What makes a day holy? We throw around the term holiday with something like abandon, without thinking of its origin. Federal holidays are paid days off; Are you going on holiday? is a synonym for vacation, and even Happy holidays is preferred as a secular greeting to avoid saying Christmas, which is too, you know, religious. But holiday is rooted etymologically and culturally in holy day.
Keep holy the Lord’s day is one of the original commandments, the original how-to from God on how to order our lives rightly toward Him and one another. That day was the seventh day, the sabbath, which was made holy by the Lord’s resting after the six days’ work of creation. So holiday does have some original relationship to vacation, after all. But, how to keep it? “Keeping” a day holy means, oddly enough, offering it back to God by setting it apart from other days and all the things one would ordinarily do on them, and filling it instead with worship.
At the root is the realization that a day’s holiness comes from its being marked or set apart by God or His divine action. Things that we ourselves mark as having transcendent significance to us as a nation or even a family are more rightly considered sacred, such as Independence Hall, a civil war battlefield, or a multi-generational family vacation cottage. But holy is given to us, achieved by divine action.
That’s how the Lord’s Day changed – God did it. The day of rest, the sabbath, was the original holy day out of seven days, until the Lord Himself rested again on that day -- in the tomb (Something strange is happening; the King is asleep. – third century homily for Holy Saturday). That was only the preparation to the NEXT day, which would thenceforth and forever be marked by His resurrection. This now is the Lord’s Day of the new and eternal covenant, the eighth day of the old week and the first day of the new week. Called “the Lord’s Day” in many languages (e.g., Domenica, in Italian), our retention in English of the quaintly pagan Sunday obscures its significance but provides no excuse to those who try to claim ignorance.
The resurrection is the ne plus ultra of divine actions that mark a day as holy, but it would be foolish to think it the only one. The incarnation of God as man in His mother’s womb, upon her blessed consent, made holy March 25th and is celebrated liturgically as The Annunciation. The Ascension of the Lord into heaven forty days after His resurrection, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles ten days later on Pentecost, and the Assumption of the Mother of God body and soul into heaven are all days forever marked as holy by the works of God in our midst.
These days, our calendars are marked with so many holidays that it is easy to lose track of when and why any given one is there, though you can be fairly certain it wasn’t anything God did, and there will be sales.
It can make one laugh to remember that one of the reasons that the overthrow of the Catholic order of things by the so-called “reformers” was welcomed by rulers and owners, was that it wiped off the calendar all of the holy days that the peasants and other such workers could take as holidays, that is, not go to work. Ebenezer Scrooge was really just a good Calvinist like all the observant Anglicans for three hundred years before him. Christmas? That makes no difference in your workweek, Cratchet!
But even after a day loses its significance to man, it retains its significance in the sight of God. That is, it can cease to be held sacred (and kept as such) by much and even all of the population, but still it remains holy. Maybe that is what Scrooge is supposed to have learned. God bless us every one, indeed.
Monsignor Smith
