Church Matters: Retrieving the Great Tradition

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Chur ch Mat ter s : Ret r i ev i ng the Great Trad i t i on

A Theology of the Christian Year, continued

With meekness hear the gospel word, With thanks his dying love record; Our joyful hearts and voices raise, And fill his courts with songs of praise.

When the followers of Jesus assemble “in his name,” they find the risen Lord present “in their midst” (cf. Matt 18:20). For the preacher in particular, this is the ground and realization of the promise that, when the gospel is proclaimed, “whoever hears you, hears me” (Luke 10:16). All faithful preaching of “Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23) is the gift of Christ’s enabling presence and a means by which the living Lord continues to speak to his people and to the world. Even when the Resurrection is not specially emphasized (and we shall see later that it is quite appropriate for the preacher to focus on other events in the Lord’s career over the course of the year), every sermon is implicitly a testimony to the Resurrection and an offer of eternal life to those who through Christ come to God in repentance, trust, and obedience. That the Christian assembly, and the preaching which is a constitutive element in it, regularly take place on a Sunday is an expression, in the symbolism of cosmic and historical time, of the foundational, continuing, and yet-to-be-fulfilled importance of the resurrection of the crucified Christ to the gospel, the history of salvation, and the destiny of the world. The Eastern Orthodox think of every Sunday as “a little Easter.” Conversely, Athanasius of Alexandria had already called the fifty days of the Easter season “one great Sunday.” Let us look for a moment at Easter as the church’s yearly focus on Christ’s death and resurrection. Easter: The Christian Passover “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7; cf. 13:1, 15:36). The earliest Christian Pascha appears to have been a unitary commemoration and celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. In the Asian churches the feast was kept each year on 14 Nisan; in Rome, on the following Sunday. The Roman practice won out by the third or fourth century. The Easter night of Saturday to Sunday, during which the Paschal Vigil was held, remained in that time of keen eschatological expectation the favored moment for the Lord’s final advent. The Old Testament prophecies, whose reading formed the scriptural core of the vigil service, had found their first