Easter will be mentioned as well, but very often it’s not given the importance it deserves. Christmas is seen as a “family” time for the whole country and receives massive publicity from schools to shopping precincts and from Eastenders to the Queen’s speech. Sadly Easter doesn’t attract the same coverage, yet it is for Christians the most important festival of the whole year. It’s the day on which Our Lord rose from the dead; the day he became our Saviour; the day on which all the Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled. Put simply, without Easter there would be no Remembrance Sunday, no Harvest Thanksgiving and certainly no Christmas. It was because of Christ’s resurrection that Christianity was born, and the early Christian Church celebrated the anniversary of that resurrection long before other feasts and festivals were imagined.

When you come to Church during Holy Week and on Easter Day itself, you’re taking part in some of the oldest liturgies around. The Palm Sunday procession; the reading of the Passion story; the Veneration of the Cross; the lighting of the New Fire are all found in the earliest Christian documents. At St. George’s Church we’re not only aligning ourselves with Christians around the world today, but we’re also part of a great tradition going back to those frightened disciples gathering in the Upper Room. Every Christian will want to worship in Church at Easter, and according to the Book of Common Prayer, every Christian MUST receive Communion then: “every confirmed member of the Church shall communicate at the least three times in the year, of which Easter to be one.”

The date of Easter changes from year to year because from those early times, Christians tried to celebrate the resurrection of Christ as close as possible to Passover - the Jewish Feast being kept by Jesus and his disciples when he ate the Last Supper. Passover is the most important event in the Jewish calendar recalling the Hebrew’s escape from Egypt and the eventual creation of Israel as a nation. This remains a particularly poignant occasion as Israel itself has been destroyed and re-created many times since then. The Hebrew (Jewish) calendar and the Gregorian (European) calendar are different, thus the arithmetic to work out the date of Easter is difficult and has the effect of Easter “moving around”. Passover lasts eight days, and this year is from April 3rd to April 10th, so our Easter falls right in the week. The last time both Passover and Easter coincided exactly was in the year 2000, when the date of the Orthodox Easter also coincided, but that’s a tale for next year!

Fr. Mike
Parish Priest