Sunday is, so to speak, a fragment of time imbued with eternity, for its dawn saw the Crucified and Risen Christ enter victorious into eternal life.
With the event of the Resurrection, creation and redemption reach their fulfillment. On the “first day after Saturday”, the women and then the Disciples, meeting the Risen One, understood that this was “the day which the Lord has made” (Ps 118[117]:24), “his” day, the “Dies Domini.” In fact, this is what the liturgy sings: “O first and last day, radiant and shining with Christ’s triumph”.
From the very outset, this has been a stable element in the perception of the mystery of Sunday: “The Word”, Origen affirms, “has moved the feast of the Sabbath to the day on which the light was produced and has given us as an image of true repose, Sunday, the day of salvation, the first day of the light in which the Savior of the world, after completing all his work with men and after conquering death, crossed the threshold of Heaven, surpassing the creation of the six days and receiving the blessed Sabbath and rest in God” (Comment on Psalm 91).
Inspired by knowledge of this, St Ignatius of Antioch asserted: “We are no longer keeping the Sabbath, but the Lord’s Day” (Ad Magn. 9, 1).
For the first Christians, participation in the Sunday celebrations was the natural expression of their belonging to Christ, of communion with his Mystical Body, in the joyful expectation of his glorious return.
This belonging was expressed heroically in what happened to the martyrs of Abitene, who faced death exclaiming, “Sine dominico non possumus”: without gathering together on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist, we cannot live.
How much more necessary it is today to reaffirm the sacredness of the Lord’s Day and the need to take part in Sunday Mass!
The cultural context in which we live, often marked by religious indifference and secularism that blot out the horizon of the transcendent, must not let us forget that the People of God, born from “Christ’s Passover, Sunday”, should return to it as to an inexhaustible source, in order to understand better and better the features of their own identity and the reasons for their existence.
The Second Vatican Council, after pointing out the origin of Sunday, continued: “On this day Christ’s faithful are bound to come together into one place. They should listen to the Word of God and take part in the Eucharist, thus calling to mind the Passion, Resurrection and Glory of the Lord Jesus and giving thanks to God who “has begotten them again, through the Resurrection of Christ from the dead, unto a living hope'” (“Sacrosanctum Concilium,” n. 106).
Sunday was not chosen by the Christian community but by the Apostles, and indeed by Christ himself, who on that day, “the first day of the week”, rose and appeared to the disciples (cf. Mt 28:1; Mk 16: 9; Lk 24:1; Jn 20:1,19; Acts 20:7; I Cor 16: 2), and appeared to them again “eight days later” (Jn 20:26).
Sunday is the day on which the Risen Lord makes himself present among his followers, invites them to his banquet and shares himself with them so that they too, united and configured to him, may worship God properly.
Papal Letter to Cardinal Arinze on the Anniverary of “Sacrosanctum Concilium”
