The resurrection of the crucified Christ is the point on which the weekly and annual cycles of the Christian calendar turn. In fact, it supplies the clue to the whole history of salvation and indeed the cosmos. Every Sunday and every Easter day is a commemoration and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus and an anticipation of the day when the same Lord will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and finally establish God’s universal kingdom.
Sunday
Let us begin by looking at Sunday. It was “on the first day of the week” that the tomb of Jesus was found empty (Matt. 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1) and the risen Lord interpreted the Scriptures to the two on the road to Emmaus and revealed himself to them, and later to his other disciples, at the table (Luke 24:13–32, 33–49). In Paul’s time, the Christians at Ephesus gathered on “the first day of the week” to hear the apostle preach and to break bread (Acts 20:7–11). A century later, Justin Martyr reports that Christians from town and country gathered together in one place “on the day of the sun” in order to hear the Scriptures read and expounded and to take Eucharist: “We assemble on Sunday because it is the first day, that on which God transformed the darkness and matter to create the world, and also because Jesus Christ our Savior rose from the dead on the same day” (First Apology, 67). The contemporary Epistle of Barnabas, taking the recurrent first day as also the eighth, speaks of “celebrating with gladness the eighth day, in which Jesus rose from the dead,” “the beginning of a new world” (15:8–9) or, as Basil of Caesarea put it in the fourth century, “the image of the age to come” (On the Holy Spirit, 27). All these themes are resumed in Charles Wesley’s hymn “For the Lord’s Day”:
Come, let us with our Lord arise
Our Lord, who made both earth and skies;
Who died to save the world he made,
And rose triumphant from the dead;
He rose, the Prince of life and peace,
And stamped the day forever his …
Then let us render him his own,
With solemn prayer approach the throne,
With meekness hear the gospel word,
With thanks to 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 especially 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 fulfillment in the death and resurrection of Christ, and now their universal consummation was awaited. Good Friday, which emerged into prominence with the more chronologically, geographically, and even dramatically oriented liturgical events of Holy Week around the sites of Jerusalem in the latter fourth century, had some earlier grounding in the weekly observance of Fridays as fast days. Palm Sunday, and then Maundy Thursday, became purely annual occasions in which the historical commemoration of the detailed events of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the Last Supper was the dominant content.
Eastertide
From Tertullian we know also that, as early as the second century, Easter extended forward into a “most joyous season” of fifty days. During the entire seven weeks of Eastertide, Christians did not kneel for prayer but rather stood in order to mark the heavenly location of believers in the risen and exalted Christ, in anticipation of the general resurrection; nor did they fast, for they were enjoying a foretaste of the heavenly banquet with the messianic bridegroom. Easter was the season of the Alleluia, a hopeful sign of the time when “we shall do nothing but praise God” (Augustine). The oldest practice of the church draws heavily on the Fourth Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Apocalypse for scriptural readings during “the great fifty days”: the followers of Christ, rejoicing in the gift of the other Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, spread the good news of salvation and tasted the life of heaven.
Pentecost
The fiftieth day of Easter retained the name that could also designate the whole period: Pentecost. The first evidence we have of a special feast to “seal” the Pentecostal period comes from the fourth century. In dependence on Acts 2:1ff., the gift of the Holy Spirit to the 120 is commemorated and the Spirit’s abiding presence in the life and witness of the church is celebrated. Our oldest testimony to the feast links the descent of the Spirit to the ascent of Christ, and preachers continued to make the connection. A separate observance of the Ascension on the fortieth day (cf. Acts 1:3) is, however, attested only a little later than the evidence for the feast of Pentecost of the fiftieth. It may be that first Pentecost, and then Ascension as a distinct feast, together with the development of Holy Week, all mark a growing tendency to historicism in the church’s liturgical sense, where the church of the earliest centuries had held the death, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ closer together in a single mystery whose evangelistic and eschatological import was brought home to the assembled believers by the Holy Spirit.
The Empty Cross. The symbol of the empty cross with the rising sun speaks of the resurrection of Jesus. Often, as is the case with this cross, the INRI (Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews) is displayed at the head of the cross, as are the nails.
