THAT WONDERFUL FIRST DAY.
By Editor
THE following is a part of a leading editorial that appeared in the Occident just before last Christmas. We have never seen anything that more fully exhibits the weakness of the claims for the first day of the week as a day above other working-days, than it does:— “As we do not know the exact date of our Lord’s birth it would have been well if, instead of the twenty-fifth of December having been chosen as the time for commemorating the advent, there had been selected, say, the first Sunday after the twentieth of December. It seems especially appropriate that Christmas should come on the day of Him whose birth we celebrate. What added impressions to the sweetness of the day would be given, what increased delight to think of the birth, the resurrection, the ascension, and the coming again in glory as each on the first day of the week. The resurrection and the ascension we know were on this day; the coming again in like manner we may reasonably infer will be on the Lord’s day; and so, too, may we not rightly infer that this day was divinely selected for the [first] advent?” There is a specimen of large conclusions from small premises. The writer starts out with the acknowledgment that nobody knows the date of Christ’s birth, and the wish that, since any celebration of it is all guess-work anyway, the first day of the week had been chosen, and winds up with the conclusion that Jesus was born on Sunday. In that case, the wish is father to the thought, just as it is in all Sunday argument. We can readily understand how a little girl can attribute to her doll all the wants and actions of a living child, and can care for it with as much solicitude as a mother could for her babe; and we can understand how a boy can ride his father’s cane with as much enthusiasm and real enjoyment as though it was a real horse; but it is passing strange how grown men, with their reasoning faculties fully developed, could regard Sunday with increased reverence and delight, simply because they might suppose that Jesus had been born on that day, knowing all the while that it was not so. But what a wonderfully elastic day that first day is. We have long been familiar with the theological sleight-of-hand performance by which two evenings more than eight days apart (John 20:26) were both made to be the first day of the week. That is, we have been familiar by sight only, for we have never been able to comprehend how it was done. We have also known for a long time that the credulous followers of the egotistical ignoramus who some centuries ago wrote under the pseudonym of Barnabas, regard Sunday as both the first and the eighth day of the week, which has only seven days; but we never before heard that both the resurrection and the ascension of Christ were on the first day of the week. How long will it be before the pleaders for Sunday will claim that every notable event in history took place on that day? Just notice how accommodating that first day is. The resurrection of Christ is generally admitted to have been on Sunday. The writer of the book of Acts says that in a former treatise (the book of Luke) he had set forth all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day in which he was taken up, after he had given commandments unto the apostles, “to whom also he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days.” Acts 1:3. Luke records the resurrection and the ascension of Christ, and he says that he was seen alive after his passion forty days. Now let any child that knows the days of the week, and can count on its fingers, reckon up and tell on what day the ascension must have been. He arose from the tomb very early in the morning of the first day of the week, so that five full weeks, thirty-five days, would bring us to the beginning of another first day of the week. The fifth day from that, completing the forty days, would fall upon the fifth day of the week, or Thursday. So that, stretching the forty days to their utmost limit, the ascension of Christ cannot be made to have come later than very early on Friday morning; yet the Occident has no difficulty in making it come on Sunday. The church festival of Lent is forty days long, yet the Catholics with all their regard for Sunday, do not try the impossible feat of making it begin and end on that day. It always begins on Ash Wednesday, and ends on Easter Sunday. We should like to see the Occident solve its problem of making a period of forty days begin and end on Sunday. So, then, we have Sunday not only the first day of the week, but also the eighth (?) and the fifth; and certain ones also tell us that it is the seventh as well. There is only half the week yet to be accounted for, and surely it will not be a difficult task, for those who have done this, to show that there is no day in the week but Sunday. Of course it is claimed that Christ always appeared to his disciples after his resurrection on Sunday, including the fishing occasion recorded in John 21, although the people who claim that his appearings to them were only on Sunday, do not seem willing to carry their adherence to apostolic example so far as to set apart the first day of the week as a fishing day. The reader may have thought it extravagant when we said that but little remained for the Sunday folks to do to show that there is no day in the week but Sunday; and so it is extravagant; but it is no more than they have virtually done already. Thus: They claim Jesus showed his regard for Sunday, and put special honor upon it, by appearing to his disciples on that day after his resurrection. Now to make any point on this, they must necessarily claim that he did not appear to them on any other day; for if he met with them on other days beside Sunday, it would have lost its prominence. This claim they endeavor to make good by stretching a week out over eight or ten days, so as to make two events, more than eight days apart, fall on Sunday. But Luke says that Jesus showed himself alive to his disciples after his passion, “being seen of them forty days.” Therefore he appeared to them every day between his resurrection and his ascension, just as would naturally be expected; and so our friends who think that they can prove that Jesus showed himself to them only on Sunday, have the Scriptures to help them out in their claim that every day in the week is Sunday. There are some unfortunate persons, known as tramps, who might, on that basis, hail with delight a law forbidding work on Sunday. While the Occident was about it, we cannot see why it does not claim that the crucifixion also took place on Sunday. Then it would have had much more cause to regard the day as sacred. But why pursue the matter further? The fact that men of intelligence are forced to invent such childish excuses for the observance of Sunday, is as good an argument as can be asked for to prove that Sunday has no claim whatever to be regarded as a sacred day. For our part, we deem it far more satisfactory to observe the Sabbath which God has sanctified, and which does not slip around so much, but can always be found on the same day of the week—the seventh.