Bright Year: Introduction
What’s the most important day of the year?
For the vast majority of Christians, the answer has been clear: Easter. Of course Easter. It is the high holiday, the holiday par excellence. Easter is the day when Jesus rose from the dead, defeating death, being established as the Lord and Savior of the universe. If that Sunday was the high point of human history, which it was, it should be treated as the pinnacle of the calendar.
Not Halloween. Not Thanksgiving. Not even Christmas. Easter is the big one.
So humungous is Easter that it demands a party that lasts forty days. At least that’s the sentiment behind the traditional Christian liturgical year. Churches decorate in white, indicating glory, radiance, eternal life. It’s party season. Forty days of joy.
There’s another, more concentrated tradition called Bright Week. In the eastern churches especially, the Easter feast is carried out with great intensity for seven days, starting on Easter itself and carrying through the following Saturday. At the very least, let’s have a week!
So serious were the eastern bishops about Bright Week that they decreed its observation. At the Quinisext Council of 692, canon law 66 was formalized:
From the holy day of the Resurrection of Christ our God until the next Lord’s day, for a whole week, in the holy churches the faithful ought to be free from labour, rejoicing in Christ with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs; and celebrating the feast, and applying their minds to the reading of the holy Scriptures, and delighting in the Holy Mysteries; for thus shall we be exalted with Christ and together with him be raised up.
Mandatory vacation, Bright Week!
There’s plenty to think about in Bright Week, once you begin to unpack the significance of Easter. The resurrection of Jesus screams volumes about Jesus, of course. The resurrection also means all sorts of things about our own salvation. The list goes on from there. In Bright Week we are invited to muse on what resurrection means for creation, community, discipleship, the Holy Spirit, angels, sex, politics – just to name a few.
The truth is, the resurrection sheds light on everything. Jesus of Nazareth stepping out of the tomb released a glory bomb. It detonated and nothing was ever the same. It didn’t automatically paint everything in blinding white, no. That’s not how Easter light works. Rather, for those who encountered the risen Christ, they could, as if for the first time, see. They could see Him. They could see the ultimate truth. In the resurrection light they could also start to see everything else in its intricate beauty. Jesus emerging from the tomb brought out very different colors, colors which are (to borrow a term from Hans Urs von Balthasar) “legitimate refractions.”
This blog series is about recording some of those refractions. Some posts are observations of the biblical accounts themselves. A few will be about dogmatics. Far more will be posts on the things illuminated by Easter: meditations, discoveries, photos. You know, all the things elicited by the resurrection glory shining over the ups and downs of the year between Easter and Easter.
We need more than Bright Week to see it all. We need a Bright Year.
Okay, I need a bright year. It’s been a rough one. This series starts in earnest after a brutal 2020. Plague and politics and all the unknowns that went with them. To boot, my home church faced its own crisis of leadership. It was a grim time.
Hence Bright Year. This is my account of a year of renewal, a year of re-emerging in the strange light pouring from the empty tomb. If it sheds light on your way too, praise be to the God of life.
Nathan Hitchcock
Pascha 2021
For all posts, see here.
Dr. Nathan Hitchcock is an educational consultant specializing in competency-based curricula and network-based supervision. He also helps organizations find their future through strategic planning. He received his PhD in Divinity from the University of Edinburgh.