Understanding our Faith

Sunday: The Original Feast

We have become accustomed to the great feasts of Easter and Christmas and see them as pivotal points of our year with seasons preceding them and following on from them.

But these feasts came along later. The original feast is Sunday. Christians came together for the Eucharist each first day of the week. At first, they gathered with other Jews in the synagogues for what we now call the Liturgy of the Word. They did this on the Sabbath, the last day of the week. But then, they came together specifically as Christians to celebrate the Lord’s Supper as St Paul called it, or the Breaking of the Bread as St Luke called it, or as we normally call it the Eucharist. 

When divisions between Jews and Christians became greater, Christians gathered for both the Word and the Eucharist on the first day of the week, Sunday. And the celebration took on much the same shape as we have today.

At first, Christians only celebrated the Eucharist on Sundays because it was the day of the Lord’s resurrection and the Eucharist was identified as their meeting point with the Risen Lord. 

The first day of the week was not just a calendar date for them; it was the day on which they believed that everything had been renewed, that a new creation had come about, that the future which God was promising had come into the present in the very presence of the Risen Lord. 

In times when Christians were the object of great suspicion and at times of persecution, they went to great efforts to make sure that they were present at the Eucharist; it was their source of identity and strength. As the martyrs of Abitene in North Africa said: without the Lord’s Day we cannot go on.

They used the Latin word ‘Dominicum’ which had three aspects of meaning to it: it was the gathering of the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day for the Lord’s supper.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin