Pascha is the Feast of Feasts. It’s not just a Sunday, it’s a midnight explosion of light and joy that launches fifty days of celebration.
If you’ve only been to Western Easter services, you’re in for something different. We don’t do sunrise services. We do midnight. The church goes dark on Holy Saturday night. People gather, waiting. Then just before midnight, the priest emerges with a single candle lit from the altar, proclaiming “Come, receive the light!” Everyone lights their candles from that flame, passing fire from person to person until the whole church glows. Then we process outside (yes, even in Southeast Texas humidity) and circle the building, carrying that light into the darkness. When we reach the closed church doors, the priest chants “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!” The doors fly open. We flood back inside singing. The bells ring. It’s midnight, and everything has changed.
“Christ is risen!” someone says to you. “Truly He is risen!” you answer back. You’ll say this hundreds of times over the next week. To your priest. To the person next to you at coffee hour. To your kids when they wake up Sunday morning. To the checkout lady at Brookshire’s if she’s Orthodox too. It’s not just a greeting, it’s the truth we’ve been fasting forty days to fully receive.
The Paschal Divine Liturgy follows immediately after that midnight proclamation. We don’t kneel. We don’t prostrate. For the entire service we stand in the presence of the Resurrection. The liturgy uses texts you won’t hear any other time of year. St. John Chrysostom’s Paschal homily gets read, the one that welcomes everyone whether they fasted the whole forty days or showed up at the eleventh hour. Then we commune. Then we eat.
And we eat everything we’ve been fasting from. Most families bring a basket to church filled with foods that were off-limits during Lent: red eggs, cheese, butter, lamb, ham, special breads. The priest blesses these baskets either right after the midnight liturgy or on the following Sunday (Thomas Sunday, when we read about the disciple who doubted). Those red eggs aren’t just decoration. They represent Christ’s blood and the new life that breaks out of death. Kids play a game cracking them against each other, last egg standing wins.
The meal after the midnight service is its own tradition. Some families go home for a feast. Some parishes host a huge breakfast right there in the fellowship hall at two in the morning. You’ll find lamb (roasted, in soup, however your family does it), Paschal breads that go by different names depending on who baked them, cheese, eggs prepared six different ways. People are exhausted and wired at the same time. Nobody’s in a hurry to leave.
Then comes Bright Week, the seven days after Pascha. We don’t just celebrate one day and move on. The whole week is Pascha. Many parishes serve the Paschal liturgy every morning that week. Fasting rules are completely relaxed. The services stay joyful. You’ll hear “Christ is risen from the dead” so many times it becomes the background music of your week. That’s the point. We’re not marking a historical anniversary. We’re entering the reality of the Resurrection, and it takes more than three hours on one night to do that.
The Paschal season actually lasts fifty days, all the way to Pentecost. The liturgical texts stay bright. We don’t fast on Wednesdays and Fridays like we normally do. The whole Church is catching its breath in the joy of the Resurrection. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware once wrote that Pascha isn’t just the most important day of the year, it’s the day that makes all other days possible. You feel that during these fifty days. Everything’s different.
If you’re coming from a Protestant background, this might feel like a lot. You’re used to Easter being one Sunday, maybe with a special service and new clothes and ham afterward. We do that too, but we stretch it out. We make it last. Because if Christ really rose from the dead, one morning service doesn’t quite cover it.
Some of this will vary depending on your parish. Antiochian churches sometimes incorporate Middle Eastern foods and customs, specific breads, certain ways of preparing lamb, Arabic hymns mixed with English. But the core is the same everywhere: the midnight service, the light, the procession, the greeting, the feast, the fifty days.
Your first Pascha will probably overwhelm you. You’ll be tired. You might not know all the responses yet. You’ll wonder if you packed the right things in your basket. That’s fine. Just show up. Light your candle from someone else’s. Say “Truly He is risen” when someone says “Christ is risen” to you. Eat the food. Let the joy work on you. You’ve got forty-nine more days to figure it out.
