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A Christian Feast for the Easter Season

Michelle Arnold

“What do I do?” the bewildered matriarch exclaimed in a question submitted to Catholic Answers a few years ago. “Some of my grown children want to spend Easter Sunday at home with their spouse and kids instead of coming to my house for the big extended family gathering I host every year for the holiday. Can we hold our clan’s Easter celebration on Palm Sunday or Holy Saturday instead?”

I was sympathetic to my inquirer’s distress but pointed out that there was no need to celebrate Easter during Holy Week. Easter is a season, seven weeks long—she could host her Easter celebration on one of the other five Easter Sundays before Pentecost.

That she evidently didn’t realize that celebrating the holiday on a day following the first Sunday of Easter was an option is quite understandable. In our culture, most people assume a holiday is “over” once the first day of the holiday passes. That’s why Americans start carting their Christmas trees out to the curb on December 26. Although many Catholics in the U.S. have begun in recent years to extend their Christmas celebrations through Epiphany, they sometimes forget that Easter also can be celebrated beyond its first day through Pentecost Sunday.

Of course, this year families must navigate Covid-19 restrictions and won’t be able to gather with extended family during this Easter season. But they can still celebrate Easter at home. Let’s look at how Catholic families might put together an at-home celebration of our Lord’s Resurrection during this Easter season.

Perhaps the earliest known Christian celebration of Christ’s Resurrection is the agape feast. Funeral feasts were popular in the ancient world, and this type of gathering is believed to be one of the inspirations for Christ’s Last Supper. For Christians, though, a memorial of our Lord’s death isn’t complete without a commemoration of his Resurrection and a celebration of the divine love (agape) that binds us together as the mystical body of Christ.

St. Paul wove these themes together in his meditation on the institution of the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, he said that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Of the bread that is broken and cup that is blessed, “is it not a participation in the [body and] blood of Christ?” (1. Cor. 10:16). By the Lord’s body and blood, we are made “individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). Our Lord, as Paul reminded us a few chapters later, is no longer dead but risen indeed because otherwise, “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17)...