Pascha is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It’s the center of everything we believe and do as Orthodox Christians.
If you grew up Baptist or non-denominational here in Southeast Texas, you probably celebrated Easter as one important Sunday among others. Christmas might’ve felt equally big, maybe bigger. But in Orthodoxy, Pascha isn’t just another feast. It’s the Feast of Feasts. Everything else in the Church year revolves around it like planets around the sun.
We call it Pascha, not Easter. The word comes from the Hebrew Pesach (Passover), connecting Christ’s Resurrection to the Exodus when God delivered Israel from slavery. Christ is our Passover Lamb. But He doesn’t just lead us out of Egypt. He leads us out of death itself.
What Pascha Means
The Resurrection isn’t a nice epilogue to the crucifixion. It’s the moment death dies. When Christ rose from the tomb, He didn’t just come back to life like Lazarus did (Lazarus eventually died again). Christ destroyed death from the inside, trampled it down, broke its power forever. The Paschal troparion we sing says it perfectly: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”
This matters because of how we understand salvation. We don’t believe you “got saved” at an altar call and now you’re done. Salvation is healing. It’s transformation. It’s union with God, which we call theosis or deification. Christ took on our humanity so we could share in His divinity. And the Resurrection is when that restored human nature, fully united to God, is revealed in glory. Pascha opens the door to the life of the age to come.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote that the liturgy isn’t just a memorial of past events. It’s how we enter into them. When we celebrate Pascha, we’re not just remembering that Jesus rose two thousand years ago. We’re proclaiming that death has been defeated, that the tomb is empty, that the age to come has broken into this one.
How We Celebrate It
Pascha begins late Saturday night. And I mean late. The service usually starts around 11:00 PM with the church in near darkness. We stand in that darkness holding unlit candles, waiting. Then at midnight the priest emerges from the altar with a single flame, the Light of Christ, and begins lighting candles one by one. The light spreads through the congregation. Then we process outside (or around the church), and when we return, the priest opens the Royal Doors and proclaims: “Christ is risen!”
We respond: “Truly He is risen!” We’ll say that greeting hundreds of times over the next forty days.
The Paschal Matins and Divine Liturgy follow. The hymns are unlike anything else in the Church year. The Paschal Canon, the stichera, the troparion repeated again and again. The services are long, but nobody’s checking their watch. This is what we’ve been preparing for through the entire forty days of Great Lent.
After the Liturgy, we feast. The Lenten fast is over. We bring baskets of food to be blessed, eggs dyed red (symbolizing Christ’s blood and new life), cheese, meat, bread, whatever we’ve been abstaining from. Some parishes have a full meal right there, with games and dancing and kids hunting for eggs as the sun comes up. This isn’t frivolous. We’re celebrating the defeat of death. Of course there’s dancing.
The celebration continues for forty days until the Ascension. The first week, called Bright Week, is especially festal. No kneeling in services. No fasting. The Paschal troparion replaces many of the usual hymns. We carry the Artos, a special leavened bread, in procession and venerate it throughout the week.
Why the Date Changes
You’ve probably noticed that Orthodox Pascha often falls on a different Sunday than Western Easter. Sometimes it’s the same, but often we’re a week or even a month later. This confuses people, especially when your Baptist relatives are asking why you haven’t celebrated Easter yet.
The reason is complicated. The First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 established that Pascha should fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. But the Orthodox Church calculates this using the Julian calendar and traditional paschalion (the set of rules for determining Pascha’s date), while Western churches switched to the Gregorian calendar in the 1500s. Different calendars, different calculations, different dates most years.
Some people get worked up about this. But honestly, the date matters less than what we’re celebrating. Christ rose from the dead. That’s true whether we celebrate it in April or May.
Why This Matters for You
If you’re inquiring about Orthodoxy, you need to understand that Pascha isn’t optional or peripheral. It’s the heart. The Church’s entire life flows from the Resurrection. Our worship, our theology, our hope, all of it stands or falls on the empty tomb.
When you come to your first Paschal service at St. Michael’s, it might feel overwhelming. The length, the intensity, the sheer joy of it. You’ll probably be exhausted. But you’ll also understand, maybe for the first time, why the early Christians were willing to die rather than deny the Resurrection. They’d seen this. They’d tasted it. They knew death was beaten.
Christ is risen. That’s not a metaphor. It’s not a symbol. It’s the truest thing in the world. And Pascha is when we celebrate it with everything we have.
