This year Easter will be celebrated on the same day in both the Western and Eastern churches. The next time that happens will be 2017. Work continues to find a common date for Easter.
Ekklesia reports:
The General Secretary of the World Council of Churches has urged Christians to give this year’s celebration of Easter a clear ecumenical profile and to work for a common date of Easter for the future, noting that this year it falls on the same day 24 April for both eastern and western traditions.
“In a world divided by poverty and violence, it is important that we are one in our witness to the crucified and risen Christ in actions as well as in words,” said the Rev Dr Olav Fykse Tveit.
He added: “We rejoice that this year Christians of eastern and western traditions will celebrate the resurrection of the Lord on the same date.”
Because the date of Easter is calculated using either the Julian calendar used by most Orthodox churches, or the Gregorian calendar, Christians of eastern and western traditions often celebrate Easter on different Sundays.
There have been five times in the past 10 years when Easter has fallen on the same date for all Christians. In the future this will be less frequent with the next coinciding dates being in 2017 and 2025.
Significant work was undertaken in the 1980s on agreeing a common date at the Pan-Orthodox level, but implementation was difficult at the time because many churches concerned were living under communist regimes. This work was taken up at a consultation in 1997 in Aleppo, Syria, sponsored jointly by the WCC and the Middle East Council of Churches, which proposed a way of calculating the date of Easter so that it would always be celebrated on the same day.
Here is a background piece on the two Easters and what is being done to reconcile the two.