In the Church this first-eighth day

In the Church this first-eighth day (the Lord’s Day: κυριακὴ ἡμέρα) is the day of the Eucharist. The early Christian tradition bears uniform witness to this fact. The Eucharist has its day, Christians gather together on a statu die— on an established day. We know that the ‘Day of the Sun’ was not a holy day of rest in either the Jewish or the Roman calendars. Nonetheless the Eucharist ‘became so firmly connected with this day that nothing has ever been able or will be able to undermine this connection. But then this is the whole point: though the Eucharist is celebrated on a statu die, though it has its own day and thus reveals a connection with and is set in the framework of time, still this day is not simply ‘one out of many.’ Everything that has been said above about the first and eighth day shows that this connection of the Eucharist with time emphasizes the eschatological nature of the Eucharist, the manifestation in it of the Lord’s Day, the New Aeon. The Eucharist is the Sacrament of the Church. It is the parousia, the presence of the Risen and Glorified Lord in the midst of ‘His own,’ those who in Him constitute the Church and are already ‘not of this world’ but partakers of the new life of the New Aeon. The day of the Eucharist is the day of the ‘actualization’ or manifestation in time of the Day of the Lord as the Kingdom of Christ. The early Church did not connect either the idea of repose or the idea of a natural cycle of work and rest with the Eucharistic Day of the Lord. Constantine established this connection with his sanction of the Christian Sunday. For the Church the Lord’s Day is the joyful day of the Kingdom. The Lord’s Day signifies for her not the substitution of one form of reckoning time by another, the replacement of Saturday by Sunday, but a break into the ‘New Aeon,’ a participation in a time that is by nature totally different.