Church Calendar Archives - Page 47 of 47

Introduction:
The first Easter occurred at the time of Passover, which is when the first fruits of the barley crop were presented to the Lord. Pentecost, soon to follow, is when the first fruits of the wheat harvest were presented. As we consider the importance of the resurrection, we need to think of it in the right fashion, which means that we have to reflect on the meaning of first fruits.

The Text:
“But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:20-26).

Overview:
Christ came back from the grave, and He did so in a glorified, physical body, the same (but transformed) body that had been laid in the tomb. (v. 20). He did this as the firstfruits (v. 20), meaning that His resurrection was one small, tiny part of the general resurrection. Adam introduced death into the world, and the last Adam introduced resurrection life into the world (v. 21). All shall die in the world because of Adam, and so all shall live in the world because of Christ (v. 22). But get the order right—the fruitfruits come first, and then the general harvest which occurs at Christ’s coming (v. 23). When Christ comes again, the kingdom which He has established (with all rule and all authority and all power) will be delivered up to the Father (v. 24). For Christ must reign (at the right hand of the Father) until all His enemies are subdued (v. 25). The last enemy in this process to be subdued will be death (v. 26), after which Christ will come again and render all things back to His Father.

Getting the Image Right:
One of the things we have to resist is a false image of human history, however orthodox we might believe we are on the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. This false image works this way—we think that human history is basically the same, at least from the Fall to the Second Coming. Things go on pretty much as they have always done. In the middle of this grim history, God placed the cross and resurrection, that resurrection being a completely anomalous event in an unchanged world. This cross and resurrection are “the gospel,” which means we can be “saved,” which means in turn that we will go to heaven when we die.
Try this image instead. At the Fall, human history became a movie we are watching in grainy and scratchy black and white. When Christ rose from the grave, a point of blinding light appeared at that place, and from that place, odd things started to happen—not in the plot lines of the story necessarily, but rather in the nature of the story itself. Color started to slowly spread out from that resurrection point, and the graininess started to slowly disappear and is gradually transformed into some kind of HDTV. Of course, over time, the story itself is affected. You have seen this kind of thing numerous times. When Aslan breathes on the stone statues and they all begin coming back to life, that is the kind of image we should have. And when that kind of thing starts to happen, we look at the screen intently, staring expectantly.

This means that the resurrection was not an odd event in the first century, with all “normal” things staying the same. The resurrection was the central event of all history, but we have to take this as the central event for all history. It defines history; it establishes the trajectory of the remaining story.

Distracted by the Interim State:
We have missed this, in part, because we have been distracted by a conclusion drawn from our individualistic premises. Because we start with “our own stalk of wheat,” we find ourselves leaving out the story of the harvest. If we started with the harvest, our own stalk would not be left out. Here is how it works.
When we die, before the harvest of all history, what happens to us? We go to be with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). But over time, this intermediate state, this very temporary state of affairs, has somehow become for us our central hope, something we call “going to heaven.” We have drifted into a very Hellenistic idea of the immortality of the soul, up in another heavenly dimension somewhere, and we have lost the Hebraic truth of the resurrection of the dead.
The Bible doesn’t generally speak in our popular way of “going to heaven when we die”—not that it is technically wrong. The problem is that the interim state has become the overarching paradigm, replacing the biblical hope. The biblical hope is heaven coming here. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth (Matt. 5:5). We look to heaven, not so much because that is where we are going in order to be saved, but because that is where our salvation is coming from (Phil. 3:20-21).

The New Ordinary:
So the resurrection is not simply a peculiar event in an old and decaying world. It is rather the defining event of the new creation, the new heavens and the new earth. It is harbinger of all things made new. We therefore cannot know the resurrection with an unresurrected epistemology (way of knowing). Resurrection life is the new ordinary.

This is why the materialism that came from the Enlightenment was a concerted way to get us back to the old way of knowing, the old way of relating to the authorities, the old way of dying. But Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not. This new order been established in the resurrection. If the dead are not raised, then rulers can rule in the old- fashioned way—“off with his head,” which is an argument that (as it seemed for a time) that had no proper answer. But the dead are raised, and moreover, the dead are raised in the middle of human history. The harvest has begun, and the firstfruits have been presented. What could be more unsettling to tyrants? Marx was right about a certain kind of religion—pie in the sky when we die religion is an opiate for the masses. But resurrection life is a nightmare for the principalities and powers, and their only device is to persuade the churches to stop talking about it. But we believe, and therefore we speak.

Now this means that if the firstfruits happened two thousand years ago, and the general harvest is sometime in the future, this historical interim is not a time in which “nothing is happening.” Rather, to return to our text, it is the time in which we, through the authority of the resurrection gospel, put down all rule and authority and power, bringing every thought captive.

