Last Sunday most churches throughout Ireland had smaller congregations than they had even at Christmas. Indeed, many had smaller congregations than on a normal Sunday. And yet Easter is the main holiday of the churches, and is supposed to have greater significance than Christmas.

Many of those who turned up in church on Sunday won't be seen again until Christmas. Many regular churchgoers are now absent from their own parishes or, indeed, any other church on Easter Day. The opportunity for a weekend away from home, and from church, is enhanced by school holidays, the absence of Sunday school, a weekend with two bank holidays and, for some, our new-found prosperity.

For those who come to church faithfully week after week, including Easter, it appears Easter is a one-day-only celebration. Indeed, many of the clergy are on holiday this week, as if it were all over. Next Sunday, the first after Easter, is known as Low Sunday, because church attendance drops dramatically after Easter.

But Easter is not a one-day event in the churches' calendar. The Easter season has as many Sundays as Lent, and the season continues until Ascension Day, which falls on May 21st this year.

Despite the changes in religious practice throughout the Western world, there still appears to be a widespread acknowledgment of Lent, and for most practising Christians Lent will have been more carefully observed and with greater intensity and piety than the Easter season.

Anglicans are not alone in observing the ritual for three hours on Good Friday, from noon to 3 p.m., with meditations on the seven last words of Jesus. It is as if the last words of Jesus on the cross were his last and final words. "On the other hand," asks the American theologian and writer, the Very Rev Richard Singleton, "when do you remember spending three hours in church listening to 10 meditations on the last words of the resurrected Christ?"

On Easter Sunday we pull out all the stops in our churches for one day, or rather one hour of one day. But for many, that's all Easter amounts to. While many might remember the last words of Christ on the cross, few will remember the last words of Christ spoken to his followers after his resurrection.

And yet, if Christianity is more than just about feeling good, if following Christ is more than accepting him as one among many great teachers, idealists, revolutionaries or martyrs, then Easter must be at the heart of the Christian message.

St Paul says: "If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith has been in vain." It is in the words of the Risen Christ that the church receives the promise of peace (John 20: 27-29). It is from the Risen Christ that we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (John 20: 22). It is in the words of the Risen Christ that we receive our mandate for mission (Matthew 28: 19-20; Mark 16: 8; Luke 24: 46-47), - and without mission the church has no function at all.

Richard Singleton, who is Dean of St John's Episcopal Cathedral in Providence, Rhode Island, argues that the Western churches have emphasised Lent rather than the Easter season because of a change in emphasis introduced in the West with the reforms of Pope Gregory the Great.

"After this reform, a gradual and subtle change in the primary theology of the church took place," he argues. "The focus shifted from the enablement of disciples through the power of God manifested through the Resurrection: being `made alive' through the gift of resurrection faith. With the establishment of Lent, the church became an organised mechanism for the remission of sin and reconciliation to God."

Dean Singleton says: "Focusing on the Resurrection emphasised discipleship for mission. Focusing on Lent led to dependency on ecclesial power. The former emphasises the empowerment of a liberating and healing people. The latter reflects ecclesiasticism, a church of sheep."

This shift in emphasis in the West had cultural consequences, too. Although Padraig Pearse may have claimed to incorporate resurrection images into his thinking before the Easter Rising, the idealism of Pearse and other Irish nationalists relied more on images of death and martyrdom. Death and martyrdom are key images throughout Western art, literature, and music.

On the other hand, as Bishop Richard Harries of Oxford says, it is no accident that we should find a strong emphasis on the Resurrection in the literature of countries such as Greece and Russia, "for the Resurrection is a present living reality for Orthodox thought in a way that it has never quite been for the Western church. In the Western church the stress has been on the death of Christ as the means of our redemption; in the Orthodox Church it is on the Resurrection."

In Greece, the death and resurrection of Christ have inspired the great epic poem of Yiannis Ritsos, Epitaphios, which was set to music by Theodorakis and became the anthem of the left as it rose against the colonels. In Russian literature, the theme of resurrection is central to Tolstoy's novel, Resurrection, and more particularly in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

But while Resurrection leaves Jesus as a good teacher, in Crime and Punishment Sonia brings Raskolnikov to a new reality and a new realisation of his humanity, raises him to a new life in Christ, as she reads to him the verses: "I am the Resurrection and the life."

This emphasis on the power of the resurrection has been recovered in Western theology by liberation theologies which see in the Easter victory the promise and reality of salvation from political and social oppression, from the principalities and powers of the secular world.

Good Friday should not mark the death of all hope, with Easter in some way representing a mystical overturning of that despair. Rather, Good Friday should represent the death of all our despair and Easter should mark the beginning of new hope and new life. Can one day be enough to celebrate all that?

Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist and a Diocesan Reader in the Church of Ireland