The permanent contribution of the Easter/ Pentecost season to the method and message of the preacher resides in its insistence on the theological inseparability of Christ and the Spirit. The Spirit of truth, the other Paraclete, brings to remembrance all that Jesus has said (John 14:26), takes the things of Christ and declares them (16:14), vivifies the flesh which even in the case of the Incarnate Word is of no avail on its own (6:63). When Peter preaches under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration, it is Christ crucified and risen that he proclaims, and baptism in the name of Jesus Christ is promised to bring the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:14ff., 38). It is only by the Holy Spirit that one can confess “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3), and when the Spirit is given to believers, it is to transform them into the likeness of their Lord (2 Cor. 3:18, cf. Gal. 5:5–6, 13–25). The Spirit enables Christ’s fellow-heirs to call God “Abba” (Rom. 8:14ff.; Gal. 4:6). It is through Christ that we have heard the gospel, become believers, and been sealed with the Holy Spirit as the pledge of our inheritance unto a day of redemption (Eph. 1:13–14, 4:30). “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11). What is thematically celebrated in “the Great Fifty Days” governs the message and method of all faithful preaching.
Beginning locally before the year 1000, the Western church has kept the first Sunday after Pentecost is Trinity Sunday. This more “dogmatic” feast can serve at least two purposes: it is a reminder that the work of our salvation—the self-giving incarnation and passion of the Son, his exaltation and continuing intercession, and the mission of the Spirit—is grounded in the eternal mystery of God; and it also allows us to rejoice in the fact that Christian worship is no less than a creaturely sharing in the life and communion of the Triune God.
Lent
The calendrical influence of Easter extends also backward through Lent. In the patristic church, the Paschal Vigil was the high moment for the administration of baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ. The climactic rites of Christian initiation described in the so-called Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus belong to the great service of Easter eve. After a preparatory catechumenate of several years, the learners finally emerged as “the elect,” and in the weeks immediately preceding Easter they underwent decisive instruction in the faith, summarized at last in the creed and in the Lord’s Prayer, and the candidates were solemnly exorcised in order to “make room” for the Holy Spirit who would henceforth fill their lives. Our season of Lent originated in the final weeks of preparation for baptism. It became also the season when penitents were made ready to have their baptismal privileges restored to them. Because we never outgrow our baptism, and indeed all of us continue throughout this life to struggle in grace to master the remnants of sin, it eventually came to be regarded as a salutary practice for all believers to “remake” their own baptismal preparations each year during Lent. In our own time, the Roman Catholic church, in a widely imitated step, has introduced into its paschal liturgy a “renewal of baptismal vows.” Traditional Scripture readings for Lent relate the story of redemption and include Old Testament types of baptism as well as Gospel episodes which have baptismal resonances. The preacher has the opportunity to recall Christians to their baptismal foundations, somewhat in the way the apostle Paul grounded his exhortations and ethical instructions in the decisive act of grace which baptism signifies (e.g., Rom. 6; 1 Cor. 6:11; 12:12–13; Col. 2:11– 3:17).
There is, however, a secondary pivot in what may perhaps be thought of as the irregular ellipse of the church year, namely the incarnation of the Word. It is Christmas as a focal celebration that we now look at.
Christmas: The Savior’s Birth
When Jesus saw the light of day, it was in fact rather the world that was being illuminated by the incarnation of the divine Word. The birth of the eternal Son of God from a human mother was the early dawn of a new day, the drawing near of “the Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2). Although Scripture does not help us to fix Christ’s nativity on December 25 (Rome) or January 6 (Egypt), it was doubtless influenced along one track or another by the natural practice of observing the winter solstice as the point at which “the sun begins again to grow.” Eventually, the Roman date won out. That the present-day Slavonic Orthodox celebrate Christmas on a different date (thirteen days after what the rest of the world calls December 25) is only due to their refusal to make the “secular” transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
Epiphany
Some other aspects of Christ’s “manifestation” to the world were left to a January season of Epiphany (Greek epiphaneia; Latin manifestatio): his showing to the Gentiles (the Western church placed the visit of the Magi on January 6, whereas the East associates it directly with Christmas), his public appearance as the divine Son (the Eastern church places Christ’s baptism on January 6, and the Western church traditionally kept January 13), and the shining forth of his glory at the wedding feast of Cana (the second Sunday after Epiphany in the West). An ancient Latin Epiphany antiphon weaves these themes together beautifully:
Today the heavenly Bridegroom weds his Church,
Since Christ has washed away her sins in the Jordan;
The wise men hasten with their gifts to the royal wedding,
And the guests are made glad by the water turned to wine.
