For Christians, Easter is "the" Holy Day. While Christmas has become the most celebrated of Christian holy days, it is not as significant as Easter. I say this because the resurrection of Jesus (the basis of Easter) has been central to the church from her inception. The resurrection forms the basis for Paul's letters, the Gospels and most other New Testament books. The birth of Jesus on the other hand occupies only minimal space in two of the Gospels. As many commentators have pointed out, you could "do" Christian theology without the birth narratives but you could not do it without the resurrection.
The resurrection has always been a bit unexpected. The resurrection was an unexpected event for the disciples. Regardless of the fact that, at least according to the Gospels, Jesus spoke of his dying and rising, the disciples could not follow this line of thought. They could not follow it because it made no sense. Resurrection, while a staple of First Century Judaic thought, was something that would happen at the end of time. In other words, when God's final kingdom broke into the world, then all of humanity would be raised from the dead; the resurrection would happen.
When Jesus was tried and crucified the disciples assumed that he had failed. They questioned their involvement with him and returned to their former lives. While they were changed by Jesus' teachings it is apparent that they gave up hope of God's kingdom breaking into the world. This becomes very clear in that even when the women tell the disciples that Jesus is raised, the disciples refuse to believe them. It is only after their own encounters with Jesus that they too believe that Jesus has been raised. The resurrection then and not Jesus' teachings formed the initial core of the Christian faith.
It is assumed that the earliest Jewish Christians, while making the resurrection the center of their weekly worship, also initiated an annual resurrection remembrance in conjunction with Passover. While we do not have any definitive descriptions of such an event it is not long before Easter appears as its own Holy Day. The actual celebration of a specific holy day is not mentioned until the mid-second century. There is an Easter homily by Melito of Sardis (d.180 CE) which implies that the celebration of Easter was an established tradition.
The celebration of Easter as a holy day was initially rejected by many of the Reformed churches (including Presbyterians). It was rejected first because every Sunday was the weekly celebration of the resurrection. It was rejected secondarily because it had taken on many pagan concepts which, in the minds of the Reformers, skewed the true meaning of the resurrection. Finally they rejected it because the celebration was not specifically mentioned in the New Testament. In fact Dr. Samuel Miller writing in 1835 from his post as professor at Princeton Seminary stated categorically that "Presbyterians do not observe Holy Days." However, this proclamation proved to be relatively short lived.
Over the course of the next fifty years members of Presbyterian churches loved the celebrations of Christmas and Easter so much that they often sneaked off to other churches in order to celebrate those Holy Days. This movement was followed in 1855 by the publication of Eutaxia, or the Presbyterian Liturgies, by Charles Baird. In this work Baird rediscovered the liturgies of Calvin and other Reformers. He even noted that Calvin had, on occasion, celebrated Christmas. In 1885 A Presbyterian Prayer Book for Public Worship, by Comegys was published. While not completely embracing the church year (including Christmas and Easter) it moved the church in that direction. Finally in 1906 the Presbyterian Church officially endorsed (on a voluntary basis) the reintroduction of Easter as part and parcel of our worshipping life with the publication of its first official Book of Common Worship.
The gift of our Easter celebration today is that we are tied together with believers around the world and across more than 2,000 years in remembering the unexpected resurrection of Jesus and the life that brings.
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