The Fifty Days of the Festival

Your fitting question deserves to be told the full and true reason. After the ascension of our Savior, which took place on the fortieth day after his resurrection, the apostles returned from the Mount of Olives, where he had let them see him as he was returning to the Father, as the book of the Acts of the Apostles also testifies. They entered Jerusalem and are said to have waited ten days for the coming of the Holy Spirit; and when these were completed, on the fiftieth day, they received him with joy. So in this way the number of this festival was plainly made up. As we read, it was foreshadowed in figure in the Old Testament as well, where, when seven weeks were completed, the priests were commanded to offer the bread of the firstfruits to the Lord. And this was shown to be truly offered to the Lord by the preaching that the apostles are said to have addressed to the people on that day. That was the true bread of the firstfruits: brought forth from the teaching of a new doctrine, it consecrated to the Lord the firstfruits of the Jews as a Christian people, when five thousand men were filled with the gifts of that food. [a]

And so these ten days are to be kept with the same solemnity and joy as the forty before them. And the tradition of this festival, handed down to us by apostolic men, should be kept with the same uniformity. That is why on those days they do not kneel in prayer: kneeling is a sign of penitence and mourning. So during these days we keep in all things the same solemnity as on Sunday, the day on which our predecessors taught that people ought neither to fast nor to kneel, out of reverence for the Lord’s resurrection.