Pascha

Pascha is the Orthodox Easter, the feast of the resurrection of Christ and the greatest festival of the Eastern churches, the "feast of feasts". It keeps the same paschal rule as the West, the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, but computes it on the older Julian tables, with the equinox reckoned by the Julian calendar and the moon by the traditional Alexandrian cycle. Because the Julian calendar now runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian, and the lunar tables differ, Orthodox Pascha usually falls one, four or five weeks after Western Easter, and only sometimes on the same day.

A further rule, honoured in practice, keeps Pascha after the Jewish Passover, following the Gospel sequence. Proposals to agree a common date, discussed most notably at Aleppo in 1997, have not been adopted. The occasional coincidences (as in 2025) are periodic accidents of the two calendars, not a settlement. The divergence is a live ecumenical question and, for the many Orthodox living among Western Christians, an annual and visible one.

The heart of Pascha is the midnight service. In darkness the faithful gather; the priest brings out a single flame from the sanctuary and the light spreads candle to candle through the whole church; a procession goes around the outside of the building, re-enacting the coming to the empty tomb, and returns to the proclamation "Christ is risen!", answered "Truly he is risen!" (in Greek, Christos anesti / Alithos anesti), a greeting exchanged among the Orthodox through the following weeks.

The Paschal Homily of John Chrysostom is read, calling all, those who fasted and those who did not, to the feast; the long Lenten fast is broken, often with the red eggs whose colour stands for the blood of Christ and whose shell, cracked, for the broken tomb, and with festal foods such as the Greek tsoureki or Russian kulich and paskha. The exchange of light, greeting and food makes the resurrection a shared bodily event rather than only a doctrine, and the following Bright Week continues the celebration with the church's royal doors kept open.