Fat 'n Happy the Rooster Byzantine Cross

Just Another Jim
writes about
Eastern Orthodoxy


Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy

A Tale of Two Dinners, pt 1

Essay on the St. Thomas Sunday
April 30, 2006 (posted May 4, 2006)

Page 1 - Page 2

St. Thomas Sunday, eight days after Pascha, has a dual significance in the Orthodox Church. This is the day, as recorded in the Gospel of John, that Thomas doubted the resurrection, and then later believed when he too met Jesus. This incident is, of course, where this particular Sunday gets its name. But there is further significance to the day because it’s the eighth day after the resurrection and the eighth day is an important theological concept.

The logic of the eighth day is as follows: In a week of seven days, the eighth day is both the first day of a new week, and thus a reiteration of the old. But it is also something brand new. In a series of seven, the number eight breaks through the end of the series into something brand new and different. It is this both/and logic of repetition and creation of something brand new that has made the eighth day so important for the church.

Remember the creation story of Genesis 1? God created the world in six days (Sunday through Friday) and rested on the seventh (Saturday). Thus in the economy of this world (or more specifically of the Old Testament world) all work is to be done on Sunday through Friday while Saturday is a day of rest, a Sabbath.

But with Jesus Christ something brand new occurs. On Sunday (and specifically, the day after Saturday, and not merely the first day of the week, but the eighth day of the week, if we may so speak), we celebrate Christ’s resurrection. This eighth day resurrection is a new creation accomplished on the day after the day of rest. Because it is an eighth day resurrection and creation, it institutes something brand new rather than fixing something already here. It is not a part of the old economy but establishes a new economy. It marks the beginning of a new age, the Kingdom age.

This idea of Sunday being the day of resurrection and pre-eminently an eighth day rather than a first day, is quite common in the writings of the Fathers. One of the interesting facets of modern Orthodoxy is that this whole eighth day idea gets clouded with other things. The service celebrated Saturday morning of Holy Week, for instance, is a glorious celebration of the Jesus’ victory. (I, in fact, like this service better than the Pascha service itself.) But it is not a celebration of the resurrection in the same sense as the Pascha service. It is properly understood to be a proleptic service. It celebrates the resurrection before the event occurs.

Proleptic thinking is pretty common in scripture and theology but it is a term not commonly used today, so a proper definition might be helpful. Proleptic thinking is the way Christians get their minds around the “already/not yet” reality of how God works in the world. God can do something in time (and specifically in the future) and the effects of that event can flow both directions (past and future). A prolepsis, then is a statement or description that assumes the reality of a future event has already taken hold.

And the resurrection of Jesus Christ is profoundly proleptic because the Old Testament saints were given life by this resurrection which had not even occurred yet in the manner that we count time in this world. Thus, the Holy Saturday celebration of Christ’s victory over death and the resurrection before its time is a profoundly significant theological event in the manner that it recognizes and interprets the meaning of the resurrection as having significance beyond time as we measure it.

It is unfortunately commonplace in modern Orthodoxy to say that the Holy Saturday service is the celebration of the resurrection as if that’s when it happened while the Sunday service (that is, Pascha) is a celebration of the discovery by the women and the apostles that the resurrection had already occurred. Such an interpretation of the services simply distorts the meaning of both Pascha and the resurrection itself because it distorts the nature of time as understood in both the old and new ages. Saturday is a day of rest while Sunday (both the first day and the eighth day) are days of creation. Saturday is a proleptic celebration of the defeat of death by death while Sunday is a celebration of the new life that follows the defeat of death. The new thing, the new creation, the new body of the Church that began to be created in Jesus Christ’s resurrection is clearly and necessarily a Sunday event and most definitely not a Saturday event because if it were, God would be creating (ie, working) on the Sabbath, and as Jesus clearly taught, he came, not to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it.

I am an idea guy. I like to play with ideas, to sort them out, to get them ordered as they ought to be ordered. Thus the interplay between the first day and the eighth day of the week and their relationship to Christ’s resurrection are endlessly fascinating simply as a theological exercise. But I also have a poet’s heart, and it is in relation to my poetic and aesthetic side that St. Thomas Sunday has become dear to me. While worshiping with a Serbian congregation many years ago we discovered a tradition that, while thoroughly Orthodox, is not practiced by all the Orthodox and is mostly unknown in the U.S. From what I understand, this is primarily a Serbian (or possibly Slavic) tradition. There are a variety of Pascha foods that are rich with symbolic meaning. On St. Thomas Sunday a picnic basket is made up of Pascha foods such as Kulich (Pascha bread made with an egg dough or batter), easter eggs saved from the week before, red wine, and other foods made from meat, nuts, berries, and dairy products. All these foods, in one way or another, point to the gift of new life and signify the end of earthly sorrow as experienced in the Great Fast. This Pascha food (or Kingdom food) is then taken to the grave of the person who most recently died within the family (or congregation) and a joyous picnic is held right there at the cemetery.

This picnic on the eighth day after the Resurrection is a visible enacting of the belief that this new eighth day Kingdom creation accomplished through Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is real. Our loved ones are alive and an active part of the Kingdom of Heaven. Just as every Sunday we worship with the Saints every Sunday (as depicted in the icons at Church, and especially in the iconostasis where the saints, on the heavenly side of the iconostasis, are looking back at us from heaven to earth and worshiping with us), so on this Sunday, this eighth day after our celebration of the resurrection, we eat and fellowship with our friends and loved ones who have already died at their body’s earthly place of rest. The picnic is a proleptic Kingdom of Heaven of event that is subversive, in that it subverts the sharp distinction we make between heaven and earth, life and death. As the easter eggs are cracked open we say, “Christ is risen!” As the wine is poured, rather than a toast, the glasses are raised and everyone sings, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and giving life to those in the grave.”

And so it is that just as the Sunday resurrection flows backward in time into the Holy Saturday worship services, so it flows forward in time as the living and the dead gather together with their Lord Jesus Christ to eat from a Pascha picnic basket at the grave of the newly dead. Sorting out theological ideas is great fun for a guy like me, but the profound impact of the reality of the resurrection captured by a St. Thomas Sunday cemetery picnic is enough to choke me up with tears of joy. In fact one of my favorite poems that I have written is about just such a picnic. I posted on the web site back in 2004 and it can be found here.

Continued on p. 2

Page 1 - Page 2