Church Seasons

The season of Advent is not to be confused with Lent. This short period is not primarily a time of penitence but rather a time to prepare joyfully for Christ’s return and his reign. The Lord’s return does indeed have a relationship to penitence, but primarily as it leads to repentance, which is an action rather than a feeling—an action of turning around and being turned around by the work of God in us. By reflecting on our lives in the light of God’s Word, we recognize the direction in which our present values and habits are leading us. Then we see that those values and ways of living must be changed. We further recognize that only the action of God can make that change in us. In the words of the Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, it is God who enables us “to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light” (The Book of Common Prayer, page 211).

In Advent the liturgy deals with contrasts: light and dark; joy and sorrow; beginning and end; and, especially, chronological time and God’s time. We discover in Advent that God’s time is of the kind described not by clocks and calendars but in terms like “the time is ripe,” or “in the fullness of time.” (See, for example, Galatians 4.) In liturgical worship Christians and our Jewish forebears and kin find time transcended in both directions. In remembering God’s saving acts in the past in prayer and thanksgiving, we find those past acts becoming present reality, and we, too, participate in them. In our liturgical rites we also look ahead to the end of time, and again our present time is filled with a foretaste of the kingdom which is yet to come.

Each of the four Advent Sundays has its own particular emphasis, and each reveals the Lord who enters into time and space, into our personal and corporate lives, whenever the “right time” occurs. As we remember, in liturgy, on each of these Sundays, ouranamnesis (Greek for “remembering, unforgetting”) becomes the means by which God’s action in what we remember becomes operative in our lives. We are likewise led to look forward in anticipation to Christ’s return (Eucharistic Prayer B, The Book of Common Prayer, page 368):

We remember his death,
We proclaim his resurrection,
We await his coming in glory.

The First Sunday of Advent is concerned with the Lord’s return as Judge of his people and of the whole created order. This is not simply a return which happens haphazardly, but neither can it be forecast by the clock or the calendar. Instead, Christ comes to each of us and to the world as he chooses, and according to his time. The character of his coming is revealed in the occasions he has come in the past. It is a gracious and loving advent, and it is judging and critical as well. Jesus encounters us not at our convenience or on demand; instead, he comes suddenly and often surprisingly. He comes to us in ways on which we can depend, such as prayer and worship, and especially in the Holy Eucharist; but he also comes when we least expect him, and often when we do not even desire him. So in the Eucharist we pray, “We give thanks to you, O God, for the goodness and love which you have made known to us in creation; in the calling of Israel to be your people; in your Word spoken through the prophets; and above all in the Word made flesh, Jesus, your Son” (Eucharistic Prayer B, BCP, page 368).

The Second and Third Sundays of Advent are focused on John the Baptist, the final prophet of Israel and the Forerunner of Christ. On the Second Sunday, John is revealed as the Forerunner, the striking figure who fulfills the last prophecies of the Old Testament. He is the human sign that the Messiah has at last come and that God’s kingdom is imminent. John cries out in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” That preparation is what the Greek-speaking writers of the Gospels calledmetanoia, which means, “change of mind” or “turning back,” and which we translate as “repentance.” The call is not to feel guilty, but to forsake that which is opposed to the reign of Christ. So we pray that day for the “grace to heed [the prophets’] warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ” (Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, BCP, page 211).

On the Third Sunday we hear more of the call to repentance from John and the call to prepare for the Messiah’s coming by living lives in keeping with the kingdom of God. We also hear John’s testimony to the ministry and significance of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah, the one whose coming John’s preaching announces. John, the Forerunner of the Messiah (Christ), is the model for our own living. We also are to be those who announce Jesus’ coming into his world. We are so to live that “we may,” as we pray in Advent, “without shame or fear rejoice to behold his appearing” (Proper Preface for Advent, BCP, page 345).

The Fourth Sunday of Advent is concerned with Jesus’ immediate family and particularly with his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and her role in redemption.

The fear of expressing reverence for Mary, which characterized many Protestant and Anglican Christians in the past, has begun to disappear as advances in biblical and historical studies have made possible a reassessment of her place in the scriptures and in the piety and doctrine of the early church. We recognize that God did not redeem us in a vacuum, apart from human participation. God brought about the Incarnation of the Son through the cooperation of a human woman with the life-giving Spirit. Furthermore, Mary’s vocation is not only to bear the God incarnate, but also to be the pattern for us as we become “God-bearers” by means of following her example of cooperation with the divine grace.

