When is Easter this year?

The calendar would be oh so simple if it weren’t for Easter. As everyone inside or outside the church is aware, Easter jumps about apparently randomly in March and April, dragging an important part of the church year around with it – Lent with its feasting (Pancake Day, Mardi Gras etc.) and fasting, Ascension, Pentecost and others. “When is Easter this year?” must be one of the most commonly asked questions when any group of Christians sit down to plan anything.

So, when is Easter this year? 

Actually of course it isn’t in the slightest bit random. Because the crucifixion took place at Passover, the early church naturally fixed the new Easter celebrations to the Jewish Passover week, and the date of that was based on observations of the moon. Easter was set as the Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox. To eliminate problems of differences of observation the Church simplified this by doing away with actually observing the moon and instead listed standardised full moon dates in tables, calling them Ecclesiastical Full Moons, and standardised the date of the equinox, which allowed everyone to celebrate Easter on the same date. Over the centuries this process has been corrected and refined as more precise astronomical data became available. At its core, however is this simple rule:-

Easter is the Sunday following the first Full Moon on or after 21 March.

The outcome of this is that the earliest Easter Sunday can fall is 22 March and the latest is 25 April.

You can find a full explanation of the calculations on Wikipedia.

Don’t forget that we have a few Easter-period drama scripts available for download on this site for use in church services – God in Your Cupboard for use in Lent, two contrasting Easter Morning scripts Sunday 4am and Sunday 5am, and the hilarious-but-edgy script about Easter, faith and chocolate, A Chocolate Tomb.