Resurrection: The First Day of the Week

You may have noticed in the gospels of the Easter Vigil and of Easter Sunday that there was an emphasis on the first day of the week.  At the Vigil, we heard “on the first day of the week Mary of Magdala, Mary, the mother of James and Salome, brought spices with which to go an anoint him.  And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb just as the sun was rising” and on Easter Sunday we heard: “It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb.  She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb….”.

This emphasis on the first day of the week (Sunday) is no accident.  The first day of the week was to become central in the life of these believers in the resurrection and in our lives.  It was marked by them as the day on which they discovered that Jesus was alive after his death; from then on it became the day of the resurrection.

Those first Christians and we ourselves gather on that day for the Eucharist precisely because it was and is still the day of the resurrection.  We do not gather to obey the third commandment to keep holy the Sabbath day (Sabbath being the last day of the week); but we gather to celebrate the action which Jesus gave us to celebrate as a memorial of him and we do that precisely on the day when he rose from the dead.  Sunday Eucharist remains central to believing in the Risen Jesus.

The change from the Sabbath to Sunday is indicative of the fact that those first believers in Christ believed that the world had changed, that God’s promises had been fulfilled, that they were entering a new era in the history of humankind. 

Just as the first day of creation was the beginning of God’s creative activity, so the day of the resurrection was the beginning of the new creation that would come to full flower in the future opened up by Christ’s resurrection. 

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin