Eastertide

Eastertide is the oldest season of the Christian year after the paschal feast itself: fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost, kept not as an aftermath but as one continuous celebration. The early church called the whole span Pentecost, from the Greek for fiftieth, and treated every day of it as a Sunday. The marks of that festal status were concrete and are recorded early: no fasting through the fifty days, and prayer made standing rather than kneeling, a rule thought fitting for a season of resurrection and confirmed by the Council of Nicaea, whose twentieth canon directs that prayer be offered standing on Sundays and through the days of Pentecost. The arithmetic of the season is a week of weeks, seven sevens of days with one added, a deliberately overflowing measure.

Within it the church now keeps the Ascension on the fortieth day, following the count in the Acts of the Apostles, and the final ten days look toward the coming of the Spirit. The paschal candle lit at the Vigil burns at every liturgy through the season, the alleluia suppressed through Lent returns everywhere, and the readings run through the resurrection appearances and the Acts. Where Lent is the year's long inhale, the fifty days are its exhale, and the calendar gives the rejoicing ten days more than the fast.

The fifty days of Eastertide are inherited arithmetic. In the Torah, Israel is commanded to count seven full weeks from the offering of the first sheaf of the barley harvest at Passover, and to keep the fiftieth day as a feast: the counting of the Omer, ending at Shavuot, the feast of weeks. Greek speaking Jews called that fiftieth day Pentecost, and the Christian season took over the frame entire, counting its fifty days from Pascha, the Christian Passover, to a fiftieth day feast that kept the borrowed name. The church filled the frame with its own content.

Shavuot celebrated the giving of the covenant; the Christian Pentecost celebrates the descent of the Spirit on the apostles, an event the Acts of the Apostles places precisely on that Jewish feast, when Jerusalem was full of pilgrims. The parallel was not lost on the tradition, which read the two fiftieth days against each other, law and Spirit. One habit of the season, the count itself, has kept devotional force in both traditions: as Jewish practice counts the Omer aloud each evening, Christian communities have kept the sense of numbered days moving toward a completion, with the Ascension marking day forty and the final novena of waiting closing the season. The season is thus one of the clearest places where the Christian calendar shows its Jewish bones.