Why Sunday Matters: The Return to This-Is-Good Goodness

To understand Sunday, why it matters, we Christians must return to the beginning of things, to the mists of the beginning of all things, before Eden even. We must think upon, remembering by means of the Scripture, the story, the litany of God’s creation, if we are to begin to understand the substance of Sunday, what is of the same substance as that we call the Sabbath, the heart of the gift of creation itself.

It is the repeated refrain of creation found at the beginning of Genesis which first reveals it—what the Sabbath is, what Sunday is. “And God saw that it was good,” is that refrain. Each day, enraptured by what he had made, God “saw that it was good.” God’s delight in his creation, echoing his creation’s goodness, divine delight and created goodness culminating in a hallowed rest on a seventh day is what the Sabbath is (Gen 2:1-4). We are here talking about the experience of creation in its pristine innocence, what mystics sometimes feel.

And parents. What the Sabbath is, what mystics sometimes feel, is akin to that joy some of us know, seeing our child born, seeing her for the first time, a mother’s exhausted and happy tears, her laughter; akin to her husband’s tears, a sudden happiness as new as his newborn child and previously as unknown. That this-is-good goodness, experienced in creation and at the birth of children, is what I am trying to underline: to suggest that such goodness is what the Sabbath is; it is what Sunday is. It is what God wants to give us in the Sabbath, ultimately in the perfect Sabbath that is Jesus Christ, that primeval and eternal goodness, the joy which the Creator takes in our created goodness, which he shares with us in a shared joy like a father playing with his children for no other reason than the delight of it.

Which is also why children know this goodness, feel it sometimes too, more often than adults. Wisdom rejoices, it says in Proverbs, dances in the delight God knows in his creating (Prov 8:30-31). Along with so many others among the ancients, St. Thomas saw in the play of children something analogous to contemplation; both were activities that served no other purpose beyond either the joy of play or the joy of contemplation, no other reason except beautifully pointless delight. Simply to play and to delight in play is akin to God’s delight in creation. “All play,” Hugo Rahner said, “is an attempt to approximate the Creator.”[1] Again, I am trying to depict the feeling of the Sabbath, that it feels like Eden, like joy in the birth of a child, like children playing.

But, of course, it is not that simple. I mean, it is that simple, but sin has ruined it, rendered everything difficult, complicated things. You know the story; you know your story. The Fall, your fall; the world, the flesh, the devil, and you; and me too. You know what I mean. That this-is-good goodness is at best fleeting; it is not at all the normal constitution of our existence, or the normal experience of creation, or of nature, or of our fellow human beings. The Bible is as much a story of humanity’s descent into violence and chaos as it is a story of salvation. The first homicide is found in the fourth chapter of Genesis; in the sixth chapter, just before the flood, it says, “And he was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.”[2] Between the goodness of Eden and us is all of that, all of history’s evils and tragedies and sins. What St. Augustine called the “wear and tear of the world” is what prevents most of us from knowing what the Sabbath feels like, that this-is-good goodness. It is what makes such goodness a mere memory, something mostly for mystics, an unnerving longing, most of us most of the time discontented with ourselves and with the world around us.[3]

Which is why the Sabbath is given to the people by means of a command. It is commanded first in the desert. After sin, after enslavement, in the wandering pilgrimage of liberation from Egypt to the Promised Land, the Sabbath is a practice of liberation, of trust in God. On the sixth day the people were to gather “twice as much bread,” for the seventh day was to be “a day of solemn rest, a holy sabbath to the Lord” (Ex 16:22-30). Repeated later in the Decalogue, it is the longest of the Ten Commandments; and by it, God opens again for his people the chance to know that joy and delight, that this-is-good goodness God declared at the close of each newly created day (Ex 20:8-11). By way of commandment, God offers his people the reprise of Eden, a momentary return to the delight known at the beginning of everything. Because again, that is what the Sabbath is. That is what the Sabbath is meant to give.

That is why Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Sabbath a “palace in time.” A thing of “joy and reticence,” the Sabbath is “a reminder of adjacency to eternity.”[4] That is, the Sabbath is an outpost of Eden, an oasis and a reminder of creation’s original peace. The commandment therefore is a gift, a whisper to remember what was true in the first place, that first this-is-good goodness which was meant to belong to the enduring order of things. The Sabbath, as a reminder of Eden, thus at the same time suggests restoration; it is a foretaste of eternity. “The essence of the world to come is Sabbath eternal, and the seventh day in time is an example of eternity,” Heschel wrote.[5] What mystics sometimes see, what parents see in the birth and play of their children, what children, lost in their pretend worlds of play, themselves know: given in the desert in the commandments, by means of religion, the Sabbath is given to the whole people of God. The Sabbath is a kind of ante-paradisus, a signal telling where God intends to lead his people, and that is to the heavenly Jerusalem, to Eden re-opened.

