FEASTS, TWELVE GREAT
FEASTS, TWELVE GREAT. After Pascha (q.v.) or Easter and the Sunday resurrectional liturgy (q.v.), the Twelve Great Feasts commemorate the most important saving events connected with the life of Jesus Christ that the Church celebrates throughout the course of the year. Although a few of the feasts (Palm Sunday, Ascension, Pentecost) are movable because they are dependent on Pascha, all the rest are on fixed calendar days. The Christian ecclesiastical year, just as the Jewish year, begins in September, and so the feasts are thus arranged:
1) 8 September, Nativity of the Theotokos (q.v.)
Originating in Syria-Palestine in the 6th c. and celebrated in Rome in the 7th c., this feast commemorates Mary’s (q.v.) birthday, not for its historical accuracy-because we do not know the exact date of her birth-but as the first feast of the new year, in a certain way making all other of the feasts possible. The words of the liturgical celebration express it well: “Your birth, O virgin mother of God, announces the joy of the whole world, for from you has come and shines the Sun of Justice, Christ our God.”
2) 14 September, Exaltation of the Cross
This day commemorates three historical occasions that are separable, each of which involves the Cross on which Jesus was crucified: A. The first is the legend of the finding of the Cross by Helen, Constantine’s (q.v.) mother, with his patronage. B. Second is the anniversary of the completion of the Constantinian basilica Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulcher) in Jerusalem, which also covers the site of the crucifixion. C. Last is the recovery of the Cross from the Persians in 629 by the Emperor Heraclius. We know from the pilgrim Egeria’s (q.v.) diary that the first two feasts were already celebrated in the 4th c. in the East.
3) 21 November, Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple
This first feast of the Christmas-Epiphany fast (beginning on 15 November) is based on the story of Mary’s life in the Temple as a child, found in the Protoevangel of James (ca. 150), an “apocryphal” work. The feast, also called the presentation, anticipates the Christmas-Epiphany theophanic themes and shows Mary to be the holy fulfillment of the First Covenant. It also develops the comparison between the Temple of stone and the living temple, Mary, and, by extension, the temple of the Holy Spirit (q.v.) of every human being. It seems to have first been celebrated in Syria at the end of the 6th c.
4) 25 December, Nativity of our Lord, Jesus Christ
This later and lesser of the two winter theophany feasts (i.e., Epiphany and Christmas) was first popularized in the West in the 4th c. in order to compete with the pagan festivals of the winter solstice, Natalis Solis Invicti and Saturnalia. Soon popular in the East as well, possibly due to the heated Christological controversies of the 4th-6th c., the liturgical texts focus on the Incarnation and the birth accounts in the Gospels of Mt and Lk. The modern celebration curiously juxtaposes some of the most profound theological insights with popular druid, and now capitalist-commercial, festivities.
5) 6 January, Epiphany (or Theophany)
The greatest of the winter theophanic feasts, Epiphany remembers the Baptism (q.v.) of Jesus, prototypical for every Christian, and the revelation of the Trinity (q.v.). Marking the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, this holy day is not only one of personal baptism, but of the blessing of all water, a source of human life, and through that water the blessing of the cosmos. This feast, like Pascha and Christmas, is celebrated in a three-day cycle followed by great feasting.
6) 2 February, Meeting of the Lord in the Temple
This feast, as old as the 4th c. in Jerusalem and spread throughout the Empire by Justinian (q.v.) in 542, commemorates the fulfillment of the Law of Moses (Lev 12; Num 18) forty days after Jesus’ birth. Alternately called the Presentation in the West and greatly expanded contextually there, in the East the liturgical texts especially commemorate the Lucan narrative of the meeting of the Lord by Simeon and Anna, and the recitation of the beautiful Nunc Domitis.
7) 25 March, Annunciation
As early as Hippolytus and Tertullian (qq.v.) in the 3rd c., there is mention of the crucifixion on 25 March, and with it in Hippolytus and other later writers, the Annunciation. But the earliest reference to a liturgical celebration is at the Council of Toledo in 656, though there is a church commemorating the Annunciation built in Nazareth before 400. The feast celebrates the visitation of the Archangel Gabriel to Mary in Lk 1, announcing to her the birth of Jesus, Son of the Most High. It focuses on its connection with the nativity of Jesus and the real role that Mary’s sanctity and volition played in that event.
8) One week before Pascha, Entrance of the Lord into Jerusalem
Known popularly as Palm Sunday (although it falls on Monday in the Gospel of John), this feast inaugurates Holy Week-separate from Lent (q.v.) in the East-and is intrinsically linked with the raising of Lazarus and the causal events that led to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. On this day the faithful hold palms, or branches of willows in the Russian Orthodox tradition, to identify themselves with the people who greeted Jesus as he entered Jerusalem, an entrance that was both a display of political and eschatological significance as the beginning of the last week.
9) Forty days after Pascha, Ascension
Celebrated by the whole Church from at least the 4th-5th c., this feast commemorates the end of the Resurrection appearances and the joyous “sitting down of Jesus Christ at the right hand of the Father.” Although the Eastern Church liturgically follows the Lucan chronology (Lk 24; Acts 1), the only one that gives us a forty-day ascension, it is not unaware of the other alternatives that see the Resurrection-Ascension-Pentecost as a single event, since the Johannine readings are prescribed for the forty-day period. A Russian Orthodox monastery sits atop the Mount of Olives and marks the traditional identification of the site of the Ascension.
10) Fifty days after Pascha, Pentecost
The fiftieth day after Passover is the Feast of Weeks in Jewish practice, or Pentecost; and in the Lucan chronology (Acts 2) is identified as the day the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles (q.v.). Pentecost marks the birth of the Church and falls near the end of the Paschal celebrations, although the whole of the time between Easter and Pentecost has occasionally been referred to as Pentecost, a fast-free time when the liturgical book (q.v.) the pentecostarion is used. On this day, in addition to the descent of the Holy Spirit, the Orthodox especially remember the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel as contrasted with the translation of the Good News into languages comprehensible to all.
11) 6 August, Transfiguration of the Lord
Celebrated in Asia, probably by Armenians, as early as the 4th c., it was in wide use in the East before 1000, but not in the West until it additionally commemorated the defeat of the Turks at Belgrade in 1456. The Gospel event is recorded in the synoptics (Mt 17; Mk 9; Lk 9), alluded to in 2Pet 1, and marks the center of all the synoptic Gospels, along with the confession of Peter and the prediction of the Cross and Resurrection (q.v.). The understanding of transfiguration and theosis (q.v.) are quite different in the East from the West. Whereas the West might see the event on Mount Tabor primarily as a revelation of Jesus as God, the East understands it, not only as a revelation of the Trinity (q.v.), but as the visible manifestation of the transformed humanity of Jesus, a glory shared by Moses and Elijah.
12) 15 August, Dormition of the Theotokos
Known in the East also as the feast of the Falling Asleep of Mary, and in the West as the Assumption, the holy day was observed in Syria-Palestine from at least the 4th-5th c. Belief in the bodily assumption of Mary was a topic of the 6th c. among Gregory of Tours, Dionysius (Ps.) the Areopagite (q.v.), and later Germanus of Constantinople. The celebration not only draws attention to the sanctity and faithfulness of Mary’s life, but to the recapitulation of the experience of the whole Church and the life of the believer in her: “The source of life is laid in the grave and her tomb becomes a ladder to heaven.” This feast is an apt conclusion to the cycle of the liturgical year, which began with Mary’s birth.