The correct title for next Sunday?

Titles and names matter and behind them can be major theories or hypotheses. Consider the names given to Sundays by the modern Church.

In one of the two small parishes I serve, next Sunday (May 2) is The Third Sunday after Easter (which is the title in The Book of Common Prayer of 1662); in the other it is called, The Fourth Sunday of Easter (which is the title in Common Worship, the alternative to the BCP, of 2000). And the following Sunday will be “the fourth after…” and “the fifth of…” and so on.

The traditional English title of the BCP presumes that there has been the major festival - in fact the feast of feasts – of Easter and that the Sundays, five in all, between the festival day and the next major festival, Ascension Day, are Sundays after Easter; and then after Ascension Day (the fortieth Day after Easter) there is one Sunday after Ascension Day before the next major festival, Whitsuntide (Pentecost) Sunday in ten days time. On this scheme, which the BCP inherited from western medieval Catholicism and the late patristic Church, the Easter (Paschal) Candle where used is put out on Ascension Day, after the reading from Scripture that Christ is ascended. So there are two distinct pieties here – that of the 40 days and that of the 10 days.

The new title, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, presumes that originally in the primitive Church of say the second and third centuries there was a festival of 50 days from Easter Sunday (actually Good Friday) to Pentecost – “the fifty-day Easter”. This Pascha, as it was called, was believed to be a unitary festival that recalled the suffering, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus as well as the gift of the Spirit to the Church. Though centred on Good Friday through Easter Day, with the most important rite being that of Easter Eve in the Great Vigil of Easter, it actually lasted fifty days until Pentecost. Thus it is deemed appropriate to speak of “the great Fifty Days” or the “fifty-day Sunday” and of the seven Sundays of Easter. On this scheme, where there is a Paschal Candle, it remains lit until Pentecost to signify the fifty days of Easter. Further, some insist that there should be standing at all times with no kneeling as the norm and, further, the general confession of sins should be omitted since this fifty-day Sunday is a period of celebration of the resurrection, not of penitence for sins.

[It is interesting to note that this scheme lies at the very basis of the mindset of those who produced the 1979 Prayer Book for the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. In a short but important essay published in 1984, Massey H. Shepherd Jr., a prominent member of the S.L.C., explained that the shape or structure of the 1979 Book owed much to the scholarly reconstruction of the liturgy, and especially of the Easter liturgy, in the ancient Church. He wrote: “The unifying principle of most of the restoration or renewals of liturgy in the 1979 book from the ancient Church is the Paschal Mystery.” (“The Patristic Heritage,” in The Historical Magazine of the Episcopal Church, Vol.53, 1984, pp.22ff.) He went on to explain that he believed that the whole Paschal Mystery was relived by the faithful in those early centuries once a year on the anniversary of the Lord Jesus’ own Passover. This was the very centre of the Christian Year and the festival of festivals and feast of feasts.]

The problem with basing modern liturgy and the names of the Lord’s Day on this theory of “the fifty-day Easter” is that it does not take into account the fact that the Church slowly developed her Year and named her Festivals, and the Festival of the Ascension on the fortieth Day became a major festival by the fourth Century. St Augustine of Hippo highly valued it and saw it as the crown of the festivals of our Lord. The modern commitment to the “fifty-day Easter” in recent liturgy tends to relegate the Feast of the Ascension into a secondary festival and to make no distinction between the liturgical and devotional ethos of the 40 days between Easter Day and Ascension and the 10 days between Ascension and Pentecost (Whitsuntide). Further, the doctrine of the exaltation of the Lord Jesus can be seriously minimized or neglected on this scheme.

There is much to be said for the traditional scheme!

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.),
Christ Church, Biddulph Moor & St Anne's, Brown Edge