Thus, we pray on the Fourth Sunday that our consciences may be so purified that Christ “may find in us,” as he did in his holy mother, “a mansion prepared for himself” (Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, BCP, page 212).

God’s time breaks into our time redemptively whenever we, in prayer and liturgy and ministry, cooperate with the divine will. It is then that the reason for honoring blessed Mary becomes clear, for we see her as the pattern for ourselves and as the first of all believers. The liturgy is always human action in union with God’s action, by which God removes the barriers between our chronological time and space, and God’s time, God’s kingdom. The liturgy is the point at which God’s Spirit draws us into the life and the presence of the saving God. It is in the liturgy that we are revealed to be the Body of Christ and to be the means by which the Incarnation is extended in time and space.

In Advent we find all our times brought together in God’s time, all our joys in God’s joy, all our lives in God’s life. In Advent we pray in these words (Eucharistic Prayer B, BCP, page 368):

We give thanks to you, O God… For in these last days you sent [Jesus] to be the Savior and Redeemer of the world. In him, you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life.Our King and Savior now draws near: Come let us adore him.

From The Rite Light: Reflections on the Sunday Readings and Seasons of the Church Year. Copyright © 1998 by Michael W. Merriman. Church Publishing Incorporated, New York.

The celebration of Jesus’ birth and his manifestation as the Son of God comes in a pair of seasons with common characteristics. These seasons have been particularly popular in western Christendom and were, in the past, times of such levity and rejoicing that puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to do away with them. In the last century, when the puritan influence had waned, Christmas became popular in this country again, but by then the churches had all but lost their memory of the old feast. As a result, Epiphany season and the intervening Twelve Days of Christmas were not part of the secular celebration. A host of new secular customs and legends developed during Advent primarily as a means of supporting business. We need to recover our own special heritage if we are to make Christmas and Epiphany central to our faith and life.

Recent historical studies have found that the original reason for setting the celebrations of Christ’s birth and his manifestation on December 25th and January 6th, respectively, was related to the date of his death and resurrection. Early Christians believed that the date of Jesus’ death was March 25th. They also assumed that, our Lord being perfect, even the span of his life in the world would be perfect; accordingly, they assumed that his life in the world began on March 25th also, on which date they celebrated his conception. We still use that date to celebrate the conception of Christ—the Annunciation of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Therefore, the birth of Christ is celebrated nine months later.

The date of January 6th resulted from the fact that, in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, the calendar differed from that in the west. The date in the eastern calendar corresponding to the western December 25th was January 6th. By the time of the fourth century, the eastern and western calendars had been brought into line; and so the east had its feast—still on January 6th—twelve days after the western feast. Since the eastern feast had centered on Christ’s manifestation and that in the west on his birth, the two areas began to borrow each other’s feasts and ended up with the two celebrations of Christmas and Epiphany.

Underlying these two feasts, then, is the central proclamation of Christianity: the dying and rising of Jesus. Recovery of this earliest level of meaning can help us rescue Christmas from a limited emphasis on the birth of a baby; for that birth is of ultimate importance only because of the saving event of his death and resurrection.

As the church took over the Roman Empire in the fourth century, its celebration of Jesus’ birth and manifestation was influenced by pagan feasts of the Roman world. In Rome, late December was the time of celebrating the rebirth of the sun god. The church took over the pagan image of the sun and, combining that image with the biblical one of light overcoming darkness, supplanted the pagan feast with the Birth of the Son of God. In the eastern church, pagan customs of Egypt were to influence the January 6th celebration. In Egypt, the pagans celebrated the birth of the god of the Nile at that time, and this water emphasis led the Egyptian and other eastern churches to celebrate Jesus’ Baptism at the time of Epiphany. So a second level of meaning, derived from the pagan world’s life, was added to these feasts.

As the church spread northward into Europe and Britain, it encountered other old religious customs connected with winter, and many of them also affected the celebration—hence our use of evergreens and mistletoe, which were symbols of the nature religions of Britain and Germany. Thus, ancient images of light overcoming darkness and life in the midst of the cold and apparent death of winter, along with corresponding rites and symbols, were often preserved in the church. Finally, after a few hundred years, as customs and ideas spread from east to west and back, the church had a pair of festivals, one celebrating the birth, the other the manifestation, or Epiphany, of Christ.

