I guess its because He rose again back then and is not in a perpetual cycle of rising again? I don't know, those are my thoughts on it.
I dunno.
I recall that when wandering around the socialist paradises of the workers and peasants, a big deal was made out of this, and the Orthodox considered the Roman Catholic and Protestant versions utter heresy.
An interesting people, the Orthodox, utterly fascinating.
Their main "enemy," I suppose, is the Roman Catholic Church, from which they split in 1054 or 1154 or something like that, whenever the Great Schism was. With Poland then serving as an impenetrable wall, the Reformation of the early 1500s never seeped into Russia, and so eastern Europeans have little or no knowledge of Protestantism.
The Roman Catholic Church evolved into a "universal" church, irrespective of national boundaries, while the Orthodox Church evolved wholly along national lines; the Russian Orthodox, the Greek Orthodox, the Ukrainian Orthodox, the Romanian Orthodox, the Bulgarian Orthodox; just lots and lots of different groups.
While I was there, there was a great scandal associated with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which had just split away from the Russian Orthodox Church, and was seeking a new leader. The man selected was Lithuanian, who had been born and baptized a Lutheran, ordained a Russian Orthodox priest, a near-life-long resident of Kazakhstan, and was rumored to be a secret Roman Catholic.
Among other minutae I noticed was a resentment of the Orthodox about the western perception of the color black, which to us generally means death, or something foreboding, while to the eastern Europeans, the color black is the color of God; white is the color of mourning, and red is the color of evil.
Unlike in the Roman Catholic Church, where one has to be dead before one can be a saint, the Orthodox informally canonize (they have no formal procedure) anyone they choose; I saw many icons of George Bush (the first George Bush) in some churches and for sale when there, George Bush and not Ronald Reagan being associated in the popular mind as the one who crumbled the Evil Empire.
Really. I saw that about six times, and there were even hundreds of candles, or tapers, alit in front of George Bush.
Orthodox Churches have no pews; the audience has to stand the whole time, and services can last three or four hours. This is ameliorated by that one can come-and-go; one doesn't have to stay the whole time. There are altars, but the priests move around the whole place, instead of just remaining near the altars; sometimes they even lead the people outdoors.
The services are circa 99% music, 1% spoken. The Orthodox believe musical instruments are an insult against God, Who created the human voice, and so the music is wholly human, no instruments.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the first "jobs" Gallup had there was to measure the religious sentiments of the people; to no one's surprise, after 75 years of ruthless violent bloody suppression, the percentage of both believers and actually-practicing believers was much higher than it had been in 1917.
Orthodoxy has generally always been a religion of "old women;" the socialists when scorning it embellished that reputation, but actually it has generally always been that way, for a thousand years.....and yet flourished and prospered, instead of dying out.
I'll bet things like this drive the malicious cartoon character over on Skins's island nuts.
Despite that the Orthodox are based upon Roman Catholicism, I have no idea, no idea at all, about their practices regarding the Sacraments' baptism, confession, communion, whatnot. While I was there, such things seemed absent, but I have a sense they were actually there, but invisible to my western eyes.
Ukraine was where I noticed the greatest disparity between east and west. The eastern two-thirds of Ukraine (a country the size of Texas, or of France) is Orthodox; the western third is Roman Catholic.
Western Ukraine was a mirror-opposite of the rest of the country; the old women and the fatalism of the Orthodox, as compared with the masculinity and vigorous vitality of the Roman Catholics--a women's religion on the larger side, a man's religion on the other side. The congregations in Orthodox churches tended to be mostly older women, while the congregations in Roman Catholic churches tended to be mostly young men.
It was all very interesting, fascinating.
The time I was in Ukraine, incidentally, just after the collapse of the empire, St. Alexander's Roman Catholic Church in Kiev was the meeting-place for westerners. There were damned few westerners in Ukraine in the early and mid-1990s, and no places for them to go, unless one includes the fleshpots, where one was more likely to be robbed or injured. I met all sorts of westerners there, but most were Italian or South American diplomats.