A hymn by Christopher Wordsworth prolongs this threefold manifestation into Christ’s ultimate epiphany:
Sun and moon shall darkened be,
Stars shall fall, the heavens shall flee;
Christ will then like lightning shine.
All will see his glorious sign;
All will then the trumpet hear,
All will see the Judge appear:
Thou by all wilt be confest,
God in Man made manifest.
Grant us grace to see thee, Lord,
Mirrored in thy holy word;
May we imitate thee now,
And be pure, as pure art thou;
That we like to thee may be
At thy great Epiphany;
And may praise thee, ever blest,
God in Man made manifest.
The preacher’s task is to allow the glory of God to be seen in the face of Christ Jesus (2 Cor. 4:6), so that, being by that beholding changed from glory into glory (3:18), the righteous by faith may at the last shine like the sun (Matt. 13:43).
Advent
Epiphany became, after Easter and Pentecost, the next most favored moment for Christian baptism; and the preceding season of Advent, which is confined to Western Christianity, may in that respect have had origins similar to Lent. The liturgical themes of Advent, however, offer only a few hints of preparation for individual baptism and seem rather to envisage more directly the first and final comings of Christ. They encourage Christians to relive the Old Testament expectations that they believe were fulfilled at Bethlehem and, simultaneously, to prepare themselves for the Lord’s return at the consummation. Isaiah is a favored source of Scripture lessons since the book lends itself to a “stereoscopic” reading that sees the prophecies as both realized in Christ and yet still outstanding until the End.
The preacher will use the season of Advent not only to build up to the celebration of Christmas but also, following medieval practice, to confront the “four last things” of death and judgment, heaven and hell. This is the existential application to each individual of Christ’s awaited coming again in glory to judge the quick and the dead (cf. 2 Cor. 5:10).
Two traditional feasts related to the date of Christmas are the Annunciation (March 25, nine months before December 25; cf. Luke 1:26–38) and the Presentation of Christ in the temple (February 2, forty days after Christmas; cf. Luke 2:22–40).
The Rest of the Year
If we were to draw the “irregular ellipse” of the church’s year, we should find the line fading into brokenness shortly after the feast of the Epiphany (January 6) until just before Lent (for many centuries the West had the pre-Lenten Sundays of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima), and then again from Pentecost or Trinity Sunday until just before Advent (the twentieth-century Roman feast of Christ the King, now placed on the Sunday immediately preceding Advent, is but the most recent instance of anticipating the season). For long the “green” Sundays—the most “neutral” color for liturgical vestments—were numbered “after Epiphany” and “after Pentecost” or “after Trinity.” Beyond the first week or two, these scarcely constituted coherent season, although there may still be continuing tendencies to thematize the earthly life and ministry of Jesus (particularly the former) and the ongoing life and mission of the church in the second. The current Roman Catholic bluntly designates these periods as “ordinary time” (per annum).
“Ordinary Sundays” remain, however, precisely Sundays. That fact calls the preacher to bring the Scripture readings and the sermon into relation to the pivotal event and mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Lectionaries
Lectionaries do not fall directly from heaven. Rather they codify and promote patterns in the liturgical reading of Scripture that have commended themselves to the church over a greater or lesser extent of time, space, and confessional tradition. They are necessary because it is impossible to read the whole of the Bible in a particular service of worship; they are valuable insofar as they allow the broad range of the biblical witness to be heard. Lectionaries perpetually exhibit a certain tension between the reading of entire biblical books in course (lectio continua) and the eclectic selection of passages from the canon that are appropriate to particular times and occasions. The more definite the theological or Christological content of a feast or season, the more likely are the lessons from the Old Testament and the New (Epistle and Gospel) to be arranged for their typological and thematic point and counterpoint; this is a strong testimony to the belief in the unity of the Scripture, although there is a danger that the Old Testament, in particular, will be used for snippets to match the New. On the other hand, the individual books of the Bible have a greater chance of communicating their characteristic message when they are read more continuously. Mixed cases are found in, say, the semicontinuous reading of Isaiah in Advent, or of St. John, the Acts, and the Revelation in Eastertide.