Eastern Christians still have the Baptism of Christ as their primary theme on January 6th. In dry countries, this is connected to the blessing of wells and springs, and in seagoing countries, to the blessing of the sea and of ships—both holdovers from pre-Christian ceremonies. At least partly because of Charlemagne’s purported discovery of the bodies of the Wise Men, which he enshrined in his cathedral in Cologne, western Christians came to focus on the coming of the Magi as Christ’s Epiphany to the Gentiles. The story that there were three Magi, and that they were kings, perhaps comes from this same period.

Christ’s Baptism was a secondary theme in the western church during Epiphany. It has been made an even stronger theme in the liturgical revisions of most western churches in the past few years by being celebrated on the First Sunday after Epiphany.

The period of Christmas and Epiphany has three primary days and themes: Christmas, or the Nativity of Christ (December 25th); Epiphany, or the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles (January 6th); and the First Sunday after Epiphany: the Baptism of Christ. Other celebrations came to be associated with this time as well. The three days following December 25th commemorate Stephen, the first martyr; John, the disciple closest to Jesus; and the Holy Innocents, the children Herod ordered slain in Bethlehem in his vain attempt to destroy the Christ. The biblical account of Jesus’ naming at his circumcision, on the eighth day after his birth—in obedience to Old Testament law—gives us the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ on January 1st. The significance of his name (in Hebrew, Yeshua, which means “Yahweh saves”) is that it reveals his nature and his ministry. (Stephen, John, and the Innocents are moved a day later when one of them falls on Sunday. Holy Name and Epiphany are always celebrated on their dates, even when they fall on Sunday.)

There are three sets of Proper readings for Christmas. The Gospel for the night celebration on the eve is the angels’ announcement to the shepherds of Jesus’ birth. At the early celebration on Christmas day, we hear of the shepherds’ visit to the infant. Then, at the later celebration, we hear John’s magnificent poem on the pre-existent Word of God: the Word who is God, who is the instrument of God’s creation, who is the light of all people, and who became flesh in Jesus. (When there are not three Eucharists in a congregation, any of the readings may be used.)

The First Sunday after Christmas is focused again on the prologue to John’s Gospel, but it continues the reading for a few more verses, dealing with the new relationship between God and humankind, which is characterized by grace rather than law. The Second Sunday focuses on Jesus and his parents, with a choice for the Gospel reading of one of the accounts of his infancy and childhood.

On Epiphany, the theme is the manifestation, or showing forth, of Christ to the Gentiles in the account of the Wise Men. Light is the primary symbol, with the Star of Bethlehem as the sign that Christ, the light of the world, has come. On the following Sunday, we celebrate the Baptism of Christ. This is one of the four days of the year which the Book of Common Prayer designates as baptismal days. (The other three are Easter, Pentecost, and All Saints’ Day.) Even if there is no one to be baptized that day, we reaffirm our Baptismal Covenant as we rejoice that Christ, who was manifested as Son of God in his Baptism, is now made manifest in us, his church, through our Baptism.

In the weeks after Epiphany, other events in Jesus’ ministry are celebrated, events such as his first miracle, changing water into wine; his first healing; his calling of the disciples; his first preaching. These events reveal him as God’s Son and help us explore more deeply the unlimited extent of his love and our role—as the members of his Body—in revealing him to the world.

The liturgical texts for this period are very expressive of its meaning and embody many of the symbols, both biblical and cultural, which came to be part of the season:

“…you gave Jesus Christ, your only Son, to be born for us; who, by the mighty power of the Holy Spirit, was made perfect Man of the flesh of the Virgin Mary his mother; so that we might be delivered from the bondage of sin, and receive power to become your children” (Preface of the Incarnation, The Book of Common Prayer, page 378).

“…you have given your only-begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and to be born…of a pure virgin: Grant that we, who have been born again and made your children by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit” (Collect for Christmas Day, BCP, page 213).

“…you have poured upon us the new light of your incarnate Word: Grant that this light, enkindled in our hearts, may shine forth in our lives” (Collect for the First Sunday after Christmas, BCP, page 213).

“…you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world” (Collect for the Feast of the Holy Name, BCP, page 213).

“…grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity” (Collect for the Second Sunday after Christmas, BCP, page 214).

“…in the mystery of the Word made flesh, you have caused a new light to shine in our hearts, to give the knowledge of your glory in the face of your Son, Jesus Christ” (Proper Preface of Epiphany, BCP, page 378).

“…grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior” (Collect for the First Sunday after Epiphany, BCP, page 214).

From The Rite Light: Reflections on the Sunday Readings and Seasons of the Church Year. Copyright © 1998 by Michael W. Merriman. Church Publishing Incorporated, New York.

