On the first day of the week, very early in the morning
Have you recovered from Day Light Saving Time
yet? I have not, at least not entirely. Messing with time is messing with
people at a profound level. All my homilies are stolen but I only steal from
the best sources. Austin Farrar, one of the greatest and most neglected
Anglican theologians of the 20th Century, said: when Christ rose on the first day of the week he made a revolution of
all things and, among others of our attitude towards time. Before Christ we
kept the seventh day but Christ rose on the first and now we keep that.
It is a change in time from which we will never
recover.
All four gospels provide us with the very same
detail of the Resurrection of Jesus that
St. Luke gives us today: On the
first day of the week, very early in the morning they went to the tomb.
A circumstantial proof but a good one for the reality
of the Resurrection of Jesus is the change of the Sabbath from the last day of
the week to the first. All the first Christians were Jews and to change such an
established practice as the day of the Sabbath would be as difficult as
removing a practice such as infant circumcision. But St. Ignatius of Antioch
writing at the end of the 1st Century says that Christians no longer
observe the Jewish Sabbaths but keep holy the Lord's day, on which, through
Him and through His death, our life arose.
The Jews kept the seventh day but Christians
keep the first day and perhaps we can imagine the first Jewish Christians being
as irritated by the change as we are by Day Light Savings Time. After all the
Jewish Sabbath was biblically bound: God
blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his
work which he had done in creation. ‘Work first, then rest’ makes perfect
sense especially since it seems to be that God himself operates that way. You
earn your rest. Get your affairs in order first then come before God.
That is what is happening in the Parable of the
Pharisee and Tax Collector. “Two men went up into the temple to pray.” The
Pharisee had plenty to report: ‘I am not like extortioners, unjust, adulterers.
I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.” The Tax
Collector by contrast had nothing to show for himself except sin.
We have always to remember when Jesus talks to
or about the Pharisees he is talking to and about good men. The problem with
the Pharisees was not that what they did was wrong, fasting, tithing, and
praying. As far as it goes religion does not get much better than that.
The problem is: the Pharisee could have made a
case for himself, if he had just left out the bit about “God, I thank thee that
I am not like other men, or even like this tax collector.” The very best
religion is so easily undone by pride and her children, hatred and
self-reliance. The problem is we can never get our affairs in order.
But “very early in the morning, the first day of
the week”, Jesus rose from the dead and undid that noble but flawed approach to
religion. It was far too early for anyone to have accomplished much of anything
or to have gained even an ounce of merit. The women came to do their duty for a
dead man but here is something that “has nothing do with last week’s work or
last week’s sin”, as Dr. Farrar puts it.
A ‘new creation’ St. Athanasius calls it: the
old Sabbath was the memorial of the first creation but Sunday, the first day,
the memorial of the new creation.
Holy Week only shows what a mess we make of
things, comic, if it were not with such tragic consequences but at Easter God
says ‘now it’s my turn.’
For the disciples the old world had ended in
calamity, had gone down into darkness, the earth had shook and there was
nothing solid to stand on. Here was something so new that it could only be
described as a new creation, new life ex
nihilo –from nothing – new life given, as life first was given, by the
hands of God alone. No wonder the women took one look and turned and ran away.
Because Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the
first day we now live from Sunday to Sunday and not Saturday to Saturday,
assembling to eat Him in bread and drink Him in wine, as he commanded, and to
live Him for another week.
Which means we are also witnesses of the
Resurrection. "Every Sunday is Easter." Attendance at Sunday Mass is obligatory, just as obligatory as
the old Sabbath was to the Jews but we can and should ask ‘how come.’ Just so
we can join ourselves to the great line of witnesses to the Resurrection of
Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Joanna, Peter and John, the disciples on the
road to Emmaus, St. Thomas the Apostle and all those millions who through the
centuries have gathered on the first day week just because and only because on
that day Jesus rose from the dead. The only good reason
to be here . . .
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning
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