Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Append i x

Appendix 35 A Theology of the Christian Year Geoffrey Wainwright, in Webber, R. The Services of the Christian Year (86). Nashville: Star Song Pub. Group, 1994.

The resurrection of the crucified Christ is the point on which the weekly and annual cycles of the Christian calendar turn. In fact, it supplies the clue to the whole history of salvation and indeed the cosmos. Every Sunday and every Easter day is a commemoration and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus and an anticipation of the day when the same Lord will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and finally establish God’s universal kingdom. Sunday Let us begin by looking at Sunday. It was “on the first day of the week” that the tomb of Jesus was found empty (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1) and the risen Lord interpreted the Scriptures to the two on the road to Emmaus and revealed himself to them, and later to his other disciples, at table (Luke 24:13-32, 33-49). In Paul’s time, the Christians at Ephesus gathered on “the first day of the week” to hear the apostle preach and to break bread (Acts 20:7-11). A century later, Justin Martyr reports that Christians from town and country gathered together in one place “on the day of the sun” in order to hear the Scriptures read and expounded and to take Eucharist: “We assemble on Sunday because it is the first day, that on which God transformed the darkness and matter to create the world, and also because Jesus Christ our Savior rose from the dead on the same day” ( First Apology , 67). The contemporary Epistle of Barnabas, taking the recurrent first day as also the eighth, speaks of “celebrating with gladness the eighth day, in which Jesus rose from the dead,” “the beginning of a new world” (15:8-9) or, as Basil of Caesarea put it in the fourth century, “the image of the age to come” ( On the Holy Spirit , 27). All these themes are resumed in Charles Wesley’s hymn “For the Lord’s Day”:

Come, let us with our Lord arise, Our Lord, who made both earth and skies; Who died to save the world he made, And rose triumphant from the dead; He rose, the Prince of life and peace, And stamped the day for ever his! Then let us render him his own, With solemn prayer approach the throne,