Easter keeps coming around.
But it seems to me that each time it circles back, I settle upon something different. Each go round I focus on a different element of what it means for Jesus Christ to be alive and risen from the dead.
What I keeping returning to during Easter season 2013 is how the rising of Christ happened on a Sunday, on the first day of the week in the Jewish reckoning of time.
One thing that this meant for the first disciples was that the day the stone was rolled away was also a day they were expected to roll out of bed and go to work.
The Sabbath, the God-formed day of rest had just passed in silence. The Sabbath, the day God’s people were to take it easy because the Lord had set them free from slavery…well, that day had come and gone. Sunday wasn’t it.
It was their Monday. Grief aside, it was a typical day of ordinariness and toil. A day of work.
And into this world Jesus walked anew.
The resurrection of Jesus on a Sunday is why followers of Jesus settled onto Sunday morning as their primary meeting time for worship. Every Sunday thus became a “little Easter” and each Easter, I suppose, was a great big Sunday.
It remained a typical workday for folks, at least for hundreds of years after Christ. So, followers of Jesus squeezed worship into a day of work. The most profound, life-altering event in the faith – the rising of Jesus from the dead – sits side-by-side with the workaday world.
Actually it sits inside the workaday world. It does not sit in some gilded day set apart from the rest of life and the money, sweat, unemployment and grousing from the boss that fills it.
So I wonder…
How can we let the Risen Jesus transform that workaday world for us here and now?
When we start to answer this question, and put those answers into action, we often begin to see our faith flow in ways that we might not have previously imagined.
But it seems to me that each time it circles back, I settle upon something different. Each go round I focus on a different element of what it means for Jesus Christ to be alive and risen from the dead.
What I keeping returning to during Easter season 2013 is how the rising of Christ happened on a Sunday, on the first day of the week in the Jewish reckoning of time.
One thing that this meant for the first disciples was that the day the stone was rolled away was also a day they were expected to roll out of bed and go to work.
The Sabbath, the God-formed day of rest had just passed in silence. The Sabbath, the day God’s people were to take it easy because the Lord had set them free from slavery…well, that day had come and gone. Sunday wasn’t it.
It was their Monday. Grief aside, it was a typical day of ordinariness and toil. A day of work.
And into this world Jesus walked anew.
The resurrection of Jesus on a Sunday is why followers of Jesus settled onto Sunday morning as their primary meeting time for worship. Every Sunday thus became a “little Easter” and each Easter, I suppose, was a great big Sunday.
It remained a typical workday for folks, at least for hundreds of years after Christ. So, followers of Jesus squeezed worship into a day of work. The most profound, life-altering event in the faith – the rising of Jesus from the dead – sits side-by-side with the workaday world.
Actually it sits inside the workaday world. It does not sit in some gilded day set apart from the rest of life and the money, sweat, unemployment and grousing from the boss that fills it.
So I wonder…
How can we let the Risen Jesus transform that workaday world for us here and now?
When we start to answer this question, and put those answers into action, we often begin to see our faith flow in ways that we might not have previously imagined.