The liturgy in Lent has as its central concern the preparation of the church for the main event of Easter: Christian initiation. Lent itself came into being as the time of final preparation for those chosen for Holy Baptism, at a time when all Baptisms were done at Easter. The candidates, who had been in an intense period of training for Christian living—lasting three years in most cases—were solemnly admitted as candidates at the beginning of Lent. They, their sponsors, and the whole church spent that period in prayer and fasting, additional instruction, and performing works of mercy in preparation for the Baptisms at the Easter Vigil. It was also a period in which those who had been excommunicated for serious sin did penance in order to be restored to communion at Easter.

This remained the pattern for many centuries. Once most people in Christendom were baptized, however, and the Baptism of infants became the norm, such an extended period of instruction began to fade. Nevertheless, the season of Lent had become ingrained and it persisted. Shorn of its original focus, it became a time for the members of the church to renew their commitment to Christ as they anticipated the great feast at Easter.

Many of the liturgical customs of Lent stem from those earlier times and can best be understood in that light. Some customs, in fact, need that understanding or else they will be contradictory to the central meaning of Lent and Easter. This is because many of the customs, having lost their original purpose, were distorted.

In the past fifty years the liturgical churches have been reforming their rites for Lent, seeking particularly to recover the baptismal emphasis of the season and of Easter. The Book of Common Prayer as revised in 1979 embodies much of that, as do the revised rites in the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Churches, and others. Another important factor is the dramatic increase in recent years of adult candidates for Baptism, the churches adopting once again an intense preparation for the Baptism of adults like that of earlier days, and the restoring of the Great Vigil of Easter as the primary liturgy of the year.

A number of Lenten customs have distorted Christian faith and living, because they so easily play into the hands of popular misconceptions which dominate Western society and religion. Those misconceptions include individualistic and often nostalgic piety, sentimentality, and, in this country, a do-it-yourself mentality borrowed in religion from American culture. The effect of all this on Lent has been unfortunate. It has produced an attitude of seeking to carry out the Lenten obligations as personal religious exercises with little relationship to the larger Christian community; of greater concern for one’s personal salvation than with ministry to others; of attempting to make up for past failures with extra religious activities; and an over-emphasis on activities and services geared primarily to the production of religious feelings rather than growth in knowledge of God and the deepening of our reliance on divine grace.

The liturgies of Lent in The Book of Common Prayer which are the center of our Lenten observance are the means of correcting such distortions. They can, when understood and used, rescue us from individualistic piety, from sentimentality, and from the futility of attempting to save ourselves. They will inform and enrich our prayer, fasting, and works of mercy. They will aid us in deepening our experience of the saving acts of God in the past and thereby strengthen our faith, enabling us to recognize the actions of God in our world, our culture, and our lives.

Above all, a serious and committed participation in the liturgies of Lent will enable us to discover anew the meaning of Baptism and to renew—and have renewed in us—what God accomplished in us when we were baptized.

Ash Wednesday

The church’s liturgy on Ash Wednesday invites us “to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.” This first day of Lent sets the pattern for our Lenten observance: one which leads directly to our recognition that we are mortal, we will die and, indeed, are in the process of dying all the time. Our sin is not the primary focus of our attention. Instead, our recognition that we are sinful moves us to an awareness of our need to change and be changed. Our repentance becomes not an end in itself but a renewed relationship of children to God opening us to accept God’s love, mercy, and peace.

As a result, prayer, fasting, and self-denial are saved from being mere good works for our own benefit, and instead free us and our time and our resources to a new and deeper scope of ministry to others.

Finally, in the scriptures we recover once again the story of God’s mighty acts of salvation for the entire human race: we discover once again that we are part of a vast company of believers in every age on pilgrimage into God’s kingdom.

When we receive the ashes on the first day of Lent, we do so within the Body of Christ. Here, in the company of our fellow sinners, we are not in danger of taking pride in our penitence because we are all alike in our sinfulness. We should consider carefully, however, the words Christ addresses to us in the Gospel reading on this day, asking ourselves, “Can I wear these ashes into the world without feeling a kind of self-righteousness about them? Should I heed the Lord’s word and wash my face before going out from the Body into the world?”