Introduction:
We are nearing the conclusion of the historic season of Lent, the preparation season for the celebration of Easter. This is Palm Sunday, the day in which we mark and celebrate the Lord’s Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem. As we are trying to orient ourselves by and with a Christian year, instead of the secularized civic year, we are certainly taking a step in the right direction. But this does not mean that there are no pitfalls as we move in this direction. We have to remember that the Church has been here before, and we have stumbled before.

The Text:
“And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation. Ye shall do no servile work therein: but ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD. And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Also on the tenth day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement: it shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD” (Leviticus 23:23-27).

Overview:
In Leviticus 23, the Lord revealed the festivals of Israel to Moses. The weekly sabbath was first (v. 3). The other feasts (Passover/Unleavened Bread, Pentecost, and Tabernacles) were all celebratory in nature—they were feasts. And in our text, we come to the singular Day of Atonement. On this day, the Israelites were commanded to “afflict their souls.” God required this of Moses (v. 23). The day was set aside as a holy convocation, as a high sabbath, and was marked on a particular day (v. 24). Work was proscribed, as on a regular sabbath, and an offering of fire was required (v. 25). The Lord speaks again (v. 26), and He required the Israelites to afflict their souls (v. 27). There were other times of fasting, obviously, but these appear to have been occasional or individual. In the liturgical calendar of Israel, before the advent of the Messiah, one day out of 365 was set apart for the nation to afflict their souls. The rest of the commemorations were gratitude-soaked and celebratory.

A Weekly Resurrection Day:
In the early Church, celebration of the resurrection was instantaneous. From the very beginning, Christians celebrated and worshipped God on a weekly basis, and they did so moving their observance from the seventh day sabbath of the Jews to the first day of the week, the Lord’s Day. This was done because this was the day on which the Lord rose from the dead. “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first . . .” (Mark 16:9; cf. Matt. 28:1; Luke 24:1; John 20:19). From the pages of the New Testament down to the present, Christians have been observing the first day of the week as a weekly “Easter.” “And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them . . .” (Acts 20: 7). “Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come” (1 Cor. 16:2). “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet” (Rev. 1:10).

There are two striking meanings of this new day, this Day that the Lord has made. The first is the obvious meaning, which is that it marks the day of the resurrection. The Lord came back from the dead on the first day of the week (Mk. 16:9), appeared to His disciples on that same day (John 20:19), and then appeared to them again on the following Sunday (John 20:26). But what is the second meaning? This meaning is that God has recreated the heavens and earth. In the old covenant, the seventh-day sabbath was anchored to the old creation in an everlasting way. That seventh-day observance was clearly going to last as long as that created order did. Nothing would suffice to change that day unless it were a change of the created order, unless it were the establishment of a new created order. And this is just what we find. “There remaineth therefore a [sabbath] rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his” (Heb. 4:9-10).

Penitential Seasons?:
Lent began as a period of preparation for Christian baptism—many of the baptisms in the early Church were performed on Easter Day. Over time, as a system of work-righteousness began to establish a deeper hold on the minds and hearts of many professing Christians, the church calendar began to reflect a false understanding of the nature of the gospel. Now we want to return to an explicitly Christian understanding of our days and years, which they certainly had, but we want to do this without making the same mistakes they did.

Traditionally, both Lent and Advent are penitential seasons—not times of overflowing celebrations. This is not something we have sought to cultivate at all, even though we do observe a basic church calendar, made up of what the Reformers called the five evangelical feast days. Our reluctance to adopt the penitential approach to these seasons of the year is not caused by ignorance of the practice. I want to present three arguments here for a rejection of this practice.

First, if we were to adopt this practice, we would be in worse shape than our Old Covenant brethren, who had to afflict their souls only one day out of the year. Why would the time of anticipation of salvation be so liturgically celebratory, while the times of fulfilled salvation be so liturgically glum? Instead of establishing a sense of longing, it will tend to do the reverse.

Second, each penitential season keeps getting interrupted with our weekly Easters. Many who relate exciting movies they have seen to others are careful to avoid “spoilers.” Well, these feasts we have, according to God’s ordinance every seven days, spoil the penitential mood.

And last, what gospel is implicitly preached by the practice of drawing out the process of repentance and forgiveness? It is a false gospel. Now I am not saying that fellow Christians who observe their church year in this way are preaching a false gospel, but I am saying that lex orandi lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of faith, and over time, this liturgical practice will speak very loudly to our descendants. If we have the opportunity to speak to our descendants, and we do, then I want to tell them that the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Christmas and Easter:
So as we prepare our hearts and minds, along with our families, for the annual celebration of our Lord’s resurrection next Lord’s Day, one other comment should be made. The Incarnation was a glorious event, and we don’t want any diminution of that celebration. But the resurrection of the Lord was what remade the cosmos, and we should strive over time to have our celebration of Easter far surpass the glory of Christmas. We are currently more than a little lopsided—and we shouldn’t try to fix this by reducing what we do at Christmas.