That the Sabbath is experienced by means of what we call religion begins to explain why sacred space and ritual matters, sanctuaries and the temple. “You shall keep my sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary,” it says in Leviticus, all in the same breath (Lev 19:30, 26:2). The Sabbath is to be honored both in time and space. The Sabbath is a holy day, set apart from other days and from the work of other days. The Sabbath is cosmic in this regard, for in ceasing to work, the people of God imitate the Creator’s rest on that first seventh day. The Sabbath, God said to Moses, is “a sign for ever between me and the sons of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed” (Ex 31:17). A kind of sacrament, the Sabbath both remembers creation while anticipating its redemption. The Sabbath tells the whole story of salvation history in that sense; it frames our destiny.

But the Sabbath is at the same time a practice of justice. In Deuteronomy’s account of the Ten Commandments, after the command to rest and to give rest to one’s family, one’s cattle, and one’s servants, all of whom should “rest as well as you,” Egypt is evoked as a reminder that “once you were a servant,” liberated from bondage by God himself (Deut 5:12-15). Practiced either as jubilee or simply by showing kindness to the poor, that the same justice done for you should be done for others is the Exodus lesson. It is a lesson repeated by the prophets, rendered sometimes as a threat by the prophets. Jeremiah, for instance, calling out Judah’s hypocritical jubilee, warned them that God in retribution would make their kingdom “a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth” (Jer 34:17). It was a warning that underlined God’s seriousness that he really does mean to open the Sabbath to everyone, the poor included. The Sabbath, you see, is not meant only for mystics and parents and children and the resourced people of God; it is meant also for widows and orphans and in fact for the whole world, as justice. For justice too belongs to the this-is-good goodness of creation, what the Sabbath begins to restore.

But, of course, I am trying to explain why Sunday matters. I have been talking, however, about the Sabbath. What are we to make of that? The simple answer is that Christ is our Sabbath rest. As we encounter Jesus in the sacraments, daily or Sunday by Sunday, the rest of God that is given in the Sabbath is given also now to the baptized. Sunday would eventually become the holy day, a day, as the Catechism teaches, that “fulfills the spiritual truth of the Jewish sabbath and announces man’s eternal rest in God” (§2175). Again, we see here the expanding inclusiveness of the Sabbath; for the rest of God, the this-is-good goodness of creation, is meant for both Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female—you and me. It belongs to what is called in the New Testament “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God,” a plan “now made manifest to his saints” and which through the Church is made known to the world, to the entire universe, even “principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:9-10; Col 1:26). What I have been trying to say is that the rest of God—his menuha—which is the experience of the this-is-good goodness of creation is the gift God has been trying to give us all along—to the people of God on the Sabbath and also to his adopted sons and daughters in Christ on Sunday. Simply because the one God of us all wants to welcome us back to Eden and to its original joy.

And so, as Saint John Paul II put it, the ancient reasons for keeping the holiness of the Lord’s Day “remain valid” (Dies Domini §62). The Church still clearly teaches that Sunday matters, that it is an obligation, a grave sin deliberately to neglect it (CCC §2181). But that is not because the Church cares about attendance, or the collection, or social control. The Church’s obligation here is not a kind of retrograde sabbatarianism. Rather, the Church continues to oblige us to keep the Lord’s Day holy because to encounter Christ in the Sunday Eucharist is to enter the “heart of the Church’s life” (CCC §2177). Because it is to encounter in Christ the Sabbath rest that God has always offered.

This is what I was trying to say in my little book, Why Sunday Matters. I wanted to talk about the gift of Sunday, the gift of Christ’s rest, the Sabbath rest, the gift of that this-is-good goodness given in creation. We want to recover that goodness. You want to recover that goodness. In all you want and seek, that ultimately is what you are after—the peace of Christ that passes all understanding (Phil 4:7). Together, as a Church, and even as a society, we must recover that goodness. “What we are depends on what the Sabbath is to us,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote.[6] As it relates to the gift of rest Christ offers on Sundays, the same is true for Christian believers. The moral stakes of the Sabbath remain.

When the Church calls upon you to keep the Lord’s Day holy, when she calls upon you to go to Mass on Sunday, when she calls upon families to keep the faith, to keep Sunday holy—when, for instance, the Church calls families, yes, to enjoy sports but also always to keep the Lord’s Day sacred; when she calls upon you to practice the kinds of justice that invite all people to share in rest, the poor especially; when she calls upon you to cherish your brothers and sisters face to face rather than hate them through the screens that have today become ubiquitous; when the Church begs you to remember the rest you need in Jesus—she is extending to you an invitation that goes all the way back to Eden. She is offering you that peace which you have been looking for in everything else that you have been looking for, that peace, as I said, which passes understanding; and which is as close to you as your nearest little parish church, that tiny outpost of Eden. If you would just see it that way.

Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer