Church of The Epiphany Episcopal

Happy spring!  This year the whole month of April takes place in Eastertide.  That is the time between Easter Day and Pentecost.  It is the oldest part of the Church Year and is taken directly from the fifty-day period in the Jewish calendar which began with Passover and concluded with Pentecost (which is Greek for “fiftieth day”). Our Lord’s death and resurrection took place at Passover and the empowering of the apostles by the Holy Spirit took place on Pentecost.  Early on the celebrations of these feast days were moved to the Sundays following the Jewish festivals because of the early church’s intense reverence for the first day of the week as the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection.  The early Christians considered every Sunday to be a celebration of the rising of Christ and of the coming of the Holy Spirit – a repetition of Easter and Pentecost.

Certain things happen during worship in Eastertide that set this time apart from the remainder of the Church Year.  During Eastertide the word Alleluia is said and sung a lot.  This word, from the Hebrew word “hallelujah”, means “praise to Yahweh.”  As early as the time of the writing of the book of Revelation, the word hallelujah has had an important place in the church’s worship. You can see it in the description of the worship in heaven found in that book.

During Eastertide, one of our readings is always from the book of the Acts of the Apostles on Sunday mornings.  This book describes the life of early Christian communities; characterized by an intense awareness of the risen Lord’s presence and the apostolic preaching of the Resurrection. There are wonderful insights about how we can live in Christian community in that book.

A large candle, called the paschal candle, burns just to the right of the altar at every service during Eastertide.  This came from the custom in the Jewish synagogue to begin services in the evening with the lighting of candles – originally for the purpose of giving light but almost immediately invested with the symbolic meaning of light:  the revelation of God’s love.  Early Christians continued that use of light, seeing in the bringing of light into a dark place a symbol of the Resurrection. This paschal candle (from the Latin and Greek word pascha, which means “Passover”)  is often decorated with nails representing the wounds from the crucifixion which the risen Christ’s body still bore.  In the Middle ages, Winchester Cathedral had a paschal candle that was sixty feet tall!  We keep our paschal candle by the baptismal font during the rest of the Church Year and relight it at other times, especially for baptisms and funerals.

Eastertide is the time to live into a risen life like Christ our Lord.  Whatever is going on in your life right now, whatever you have been through, Eastertide and springtime is the right time to put the past behind you and begin anew; time to put all your energy into growing straight and strong in the light and love of our risen Lord. 

With great joy,