The many coincidences of lectionary patterns over time, space, and confessional boundaries bear witness to a remarkably common sense among Christians as to what Scriptures belong when, if the full range of redemptive history is to be commemorated, celebrated, and anticipated over a regularly recurring period (hitherto usually a year). In recent decades, various ecumenical efforts have been made to bring the various confessional practices into even greater harmony. In Britain, The Calendar and Lectionary (1967) of the semi-official Joint Liturgical Group, which spreads the readings over a two-year period, has exercised great influence on the official revisions of Anglican and Protestant churches. Unfortunately, this pioneering work has tended to isolate the British, since churches in other areas, particularly of the English-speaking world, have preferred to base themselves on the three-year Sunday and festive lectionary of the postconciliar Roman Catholic church (Lectionary for Mass, 1969). In particular, the pattern of “naming” the three years after the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke has proved popular. In some respects, however, the Roman lectionary has undergone adaptation in its reception by others. Thus the American Consultation on Common Texts, in order to avoid the sometimes strained typologies of the Roman Old Testament snippets, has attempted a more continuous reading of the Old Testament in each of the three years in the Sundays after Pentecost, with only a rough typological correspondence between the Pentateuch and Matthew, the Davidic narrative and Mark, and the prophets and Luke.
Protestant preachers in many regions and denominations are increasingly finding it a boon to have the scriptural matter of their sermons “provided” for them through the use of a lectionary. If, as Karl Barth almost implied on a couple of occasions, one should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, the use of a lectionary offers a better chance for the Scriptures to relate to our current perceptions of the world and human affairs, rather than the other way around. This is not to say that a particular event may not sometimes impel the preacher to turn to another Scripture for the sermon, but the congregation ought not to be robbed of the steady and consistent reading of the Scriptures in the worship assembly.
We thereby come to one final theme that has tentatively surfaced at a number of points in our discussion and now needs to be dug out: the theme of history and mystery, of time and eschatology.
History and Eschatology
It is sometimes argued that the fourth century marked a dramatically new phase in the Christian understanding of history and of this temporal world. Certainly, it is no accident that this century—that of Constantine’s conversion—provides our first evidence for the practice of an annual Holy Week (Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday), a feast on the day of Pentecost (and soon a separate Ascension day), and a celebration of the Savior’s birthday and public appearance (with Christmas and Epiphany becoming distinct feasts). Yet it may be a mistake to discern a drastic change rather than a more subtle and gradual shift of emphasis. There was no sudden decline from kairos into chronos (to use a distinction beloved of an older biblical theology). The church’s Constantinian “settlement into the world” was foreshadowed, if H. Conzelmann’s exegesis of Luke-Acts in Die Mitte der Zeit has value at all, in the Lucan accommodation to the delay of the Parousia.
There was probably from the first touch of historical commemoration in the early designations, as we saw of Wednesday and Friday as weekly fast days. The weekly Sunday and the yearly Easter, both inferable from the New Testament writings, commemorate the raising of Jesus from the dead, which was considered as at least a historical event. The resurrection was, of course, more. That is why Christian worship is always also a celebration of Christ’s presence and an anticipation of the Lord’s return. With Christ, the final kingdom began its irruption into this world, and all our created time has become, as the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement puts it, “porous” to God. Every Sunday, in particular, is a declaration of the eschatological qualification brought to time and history by the resurrection of the crucified Christ from the dead.
Over time, though so qualified, is not abolished. The Savior himself “needed”—we can infer after the event—the years of his earthly life, from the moment of his conception to the day of his ascension, for the multifaceted work of redemption. Moreover, the mystery of God’s design for the world apparently includes the centuries that have since passed. And still, the Parousia has not taken place. What is worked out in time and history will belong, we conclude, to the final kingdom of God, however marvelous the transformation it will undergo in the general resurrection which Christ’s presaged. If the Creator’s saving purpose accommodates itself to time and history in these ways, it is entirely appropriate to commemorate, celebrate, and anticipate it in the temporal symbolism that the church’s calendar represents. That is in no way to deny the openness of all Christian worship and the whole of Christian existence to the entire mystery of God.