Easter in autumn

Spring or fall? I’ve never been able to make up my mind as to my favorite season. Spring is my official favorite. The season of new life after the cold, the sleep, the death of winter—springtime is the return of green grass and leaves, newborn lambs, and an end to the bulky clothes of winter. Most importantly, spring is Easter. It is the Resurrection of Jesus, the Lamb of God, and an end to the bulky burden of sin. How could I choose otherwise?

While summer had its delights of swimming and freedom from school, and winter brought snow to sled on and snow days at home, hot chocolate in hand, to me the only real competitor is fall. Fall, too, has that sense of newness about it. School in fall is not yet a burden; instead, it is the opportunity to see one’s friends again and begin anew. And there is something delicious about the quality of the air in autumn. Naturally speaking, it is a close call.

Yet, what autumn lacked was a theological claim to justify it. Mrs. Mark, my junior high math teacher, at least had Christmas to back her partisanship for winter. What had fall to say for itself?

A beginning answer might be that since Christ’s resurrection, there really is no such thing as the unfortunately named modern “ordinary time.” While the term is meant to refer to the numbered Sundays after Pentecost, it would be better to verbally link those numbered Sundays to Pentecost as was done in other liturgical calendars. The entire year revolves around the mystery of Christ liturgically celebrated at the great feasts, which take their power from Easter. And every Sunday is itself a “little Easter” at which we recall Christ’s Resurrection.

This could be said of all the seasons, however. What about fall itself? As it turns out, there is an answer to that question. In his profound book The Spirit of the Liturgy, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) brings up the questions some have asked about switching around the calendar for Catholics in the Southern Hemisphere, where spring and fall as seasons are switched. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to have Easter in September or October there?

Ratzinger answered that this is not necessary. For though there are cosmic considerations to the liturgy, the historical considerations are more important since Christ’s Death and Resurrection is not a myth of the seasons but a fact of history. “Only in history,” Ratzinger writes, “is the cosmos given its center and goal.” Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, the Jewish feast of Passover. Christ is the true Passover lamb.

But even for those who celebrate Easter during their own autumn, Ratzinger writes, there is no problem. There are, he says “‘autumnal’ aspects of the Easter mystery, which deepen and broaden our understanding of the feast and give it a special profile appropriate to the Southern Hemisphere.” For though Christ’s Death and Resurrection is identified by the New Testament as the fulfillment of the old Passover, it is also the fulfillment of the highest holy day of Israel: Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. This is the feast God commanded the Israelites to celebrate on the tenth day of Tishrei, the seventh month of the year, “for on this day shall atonement be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins you shall be clean before the Lord” (Leviticus 16:30). That feast falls in either September or October. In 2024, it is on October 12.

John’s Gospel, which tells us that the death of Jesus took place at the exact hour at which the sacrificial Passover lambs were slaughtered, also interprets Jesus’ death as connected to the Day of Atonement. So, too, the Epistle to the Hebrews. In the latter, we see that Jesus’ claim to priesthood is because he fulfilled the autumn feast. There we read, “We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf…” (Hebrews 6:19-20).

That reference to Jesus entering behind the curtain is a reference to the high priest (originally Aaron), who entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple only on the Day of Atonement to 1) sprinkle the blood of a sacrificial bull on the “mercy seat,” which is the lid on the ark of the covenant and the place at which God promised to speak to Moses, for forgiveness for his own sins, and 2) then the blood of a sacrificial goat, in atonement for the sins of Israel.

Hebrews tells us Jesus’ priesthood is greater. He is the true priest of Atonement, for He sympathizes with us in being tempted but had no sins to atone for (Hebrews 4:14-5:3). But there’s more.

Not only does our Lord fulfill what is foreshadowed in the Levitical priesthood, but he fulfills what is foreshadowed in the sacrifice. Leviticus 16 tells us there were two goats on the Day of Atonement. The high priest was commanded to cast lots to see which one would be offered for the sins of the people and which one would be the “scapegoat,” driven out into the desert alive, cut off from Israel, to represent the sins of the people being taken away. On Calvary, Jesus is the fulfillment of both animals: he atones for sin and, outside the walls of the city, he carries away our sins.

This theme is not only present in Scripture. It has been present in the Catholic liturgy in various rites. For instance, the lectionary for the old Latin Mass has as its Epistle readings for the Ember Days (times of fasting and prayer that happened every season in the old Western Christian calendars) in September some of the same readings that were used by Jews in the Synagogue in the time leading up to Yom Kippur. On Ember Saturday, in fact, the first reading at Mass is from Leviticus 23: 26-32, which are the commandments given to the people of Israel about how to celebrate the Day of Atonement!

I’m still torn about whether I like spring or fall best. Theologically, however, there are no worries. Christ’s Passover includes both. As Ratzinger writes, “Christ connects the world’s spring and autumn. The autumn of declining time becomes a new beginning, while the spring, as the time of the Lord’s death, now points to the end of time, to the autumn of the world, in which, according to the Fathers, Christ came among us.”

(Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Servant.)