A woman arranges a traditional Orthodox Easter egg painted with the image of Jesus Christ at Bucharest's Village Museum during a Palm Sunday fair, where hundreds of artisans from all over Romania gathered to show and sell their goods, April 23, 2005. Romanians, like other Eastern Europeans who share the Orthodox religion, will celebrate Easter on May 1. REUTERS/Bogdan Cristel

For Orthodox Christians who operate on an old calendar and under a different understanding of the Nicean Council, Easter has not yet happened. It’s this Sunday.

Orthodox Christianity, the Eastern branch that split from Catholicism many centuries ago, celebrates Easter on a different day because it takes a different slant on the Nicean Council instruction made in 325 A.D. — that Easter falls the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, “and not according to the reckoning of the Jews.”

That “reckoning of the Jews” signified the day Jews celebrate Passover, which was about them being saved, freed and redeemed in their Egyptian captivity, by the sacrifice of a lamb.

For early Christians, said the Rev. Isaac Skidmore of St. Gabriel the Archangel in Ashland, Passover became transformed to mean “God purchased our freedom with the blood of Jesus Christ and he’s the sacrificial lamb that allows us to be delivered from the enslavement to human passions, thus opening the gates of paradise and fellowship with God.”

To honor the resurrection as well as historical chronology, Orthodox Christians decided Easter should always fall after Passover, never before or on that day, the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan.

To keep to that tradition, all Orthodox churches continue to adhere to the long-gone Julian calendar, promulgated by Julius Caesar. Because it lacked an accurate vernal equinox, it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century.

Western Christians followed the Julian calendar and took the Nicean “reckoning” clause to mean they should simply disregard the Jewish Passover date in setting the date of Easter.

Orthodox Easter is called Pascha, pronounced “paska,” and it means the resurrection of our Lord so that our sins may be passed over, said the Rev. Seraphim Cardoza of St. Innocent’s in Rogue River.

Cardoza called the event a moveable feast, as there is much feasting into the wee hours, while serving a vigil for the return of Christ.

“For every Christian, Easter is the highest day of the year, except for Christmas in America, because that has become such a commercialized holiday,” said Cardoza.

In the Grants Pass church, the vigil around midnight is done in the dark, with candles being lit, one by one, awaiting, metaphorically, the arrival of the bridegroom, who comes at midnight (Matthew 25:6).

It is the greatest and most elaborate celebration, the feast of feasts, said officials of Christ the Savior Orthodox Church.

Easter for Orthodox followers, said St. Gabriel’s Skidmore, is the time when God enters the reality of our human experience and is glorified and exalted above mortality, “like a hand reaching into our fractured existence, so we never have to be alone.”

St. Gabriel’s Easter feast goes on till about 3 in the morning Sunday, with parishioners taking Easter baskets and breaking the 50-day fast of Lent with meats, cheeses and wines in joyous celebration, Skidmore said.

“Easter is an expression of the human instinct for resurrection, for the sense of life coming out of death in spring,” he said. “Christ said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ and that’s where you need to put your instinct for rebirth, in a place that will not annihilate the self or those around us, but will give us real renewal.”

The Easter date isn’t the only issue separating Catholic from Orthodox faiths. The big doctrinal schisms, said Skidmore, are the Catholic insistence in the 11th century on the primacy of the pope over other bishops, something Eastern churches don’t accept.

Orthodox churches also don’t support the Western amendment to the Nicean Creed, stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son.” Orthodoxy believes Christ receives his divine essence from God, but does not “drink of it from the same pool of divinity” — something Skidmore called “generic trinitarianism.”

Orthodox churches see themselves as drawing from the very roots of Christianity, he added, and do their best not to go with modern changes — some even feeling that the Gregorian calendar is a “sellout to the spirit of the world.”