The Lenten Sundays

On the Sundays in Lent, much of the festive nature of the liturgy is missing. Music is restrained, and the Great Litany may be used in the entrance rite. The decoration of the building and the use of color is reduced and restrained. Many use the old English custom of the Lenten Array: unbleached linen vestments, unbleached material covering the crosses and pictures, and only simple symbols stenciled in black on the vestments and veils. The word Alleluia is missing from the liturgy. But above all, the Word of God read in the liturgies has a different focus. It is the reading from the Old Testament which sets the theme rather than the reading from the Gospel.

These readings present us with a short course in the history of salvation: definitive moments in the past in which God’s intention to save the human race is revealed. Each year the Old Testament readings are as follows:

• Lent I: A story of the origin of the human race or the origin of the Hebrew people.
• Lent II: A story of Abraham and Sarah.
• Lent III: A story from the exodus of Israel.
• Lent IV: A story of God restoring Israel and reaffirming the covenant.
• Lent V: A prophetic vision of the kingdom yet to come.

These passages are our story and our hope. They are the heritage of the people of God, and they were fulfilled in the dying and rising of Jesus. In Jesus the cross becomes the tree of life and the flood becomes the saving waters of Baptism; the promise to Abraham and Sarah is fulfilled when God offers the only-begotten Son in sacrifice; Jesus becomes the New Covenant; our exile from God is ended as Jesus brings us home in the Resurrection; the promise made through the prophets is realized.

These passages are fulfilled in Baptism, when we are joined with Jesus in his death and resurrection. They are relived and celebrated in the Eucharist, when we are made one with him and he in us; when we are remade into the Body of Christ.

There are also three special Gospel readings used in Year A of the lectionary cycle: the Samaritan Woman at the Well, the Man Born Blind, and the Raising of Lazarus. In each of these passages the gradual process of enlightenment which characterizes those preparing for Baptism, and which characterizes also the spiritual journey of all believers, is revealed. In fact, in parishes where there are candidates preparing for Baptism, these three Gospel readings may replace the usual ones every year.

The Paschal Mystery

In Lent we will frequently hear a word unfamiliar to English-speaking Christians, but one which, if we learn to use and understand it, will open our hearts and minds to the celebration of our redemption. The word is pascha. It is the ancient biblical word for Passover and is used in the Holy Scriptures both for the exodus/Passover event which saved Israel in the time of Moses, and for the death and resurrection of Jesus, which we celebrate at Easter and on every Lord’s Day. Indeed in many languages the name of Easter is some variation of pascha—see particularly French, Italian, and Spanish.

Liturgists and theologians speak of the “Paschal Mystery,” a phrase heard often in the liturgy during Lent and Eastertide. Its meaning is brought home by William Pregnall, former Dean of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. He describes the Paschal Mystery as the saving event by which God in all times and in all places saves the human race. It has been specially manifested at four points in history:

1. In the Passover/Exodus, which freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, and journeying to the promised land;
2. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, which saves us from slavery to sin and death and leads us into the promised land of God’s kingdom;
3. In Holy Baptism, when we each become participants in the dying and rising of Jesus, and partakers of its benefits;
4. In our participation in the Eucharist, where all of these past events become present to us again and we are active participants in them.

Lent is not a gloomy time, a sad time, or a depressing time for those who are remembering what God has done for them. Our self-examination, which reveals our sin, prepares us to recognize our need for God. Then we gather Sunday by Sunday in the liturgy where our story as the people of God reminds us that God has met and still meets our need. Our fasting and self-denial give us the resources with which we can join Christ in his struggle against evil and death. Joining him in that struggle, we also join him in his victory.

From The Rite Light: Reflections on the Sunday Readings and Seasons of the Church Year. Copyright © 1998 by Michael W. Merriman. Church Publishing Incorporated, New York.

This period of the year, from Easter Day through the Day of Pentecost, is the oldest part of the Church Year. It is directly derived from the fifty-day period in the Jewish calendar, which began with Passover and concluded with Pentecost (the Greek term for “fiftieth day”). The Lord’s death and resurrection took place at Passover, and its completion—the empowering of the apostles by the Holy Spirit—took place on Pentecost. These are the church’s original feast days, which in very early times were both moved to the Sundays following the Jewish festivals, because of the early church’s intense reverence for the first day of the week as the Lord’s Day, the Day of Resurrection. The early Christians considered every Sunday to be a celebration of the rising of Christ and of the coming of the Holy Spirit—a repetition of Easter and Pentecost.

At an early date, the Great Fifty Days came to have a number of liturgical characteristics that set them apart from the remainder of the Church Year. Many of those were lost in later generations of the church, but others are still very much a part of our liturgy, including some that have been revived by many of the liturgical churches in recent years. Some of the more notable of those Eastertide liturgical notes are described here.

