ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 26.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: I have a question that perhaps takes us in a little different direction. Why was Sunday selected as the Lord's Day? And why do early Christians worship on Sunday instead of Saturday. Wasn't Saturday the traditional day of worship? >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: Nick, this is such an important question for us and one that we have really not touched upon yet and one that we now need to consider as we begin to talk about the structure of time and particularly the two structures of the week and the year. We must begin with the fundamental unit which is the week, or the day of worship. And your question reflects a very important distinction that we need to make as Christians because there is much confusion in our church, and not necessarily our own Lutheran Church, but in the Christian church itself about the proper day of worship. When you look back in the Old Testament to the creation itself, you know very clearly that Genesis speaks about how God created the world in six days, and he rested on the seventh. And we know that what he did when he created the world he created it good. He created it perfect. He created it right. The day of worship was set aside as a day of rest so that our first parents could exalt in the beauty and the joy of resting in God in his beautiful creation. But this sense of rest becomes acute after the fall because life is not a life of rest. I think most of us can really identify with that. The idea of a holiday, the idea of a vacation, the idea of not working is something that we all look forward to, that sense of just simply collapsing back and being refreshed and renewed as we receive the rest we need to be a rejuvenated to go back out and do what we do in the world. And God kind of built into the rhythm of the life of the Old Testament saints a day that was set aside to rest in him. Now what's important to know when you look at the Old Testament and what the day of the Sabbath intended was that it not be a day where you simply ceased from work, but that you rested in God. And to rest in God is to rest in his word. And to rest in his word is to go where that word is read and to be there in his presence and receive the rest that only he can give through his word. Luther captured this so beautifully in his explanation to the Third Commandment where he talks about what the command to worship on the Sabbath is all about is to hear the word of God, to receive it in such a way that one experiences Christ's presence, to gladly here and learn it, as Luther says. It's all about worship and being in the presence of God and of his word. During the first century when Jesus was in his ministry, he submitted himself to the Sabbath laws. But he wanted his opponents, the Pharisees, to recognize that what they had done with their oral tradition of the law was added things to the Sabbath observance that was not intended in the Old Testament. When Jesus heals on the Sabbath, he is restoring the Sabbath to its proper sense. Jesus, you might say, had his own Sabbath theology. And what he shows the Pharisees is that the Sabbath is all about restoration. It's all about renewal and being refreshed. And there is no better way to show this renewal, this refreshment, this recreation, than by means of healing those who are broken. That is not an expression of work. That is an expression of what God has continued to do in his creation from the moment of the fall. In fact, there is this wonderful statement in John Chapter 5 verse 17 where Jesus says that the Father is working still and so am I working. You see, even though the Father rested from the creation in Genesis with the Son and the Spirit, they continued to work in restoring that creation by their intervention in the world with their *salvific purposes for Israel. In other words, the ongoing work of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to continually bring salvation to their people, to continually renew them and recreate them. When Jesus, the creator, comes into this world, he comes as the fulfillment of that work. No, if you go back to Genesis, you will see on the seventh day, a day of rest, there is no evening. That evening is left open. And I believe that that evening comes at the cross where the darkness now covers the earth. This brings the Sabbath rest of the Old Testament to an end so that the new day, the day that dawns when the light of the world rises up from the grave, on that first day of the week, which, if you look at the diagram and count it, God created the world in six days. He rested on the seventh. And then the first day of the second week, the day in which he rises from the dead, is called the eighth day because that day is the day in which a God in his Son Jesus Christ shows us what our resurrected bodies will be like in his resurrected body. That day now becomes the day of worship. The day in which Jesus rises from the dead can be understood in three different ways. It's the first day of the week, Sunday. It's the third day in the three-day sequence, the first day being Jesus' day of death, the second day his rest in the tomb on the Sabbath where he takes his Sabbath rest, the third day being the day he rises from the dead, but also now in the creation itself and the recreation, it is the eighth day. Now, why is the eighth day important? Well, the number 8 from the Old Testament is the number of eternity. Eight was the day in which the--the eighth day, I should say--after the birth of the child, the son, was a day of circumcision because this is where he now entered into eternity by being incorporated now in this covenant of blood into the life of Israel and its world of living in God in his eternity. Eight was, for the early Christians, a number that signaled eternity. And when Jesus rises from the dead, as we have said in previous ways, this is the beginning of the end times. We are now entering into eternity. In Luke's Gospel, this is illustrated in a wonderful way. All through that last chapter in which Jesus is described as the one who was risen from the dead, Luke is very careful to give as many time references, how this is the first day of the week or it's the third day and always being referred to as one of these days. But as soon as the Emmaus story is over and bread is broken and the eyes are opened and the disciples see Jesus for the first time in Luke's gospel as the crucified and risen Lord, there are no more time references. And in fact, there is some confusion among scholars that the Ascension of Jesus, which we know is on the fortieth day after the resurrection, and Pentecost which is on the fiftieth day, the evangelist may be confused, they said, about his time references here because he has to correct himself in Acts. Well, I don't think the evangelist is confused at all. The reason he stops making time references there is because when bread is broken and the eyes are opened, we are now in the end times. There is no reason to have time references. And so all those passages at the end of Luke's Gospel kind of blend together. They all look like they're on the day of resurrection because they're all part of this eternal time. We're going to see that those early Christians had a profound understanding as Sunday as the day of worship because this was the day Jesus rose from the dead. This was the day when eternity was now present through Christ in word and sacrament. This was the eighth day, the day in which they celebrated the eternal things. And one of the things we're going to recognize about early Christians is that even though they had a very heightened sense that the end was coming soon, for them it didn't matter because Jesus could come today, tomorrow, or the next day. It didn't matter because Jesus was already present now. They were already worshiping him on the eighth day. They were already having this coming together of heaven and earth. They were already receiving these gifts. And the fundamental unit of time for that first three hundred years of the Christian church was Sunday. Sunday was the day of worship. Everything moved toward Sunday, and there are very few historical remembrances of what we might call the church year during those three hundred years. A way to conclude this question and to illustrate this is in this way: Today, many of us will say that Sunday is a little Easter. And that is true because it reflects the fact that Sunday is on the first day, the day of the resurrection of Jesus. But do you know what the early Christians would say? They would turn it around. They would say that Easter is a big Sunday. Do you see the difference there? We look at time through Easter so we look at Sunday in terms of Easter. But early Christians looked at Easter through Sunday. And now as we begin to develop this concept of time in the early Christian church that comes to us today, we're going to see that there is going to be this tension between this eschatological time, we'll call it, this eight-day theology, this Sunday is the eighth day, and then the development of this historical time which is reflected in the development of the church year which really comes about after Constantine. And so as we now talk about time, we're going to have this kind of conscious tension between Sunday and church year.