Senior bishop warns against fixed date for Easter

A senior bishop has spoken out against fixing the date of Easter.

In a Maundy Thursday sermon, Bishop of Salisbury Nicholas Holtam said that Easter was linked to the Jewish Passover festival. Fixing one date for Easter would separate Christians from their Jewish roots, he warned.

Bishop Holtam said: "Whether or not the Last Supper was a Passover meal is not certain but there is no doubt the death of Jesus was connected with and interpreted by this central story of Judaism. At Passover God's people came from slavery in Egypt through the wilderness to freedom in the promised land."

He added: "In a world bedevilled by religious violence it is God's awkward gift that the central acts by which we remember Jesus are inextricably linked with the Jewish Passover."

It is the connection with Passover on which the desire to fix the date of Easter turns and falls, he said. "It seems to me a curiously unexamined piece of cultural accommodation that would separate the timing of Easter from Passover and detach us from our Jewish roots.

"In a world in which the dominant secular narrative about religion is of division and violence it ought to be a gift that there are shared stories, experiences and scriptures. Passover is not incidental to the Passion. Easter disconnected from Passover misses the point.

Easter was also a way into the "shared experience" of Jews, Christians and Muslims, the children of Abraham and people of the Book.

He was speaking after Anglican leaders meeting in Canterbury in January agreed for the first time to work with Orthodox Christian leaders to move towards a fixed date for Easter.

The aim is to end centuries of disruption around the date. Although there have been unsuccessful attempts to do this before, the latest initiative is the brainchild of Patriarch Tawadros II, Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church.