Alleluia

This word, derived from the Hebrew word hallelujah, means literally, “praise to Yahweh.” In Jewish worship, it is particularly characteristic of Passover. In the Seder meal, the entire group of psalms called the Hallel Psalms are sung (Psalms 113-118). As a result, the Hallel Psalms themselves have been of particular importance in the Christian Passover—that is, Easter. Psalm 114 is always sung at the Easter Vigil and Psalm 118 on Easter Day. As early as the time of the writing of the book of Revelation, hallelujah has an important place in the church’s worship, as can be seen in the description of the worship in heaven in that book. One notices in the liturgies during Eastertide that the word alleluia is used not only in its usual places, but also in many hymns and other parts of the liturgy.

The Acts of the Apostles

This book with its description of the life of early Christian community, characterized by an intense awareness of the risen Lord’s presence and the apostolic preaching of the Resurrection, has had an important place in the church’s liturgy. In recent years, the liturgical revisions among Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans have placed it again in the Easter liturgy. The Acts of the Apostles furnishes one of the readings every Sunday during the Great Fifty Days.

Other books of scripture heard especially in Easter season include the book of Revelation, 1 Peter, 1 John, and the Gospel according to John. Each of the years in the three-year cycle of readings features one of first three for the second reading at the Eucharist. The Gospel readings in almost every case are from John. 1 Peter is a baptismal homily which reflects on what Baptism has done for us as members of the risen Body of Christ. 1 John reflects on the character of Christian living in the Resurrection. Revelation is chosen because of its vision of the resurrected church at worship as it praises its victorious Lord, which is an image of our worship, especially in the Eucharist.

The Paschal Candle

A large candle that is first lighted at the Great Vigil on Easter Eve burns in a prominent place in the church at every service during the season. It was the custom of the Jewish synagogue to begin services in the evening with the lighting of candles—originally for the purpose of giving light but almost immediately invested with the symbolic meaning of light: the revelation of God’s love. Early Christians continued that use of light, seeing in the bringing of light into a dark place a symbol of the Resurrection. As early as the fourth century, the celebration of the Resurrection in Jerusalem began with a candle lighted in the Holy Sepulcher and brought out during the night of Easter Eve to the words, “The light of Christ.” That ceremony spread throughout the Christian church many ages ago.

The paschal candle (from the Latin and Greek word pascha, which means “Passover”) is often decorated with nails representing the wounds from the crucifixion which the risen Lord’s body still bore.

In the ancient Christian basilicas, some of which still exist in Italy, the stand for the paschal candle was built into the pulpit as a permanent feature of the building’s architecture. In the Middle Ages, Winchester Cathedral had a paschal candle that was sixty feet tall! In many places it is kept near the baptismal font and relighted at other times of the year, especially for Baptisms and funerals.

Sunday Themes in Eastertide

Certain scriptural themes which highlight the meaning of the Resurrection have been part of the church’s tradition for many centuries. The Sunday after Easter Day (the Second Sunday of Easter) always has as its Gospel reading the risen Lord’s appearance to Thomas. The theme is, of course, not “Doubting Thomas,” but Thomas’s outburst of praise in which Jesus is first recognized as God—“My Lord and my God!” he said—and Jesus’ words about us: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

The Third Sunday of Easter always gives an account of a resurrection appearance in which Jesus eats with his friends. Its significance for Christians lies in its eucharistic pattern. It was in the breaking of bread that Jesus was first recognized after his resurrection. It is in the breaking of the bread in the Eucharist that we encounter our risen Lord now; hence our response at that point in the liturgy: “Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia.”

The Fourth Sunday is called “Good Shepherd Sunday” because its Gospel reading always reflects Jesus’ relationship to us in the image of the Shepherd: he who knows us each by name, who provides for our needs, who saves us from evil, and who guides us into new life.

The Fifth Sunday has readings in which, prior to the crucifixion, Jesus foretold the results of his death for the future life of his followers. In Year A his death will make him the way for us into eternal life: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” In Year B, his death will prepare the way for us to receive the Holy Spirit, who will bind us into his life. In Year C, his death, as the ultimate expression of his love, will give us the model for Christian living: to love one another as he loved us.

The Sixth Sunday’s Gospel reading has Jesus describing the results of our new life in him. Year A describes that life as a union as intimate as that between a vine and its branches: the branches draw their life from the vine. Year B reveals that the new life of divine love that we have received makes us no longer simply servants of God but the friends of God. In Year C we hear his promise that the Holy Spirit will be the source of our continued life in him and will be our Counselor.

