Sunday prayer: the first day, not the last

Sunday has a texture the other days do not have. There is time in it, and a low-level worry about spending that time badly. You tell yourself you will pray, since this is the day for it, and by the afternoon you notice you have mostly been totting up the week behind you and drawing up a list for the week ahead.

The misunderstanding is old, and it turns on a single point of the calendar that almost nobody notices. The Christian Sunday is not the last day of the week. It is the first.

The texts never date anything by a seventh day

Look at how the New Testament dates its gatherings. It does not say “the day of rest”. It does not say “the seventh day”. It counts from the beginning.

On the first day of the week, when the disciples were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them, intending to depart on the next day, and continued his speech until midnight.

Acts 20:7 (World English Bible)

Paul counts the same way when he organises a collection in a community he cannot see.

On the first day of the week, let each one of you save, as he may prosper, that no collections be made when I come.

1 Corinthians 16:2 (World English Bible)

And when the day finally gets a name, the name does not point to rest either. It points to someone.

I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.

Revelation 1:10 (World English Bible)

Three texts, three unrelated situations, a gathering, a collection, a vision. The only thing they share is a position in the week.

The word you use hides what happened

Here English is at a disadvantage and does not know it. The ordinary English name of the day is the pagan one. Sunday is the sun’s day, and it has kept that name through everything.

Which is why the oldest description of a Christian assembly is worth reading in English with the word left in. Justin Martyr, around the middle of the second century, is explaining to an emperor what these people actually do, and he calls the day exactly what everyone else calls it, the day called Sunday. Then he gives two reasons for choosing it: it is the day on which God made the world by working a change in the darkness, and it is the day on which Christ rose from the dead (First Apology, 67).

Both reasons name a beginning. One is the beginning of everything, the other the beginning of what Christians announce. Neither of them is about completion. And the Lord’s day of Revelation 1:10 is not a synonym for the calendar word: it is a claim staked against it.

John’s Gospel is careful about the same day, down to the hour.

When therefore it was evening, on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were locked where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the middle, and said to them, “Peace be to you.”

John 20:19 (World English Bible)

The day is dated twice in one chapter, once in the morning and once at evening, as though the writer wanted no confusion about which square of the calendar this belongs to. And what arrives in the evening of that first day is not a summary of anything. It is a greeting.

Rest placed before, not after

Here is what the position of the day changes, and it is the whole subject of this page. Rest that comes after the work is earned. It rewards, it settles accounts, it counts what was done. Rest placed at the beginning rewards nothing at all, because nothing has happened yet.

The Jewish sabbath holds the other end, and it should be said here so that the two are not confused: it is time made holy, as Abraham Joshua Heschel showed in The Sabbath in 1951. That is not this page’s subject, and not this page’s business.

But if you pray on Sunday the way you close a ledger, you are asking the day for something it was not built to give. Hence the strange taste of Sunday evenings, the sense of having had time and not knowing where it went. The day was spent looking backwards.

Praying on Sunday means praying empty-handed. Not empty of merit, which would be a sad idea, but empty of accounts. You have nothing to present. The week has not started.

A prayer for Sunday

Here is a prayer written for this page. It is meant for the morning, before the day fills up, and it holds in one go.

Lord, this day does not come at the end of anything. It comes before, and I have nothing to show You but empty hands. Take the week I have not lived yet, the hours already spoken for and the ones I know nothing about. Keep me from filling it before it arrives. Give me today to receive this day as it is, without paying for it.

What it changes about the day

Three things hold, and they are small.

First: give thanks for something belonging to that very day, not to the week behind you. The coffee, the light on a wall, a voice in the corridor. The day does not need a summary.

Second: ask for the week ahead, but one thing only, named. Not a review of every front. One.

Third: keep one stretch of time you do not fill. Ten minutes is enough. That is where Sunday parts company with a day off, which is an empty day we hurry to occupy.

If what you are missing is the rhythm of ordinary days rather than of the week, daily prayer takes the question by its regularity, and morning prayer takes it at the hour you wake. And if it is a longer rest that is coming, the prayer for vacation works on something else entirely: free time nobody knows how to receive.

When Sunday is not free

This has to be said, because the page would be false without it. A great part of the world works on Sundays, and not by choice. Care, transport, security, shops, farms. A day set apart is not a day off, and the assembly Justin describes was made up in large part of slaves, who had no day of their own at all.

What stays possible is small: naming the day. One sentence before the shift and one after. Where Sunday sits in the week does not depend on what your timetable leaves you of it.