With Easter Day, the Feast of the Resurrection, falling this year on 5 April, and with a title of ‘Commemorating the Resurrection’, you might well expect this article to be about Easter in some way. But it isn’t, at least not directly. We think that the early church began to commemorate the Resurrection as an annual celebration sometime in the mid-second century, making it the earliest of the annual feast-days of the church’s year. Other feast-days associated with Christ’s life gradually grew up around it, mostly in the fourth century, when — thanks to Constantine’s edict of toleration early in the century, and the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire under Theodosius towards the end of the same century — Christians began to worship publicly and, in the churches that they went on to build, developed a yearly cycle of special days, a practice that was modelled on the annual cycle of public rituals of the secular world. But before the Resurrection came to have its own yearly day, Christians celebrated the Resurrection every Sunday. We still do, of course. And so the purpose of this article, in this year’s month of Easter (it is March in some years) is to explore the history of this weekly commemoration.

From the gospels we learn that the Resurrection occurred on the first day of the week (Sunday), the day after the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday), the seventh day of the week. The Jewish holy day, a day of rest and prayer, is on the seventh day of the week because the creation narrative in Genesis tells of how God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Within Christian communities, which soon came to include non-Jews, the practice of commemorating the Resurrection on the first day of every week quickly became established. There is a reference in Acts chap. 20 v. 7, to the coming together of the disciples to break bread on this day, and it is referred to as if it was already a regular habit. That it was on the first day of the week is perhaps not immediately obvious to us as we read the text, because the time-reference is ‘on the Saturday night’. But the Jewish Sabbath extends from sunset to the sunset, so the time indicator in Acts carefully tells us that the disciples’ practice of breaking bread together was very early on the first day of the week in the usual sunset-to-sunset terms..

Within the Christian tradition, the first day of the week soon came to be called ‘The Lord’s Day’, which in the Latin of the Roman Empire, and then continuing in the Latin of the western medieval church, was Dies Dominica, later often shortened to Dominica.  This is the origin of Dimanche in French, Domenica in Italian and Domingo in Spanish, all languages that derive from Latin. In England, however, which came to speak a Germanic language as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries, our days of the week were (and still are) named after pagan gods, the sun and the moon. So Dies Dominica, or Dominica, as it was officially called by the pre-Reformation church, continued to be called Sun-day, the day of the sun, in everyday speech. Sabbath began to be used in English as a term for the Lord’s Day only after the Reformation and is generally restricted to particular church traditions. As a leading liturgist once said, ‘Christians sanctified the week before they sanctified the year’.

Joyce Hill