On the following Thursday, following Luke’s chronology for our Lord’s Ascension to the Father on the fortieth day after the Resurrection, we celebrate that event. This is not an event separate from the Resurrection, but one of the three parts of that one event: rising, ascending, giving the Spirit.

On the Seventh Sunday, the Sunday after Ascension Day, we hear each year a different portion of the “high-priestly prayer,” the prayer Jesus prayed on the night before his death for us: that the glory he has received from the Father may be given to us (Year A); that under the Father’s protection we may have unity and be witnesses to the truth (Year B); that our unity with each other in the Father and the Son may be a witness to the world (Year C).

Finally, the season of Easter is completed on the Day of Pentecost or Whitsunday. This celebrates the third action of Christ’s victory over death: the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church. The second reading from Acts shows the disciples waiting for God to reach out to them. Their waiting is rewarded by the coming of the Holy Spirit, which makes it possible for them to speak the good news in the languages of all peoples. God is now the source of reuniting the human race in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Gospel reading reveals that through the Holy Spirit we become the means for Jesus’ ministry to continue; receiving his peace we become the instruments of that peace to the world.

On this day, the full results of redemption in the risen Lord come to light and are the cause of our celebration. In response, we keep this day as a baptismal day, and even if there are no candidates to be baptized we renew our baptismal vows.

These Eastertide themes were old and hallowed by the fourth century, when they were used by the church to instruct the newly baptized in the “mysteries” of the faith. In those days, the unbaptized were not allowed to take part in the Prayers of the People, the exchange of the Peace, or the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, until after they were baptized. These readings and themes were used by the great teaching bishops of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries to reveal the meaning of those liturgical events, especially to the newly baptized, who were participating in them for the first time.

The unbaptized were not allowed to take part in the Prayers of the People, because in the new-covenant community of the baptized, we are ourselves the priesthood, who come directly to the Father in intercession, rather than depending on others to do that for us. In our own liturgical practice, it is important to notice that it is not the leader of those prayers who does the praying. That person—whether ordained or not—simply announces the theme, and all of us, the baptized royal priesthood, pray in the power of the Spirit to the Father.

The Peace is the greeting of the risen Christ. It is his invariable salutation in his resurrection appearances. We greet one another with his peace. We are not merely being friendly, nor are we attempting to show our friends that we like them. We, the Body of Christ, by virtue of our Baptism are bringing our risen Lord’s presence to each other.

In the Eucharist and the other sacraments, it is all the baptized, not just the clergy, who celebrate. Again our share in Christ’s priesthood is revealed. It is not simply bread and wine that are offered to God to be filled with Christ. The bread and wine are the signs and bearers of us who offer them. They can become the Body and Blood of Christ only because we who offer them are his Body and Blood.

In Eastertide, the newly baptized, and all the baptized, have revealed to them the fullness of our redemption and the depth of our life in Christ. In the words of St. Augustine, preached to the newly baptized in his cathedral at Easter, “You are the Body of Christ. In you and through you the work of the Incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken. You are to be blessed and broken and distributed, that you may be the means of grace and the vehicles of the eternal charity.”

From The Rite Light: Reflections on the Sunday Readings and Seasons of the Church Year. Copyright © 1998 by Michael W. Merriman. Church Publishing Incorporated, New York.

The liturgy changes in an important way after the Day of Pentecost. Rather than taking place within specific seasons, each with its own theme, this period does not have one overall theme. Each Sunday takes its theme from the Gospel reading for that day and from the biblical and liturgical meaning of Sunday as the Lord’s Day.

The most notable feature of this period is that we finish reading substantially all of one Gospel each year, having begun this in Advent and Epiphany. The three-year lectionary appoints one of the three “synoptic” Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—for each year. John’s Gospel is used throughout the three years for certain Holy Days, Lent, and Easter, and in filling out the Gospel of Mark, which is considerably shorter than the others, in Year B. We also read several of the epistles each year during this period. Finally, the Old Testament readings are chosen to complement the Gospel reading each Sunday. Most often they are events or prophecies which point to the work of Christ in the Gospel passage they accompany.

This, then, is a period in which the liturgy Sunday after Sunday leads us into a serious consideration of the content of Holy Scripture in an orderly way. This time in the Church Year is a time to build on the growth and renewal of grace we experienced in the first half of the year, a time to prepare ourselves to celebrate more fully when we come around again to the seasons from Advent through Easter.

