Sunday is Non-Transferable

It sometimes surprises new practitioners of Lenten disciplines when they do the math and find that there are not forty but forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. How do we account for the additional days? It is then that they learn of Sunday as a blessed relaxation of the Fast in observance of our weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Day of Resurrection. The Lenten Sunday puts a point on what is true of every Sunday: it is both a looking back and a looking forward. It is a perpetual memorial of Easter until Christ returns to raise and judge the quick and the dead. 

There can also be a quirk of liturgical thinking that arises with the idea of the Lenten Sunday–a quirk that has sometimes a lax, scrupulous, or shrewd expression. In the lax variety, Sundays in Lent become occasions for a radical abandonment of the disciplines–an indulgent free for all from sunrise to sunset, an attempt to get a week’s worth of whatever it is before Monday comes with all of its rules. Over the season, this produces a ‘working for the weekend’ kind of Lent that evades the goodness of the fasting days by making them boxes to check before we can get back to enjoying life. The scrupulous sort, by contrast, see the relaxation of Sunday as a threat to the pristine integrity of their Lent. Sometimes out of a sense of moral need, though more often out of a traditionalist completionism, the scrupulous tend to count Sunday as any other day of fasting and refuse to differentiate it lest they damage their record and whatever that symbolizes. 

Finally, the shrewd (to whom the title of this post is dedicated) are those who see the Lenten Sunday as a set of six passes that can be cashed in at will. It’s sometimes a niche joke to ‘use up one of your Sundays’ in order to indulge on a Thursday. Some of the shrewd have surely in the past found themselves in the horrific situation of arriving at Monday of Lent II only to find that they have no Sundays left, requiring them either to keep a perfect Lent among the scrupulous or to fail at that and tumble past the lax into the ranks of the non-observant, vowing that ‘next year it’ll be different.’ This is the new year’s resolution to diet draped in traditionalist Christian garb. By February the onslaught of cheat-days and missed gym visits overwhelms the will to continue and so the discipline to exercise more collapses under the weight. Rather than starting again bearing the light shame of failure, though, we await the next opportunity to start over and do it perfectly. In the end, the shrewd approach adopts the worst parts of the lax and scrupulous tendencies, combined.

It seems that at the heart of the problem here is a flawed view of Christian time. The Church calendar does not lend itself to our cultural tendencies of customization and optimization. In almost every area of life, we have had just enough of the right technology for just long enough that we have developed a sense of time that would be foreign to most humans who have ever lived. We are able to keep the lights on all day and night, moving right past the natural signals of the beginning and end of our daily activity. Automation has enabled a kind of productivity that can persist even while we have to attend to our basic survival needs of sleep, nourishment, and hygiene. We also have the communications technology to be ‘present’ in a greater variety of locations and with a greater rapidity than embodied travel could ever take us. In short: we can do things beyond the constraints of time and place. Setting aside for a minute the other concerns we might have about these abilities, what seems obvious is that they have altered our imagination for what is and should be possible for us. The ability to do something, at some point, easily becomes the expectation of the right to do that thing.

The Christian sense of time pushes back against this tendency. That time begins for us on Sunday morning, that our chief holiday (Easter) has a variable date, that most feasts are observed in octaves (eight-days) that do not line up cleanly with the conventional calendar week all point to the intrusion of Christian time and the Kingdom it represents into the orderly sense of modern time with its concerns for control, predictability, and productivity. In their place they introduce us to their redeemed counterparts of diligence, seasonality, and proficiency. Christian time runs substantially but also quietly through the spectacle and noise of secular time. By attending to it, we are drawn attentively in love to what is most important if not the most obvious. As we progress through it, we are restored to the realistic seasons of life and their balance: growth and rest, activity and contemplation. Within us grows a practiced maturity known in stability instead of an acquisitive fervor for spiritual results. We remain in the world’s time, but we are not compulsively driven by it. What starts out as the awkward acclimation to Christian time by which we can seem out of sorts in the world’s eyes becomes through practice the peace that surpasses the world’s understanding.

This is why Sunday, with the work of worship in Christian time that belongs to it, is non-transferable. It is the beginning of time for Christians because it truly reflects that our life begins with the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Sunday asserts itself against the despondent cycle of work-week and weekend. During Lent, Sunday stands as a gift of relief and mirth against the seriousness of confronting sin and death. It is a picture of St. John Chrysostom’s Easter sermon welcoming those who have fasted and those who have not to the feast given as a grace. That is why the fixed relaxation of Sunday cannot be reassigned to another day. To observe that rule forces us instead to say, ‘I have not kept the fast,’ so that we might return to it with humility, knowing that Sunday will come, and eventually Easter (that Sunday of Sundays) will come as well. We cannot enter Easter if we view it as a key performance indicator of our perfect religion; we can only enter it as the foundation of our freedom from the perfectionism of religion into a renewed life. 

The relaxation of the fast on Sundays in Lent exposes us in a very measured way to some of things we are denying for the season in order that we might observe how we are being made free in relationship to them. Over the course of Lent, we can experience how what once drove us compulsively becomes something to which we can say a free ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ The Sundays in Lent push back against the puritanical impulse in us that favors mere, scrupulous abstention. In a way, they call us to mess up our record of perfect observance for the sake of the Lord’s Day to rescue us from a Lent that becomes an idol of self-help. These Sundays also push back against the lax tendency only to be able to enjoy something if we can enjoy it however much we want–the subtle equation of a thing’s goodness with our ability to define its limits for ourselves.  

That the Lenten Sunday is a relaxation of the rigors of the fast, reminding us that ‘though we be tied and bound by the chain of our sins,’ we are nevertheless being loosed from that chain by the great mercies of our God. Sundays chiefly illuminate a season of profound contrition and penitence, giving this season of spiritual sadness an undeniably bright quality. The sequence of our Sunday Gospel Lessons proclaim Christ’s victory over the Tempter and banishment of the demons to prepare the human heart for the presence of God, followed by His feeding of the multitudes, the testimony of His divine nature, and His triumphal entry into the Temple. The brief lightening of the burdens of this season signal that something very good is happening, that our Lord has come to be present with us on His Day in the Eucharist, and so the easing of the fast signals that the Bridegroom is with us.

If we have already faltered in Lent, let’s get back up and keep walking. Easter, and the Lord whose Day it is, are approaching us more quickly and ably than we are approaching them. However halting we are, our task is to keep facing in that direction and not to turn away. If we do this, we will be met in the midst of trials, and much sooner than we think.