Or, to put the question more accurately, why did Sunday become the Lord’s Day rather than Christians continuing to keep the Sabbath?
There is some debate in the Christian tradition about whether we should continue to keep the Sabbath, but now on a Sunday, or whether we should keep Sunday, but as the Lord’s Day—more a matter of invitation to worship than strict rules about rest—or not really care at all and enjoy all seven days for work, rest, and worship as the mood takes us.
I take the middle position and will be arguing from it, but the question I’d like to tackle is ‘why do we worship on Sundays?’
Perhaps it’s never occurred to you, but it arises because Saturday, as the seventh day of the week, was the Sabbath kept by the Hebrew people in the Old Testament. As Christianity arose from Judaism, some Christians kept the Sabbath—you can read the debates about whether this should be normative or not through the New Testament, but especially in Galatians—but all Christians worshipped on the first day of the week (Acts 20, 1 Corinthians 16, the Didache).
One of the reasons this catches us out is because we don’t think of Sunday as the first day of the week. It is, most likely, the seventh day in the calendar on your phone, the ‘weekend’ so clearly at the end of the week. This orientation of our lives around work rather than around worship is a sign of our post-Christianity. We should start the week with the Lord.
Why the shift?
The New Testament isn’t explicit about this; it just narrates what Christians did. As best we can tell from documentary sources, this is then what they always did. What was the logic they were using?
They were focusing on two things:
- The resurrection changed everything
Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday. We focus on the cross in our worship, and generally that is good and right, but Christians didn’t choose to meet on a Friday. We have a resurrection faith. We worship because Jesus rose from the dead. The resurrection isn’t just a proof that the atonement worked, it’s the moment that the second thing we’re focusing on happened:
- A new creation
Jesus on the cross told us that the old creation was finished. Fittingly, he then rested on the seventh day. On the first day of the week a new creation (John 21) sprung forth in his body. We participate in that by faith through our union with Christ. We know this is the case because John is at such pains to demonstrate it in the way he presents Jesus and ‘the woman’ as Adam and the woman in the garden before the fall. A new creation has started.
Sunday Worship
We worship on a Sunday because it’s fitting to do so: not only are we celebrating the resurrection, but we are stepping into a new creation. The Church is the clearest breaking in of the new age into this dying world. Sunday worship is a model for new creation living. We herald a new creation, we also participate in it, and we inaugurate it in our worship.
Sunday is the first day of the week, but Sunday worship is both happening in its place and time all around the world, and—by participation—already at the wedding feast of the Lamb. In other words, Sunday points to the new creation and, by faith, as we worship the Lord in Spirit and truth, it can be the new creation. It is a foretaste, but more in the sense of a ‘down payment’ (Ephesians 1), with the full amount of be paid when the new creation is fully here.
I think we are so afraid of over-realising our eschatology in our practice that we under-realise it in our theology. The Church universal is where you get to taste the new creation, and when you meet Christians you get to meet new creations who are still trying to figure out exactly how to live as the people they now are rather than the people they used to be.
Symbolically speaking, this means that worshipping the Lord on Saturday as opposed to Sunday is to step backwards into an old creation. The New Testament is clear that Gentiles do not need to follow the Law, instead it stands as testament to God’s faithfulness and a teacher of wisdom. We should set aside a day of rest as God himself did, and so we chose to do that with the Church.
Equally, those that say they are ‘having their Sabbath’ as a family day apart from the gathered church—usually on a Saturday—are trying to gain new creation goods in old creation ways. There is wisdom in resting, I don’t want to argue otherwise, but let’s remember that rest comes through the gathered worship of the people of God as we’re taught how to live in a new world.
In the new creation, even our work will be rest. We learn what ways there are of bringing that reality into being as we worship God in song and prayer, hear his word preached, and eat and drink the bread and cup together. These forms carry the power of the Spirit, and they teach us stories in which all the truth of reality is embedded for the wise. As we worship we start to figure out how to live as what we really are: people from the future.
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
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nuakh 