Every Sunday [Trinity 24; St. Matthew 9:18-26]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

Jesus speaks to us in today’s Gospel saying:

“Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has saved you.’ And instantly the woman was saved.”

As we approach the End of the Church Year, these 4 Sundays in November, I want to take all four Sundays and take you through what I’m going to call the Land without a Sunday. And Just so you know, this is not original to me. It is actually the title of a short essay that Maria Von Trapp wrote in the first half of last century. But as you will see, the issue has not aged at all.

Her idea behind writing this essay comes from a vacation story from some friends of the Von Trapps, back in Austria. The vacation their friends took was six-weeks to go all over Russia, when it was still possible to get a visa, in that time. Though they were assigned a “tour guide” who never left them for a moment, they returned home safe. Their friends actually wrote the book called: The Land without a Sunday.

For that is what impressed them most on their trip. It wasn’t the siberian concentration camps or the misery and hardship under the socialists. It was the fact that they never heard a church bell ring once the entire time. Socialist Russia had gotten rid of Sunday and was therefore able to commit all of their atrocities.

But you can’t get rid of a whole day. You must fill that gap with something and the socialists did. They replaced it with “a day off”, but not in the same way we would think of a day off. In specific intervals, differing throughout the entire country, a day off would eventually come in the work week. Some would have a 5 day work week, with the 6th off. Some would have a 10 day work week, and still others would have an 8 day work week. Change up the weeks and work, work, work.

And if you didn’t work, you were shot. This is what replaced Sundays. Work and fear and love for Big Brother. Do you know why? Do you know why it is that when any oppressive regime comes to take over a country, the first thing they do is attack churches? It is because on Sundays, the Church preaches Rest, Peace, and Liberty, exactly what Jesus is doing in the Gospel today.

But first off: we are not just speaking of institutionalized Sundays, meaning the Sundays that happen “just because they’ve always happened, so why change it”. I am today teaching about how important Sundays are to the Church and where that importance came from.

Remember, the Church began on Saturdays; the Sabbath day. That Day of Rest that God made holy on the seventh day of Creation. So it was, and to some still is, that the 7th day was the holy day, made so by God Himself. So it is that when we fast-forward to Jesus, in the Gospels, we find Him also attending synagogue on the Sabbath religiously.

So, Biblically we should have been here yesterday and not Today, right? 

Jesus offers us help in this area. In Matthew 28, He gives us an account of His Easter. We hear, in English, that after the Sabbath, that was Saturday, dawned the first day of the week, which we would call Sunday. However, there’s a trick here. In the Greek, in a divine convergence and agreement between all four Gospels, the phrase in question quite literally says, “...the first of the Sabbaths” (Mt. 28:1, Mk. 16:2, Lk. 24:1, Jn. 20:1). 

Now, with this information, we have one of two choices: In the first case, we can agree with the Jews and say that by Jesus’ time the word “sabbath” had come to mean “week” or “day of the week” as some generic term, but this way we run the risk of rendering the sabbath into vulgarity that which God has called holy.

Or, we may take it to mean that, just as Christ is the end of the Law for all who believe (Rom. 10:4), He is also the end of the ceremonial Law which commanded the Sabbath to be observed. Which then means that the Sabbath, the seventh day on which God rested, now has an evening. The sun has finally set on that never-ending 7th day of God’s rest from Genesis 1 and has now arisen upon the Sabbath of sabbaths; the first of the Sabbaths: Resurrection Day. Of course, this was the plan from the beginning.

So we will take the second opinion and find ourselves aligned with the Apostles who also continued Jesus’ tradition of attending Sabbath at the synagogues, but then began the new tradition of remaining after everyone had left, keeping a vigil, and hearing the Gospel the next morning in imitation of the Easter weekend they all experienced firsthand. St. Paul confirms this when he encourages offerings to be taken up on the “first day of the week” (1 Cor. 16:2).

In this way, the first Easter vigil is repeated over and over again. Not just that first Sunday but every other one as well, in order to celebrate. Every Saturday through Sunday becomes a little Easter for the Apostles and they never let a single one go past them. For us too, now every Sunday is a little Easter where we are able to prepare ourselves with Confession on Saturdays and greet our Lord at His Table the next morning, being resurrected to new life, Romans 6:4.

Now, even though Jesus is bringing rest to this little girl’s tortured and grief-stricken family, and even though His presence brings the eternal peace of God, and even though this family and all who believe are set free from death to live a life of liberty, none of that would have come without Sunday; without that Easter Sunday.

Looking at our Old Testament reading, we also hear nonsense from Isaiah if we do not have Easter Sunday. Demanding that God wake up seems silly, especially since He already tells us that He “slumbers not nor sleeps” in Psalm 121:4. However, it may make some sense if the Seventh Day of rest is still in effect. If God is still resting from creating all things, then maybe we must awaken God.

But if God awakens on His own from the slumber of death and shows the entire world what He has done, then Isaiah is not speaking of God sleeping, but God rising again from the dead, never to die again. Then verse 11 of Isaiah 51 makes eternal sense, that the ransomed will eternally be saved in the Resurrection. Everlasting joy, gladness, and comfort can only come from the fact that death is no more, as Jesus showed us by raising this daughter.

But this Resurrection Sunday does not stop there. It comes directly to you to affect you, to change you, and to gift you with the same everlasting peace. For because of Sunday, you have been baptized into the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of God. Your baptism places you in direct contact with this Sunday that Jesus creates and gives to you.

Not just the first day of the week, not just the next day, but a brand new day that has never been seen on earth before. The day where it is possible for the dead to come back to life. Not a day of work or a day of rest, but a day of eternal blessedness that will not have an end. 

This is why this new-old day we call Sunday is now the day of worship, because of all this. Hopefully now, if anyone asks “why Sunday”, you may answer with confidence: “why not Sunday?”