The Meaning of Sunday

A familiar hymn describes the biblical and liturgical meaning of Sunday:

O day of radiant gladness,
O day of joy and light,
O balm of care and sadness,
most beautiful, most bright…
This day at the creation,
the light first had its birth;
this day for our salvation
Christ rose from depths of earth;
this day our Lord victorious
the Spirit sent from heaven,
and thus this day most glorious
a triple light was given.

The Hymnal 1982, Hymn 48. Words: Christopher Wordsworth, alt.

The Day of Creation, the Day of Resurrection, the Day of the Spirit—the Lord’s Day is all of these, and for that reason it is the day of celebration for the church. So it is also the baptismal day and the eucharistic day. It used to be said that every Sunday is a little Easter. Another way of saying this is suggested by the Roman Catholic writer, Aidan Kavanagh: Easter is a big Sunday.

It was the overwhelming significance of the first day of the week which led the first Christians to go beyond the Old Testament, which had set Saturday (the Sabbath) as the day holy to God, and to establish the first day of the week as the Lord’s Day. The earliest Jewish Christians continued to keep the Sabbath, but they also gathered on the first day of the week to celebrate the Eucharist. Later Christians moved the celebration of Christ’s resurrection from Passover to the Sunday following.

As the distinctively Jewish portion of the church was absorbed into the larger church, certain Sabbath customs began to be merged with the celebration of the Lord’s Day. For instance, just as the Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday, the early Christians began the Lord’s Day at sunset on Saturday—a custom still preserved in our liturgy: in the keeping of eves of Holy Days; in using the Collect for the next day at Evening Prayer on Saturdays; and, of course, in the church’s celebration of Easter, which begins after sunset on Holy Saturday in the Great Vigil of Easter.

Gradually, Sunday came to be considered the day of rest, as the Sabbath had been, and finally, in A.D. 321, the newly converted Roman Empire established Sunday as a legal holiday. While there were advantages in this—for instance, most people had a legally protected day when they did not have to work—it has also created various problems in our understanding of Sunday and in our celebration of it.

In various periods in the past, particularly when puritanism was strong, there came to be the sort of rigid legalism about keeping Sunday as a day of rest which Jesus had criticized in the Sabbath observances of the Pharisees. This attitude included the idea that to take part in activities which are fun is out of order on Sundays. It has also tended to encourage Christians to look down on those who cannot keep Sunday as a day of rest because of their work.

It may help modern Christians understand the meaning of Sunday to know that the early Christians referred to Sunday as the “Eighth Day.” There being no eighth day of the week in our human scale of time, this expressed the notion of the Lord’s Day as the day which transcends time and space—a day which takes us beyond our life in this world and into the life of the kingdom, the eternal day of Christ. This, by the way, is why many baptismal fonts are eight-sided—because Baptism is the way we enter into eternal life, into the Eighth Day.

Sunday, then, is not only the first day, the Creation Day, but also the Eighth Day, the day the creation was made new in Jesus’ resurrection. Therefore it is the baptismal day, the day on which those born into this world are reborn into the life of God’s kingdom. As the eucharistic day, it is the day when the church in the world is united with the larger church beyond this world, with “angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.” As the day of the Spirit, it is the day when “the Giver of life” gives us new and unending life.

The Old Testament Sabbath was understood as a gift from God to humankind, the act of God which recognizes the value of human life in this world. That in itself is not insignificant in a world which tends to pressure its creatures to work unceasingly. But the New Testament Lord’s Day is for more than this life—it is a foretaste of the life everlasting. When, in the opening acclamation of the Eucharist, we bless God the Holy Trinity and bless God’s kingdom, we are expressing the understanding of Christians, in all ages, that in the Eucharist we are living beyond this world. We are taken into the kingdom of God, and in us the world is being brought into the most intimate communion possible with the world which is to come.

As we celebrate each of these Sundays, then, we have the opportunity to reflect on God’s Word in an orderly and comprehensive way. We also find ourselves being made the living and visible sign of God’s kingdom in this world. All that we heard and said and did, from Advent through Pentecost, is summed up in our Sunday celebrations. We, the people of God, are made fruitful, and we are equipped to live in Christ and to reveal him to this world.

From The Rite Light: Reflections on the Sunday Readings and Seasons of the Church Year. Copyright © 1998 by Michael W. Merriman. Church Publishing Incorporated, New York.