That difference between Saturday and Sunday is easy to overlook, but it is not a small thing. It reflects something fundamental about the difference between the Old Testament faith and the New. The Sabbath points backward….The Sabbath commemorates the completion of creation. It says: look back at what God has made. It is a day of rest rooted in a finished work. Sunday also points to a finished work, but a different one. It points to the cross, and beyond the cross to an empty tomb. 

Easter has a way of sneaking up on you. Because Passover, the Jewish holy day which undergirds Easter, runs on a lunar calendar rather than a solar one, it wanders around our solar calendar year to year, showing up when you least expect it. But here is the thing about Easter Sunday that matters far more than the date: every Sunday is Easter. Every Sunday is Resurrection Day. Christians have been gathering on the first day of the week since the tomb was found empty, and the reason for that goes deeper than tradition. It goes all the way to the heart of what the Christian faith is about.

Identifying the Day

The Apostle John, writing from exile on the island of Patmos, gives us a tantalizing phrase in Revelation 1:10: I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. Three short words — the Lord’s Day — and yet they open up a significant question. What day is he talking about?

Some commentators have argued that John is not referring to a day of the week at all. They point out that the Old Testament is full of references to the Day of the Lord as a prophetic and fearsome term. Isaiah speaks of a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lifted up. (Isa 2.12) Joel warns that the Day of the Lord will come as destruction from the Almighty. (Joel 1.15) Amos cautions those who are eagerly longing for it: that day will be darkness, not light. (Amos 5.18) Zephaniah, Zechariah, Paul, and Peter all strike the same ominous note. (Zeph 1.7-8, Zech 14.1, 1 Thess 5.2, 2 Pt 3.10) Whatever else the Day of the Lord is, it is not a pleasant prospect. It is a time of judgment, of trouble such as the world has never seen, a time of bringing things to a final and terrible close.

So, is that what John means? Is he saying that in a kind of prophetic ecstasy he was transported forward in time, seeing the great Day of the Lord in vision? Some careful and conservative Bible scholars have taken exactly that position. One 19th-century commentator described John as soaring on the wings of prophetic ecstasy, traversing ages, moving among the most stupendous administrations of the last day.1 It is a vivid picture, and it is not without its merit, since John does have experiences in the book of Revelation where he is, in effect, lifted out of his own time and shown things to come.

But there is a problem with that reading, and it is a grammatical one.

The Greek Makes the Case

In the Greek of the New Testament, the familiar prophetic phrase is haemera kuriou, the Day of the Lord. This is a construction of two nouns with the descriptive “of the Lord” in the genitive case. This is the prophetic term as described above, it is especially that day that comes from the Lord in a display of his wrath and judgement on the earth. But what John writes in Revelation 1:10 is quite different: kuriake haemera. Here the word kuriake is an adjective, not a noun. It emphasizes ownership in a particular way. (In the empire, the same word described the monthly “Lord’s day” — or, “emperor’s day” — a regular day in the imperial calendar honoring the Emperor.)

This same adjective appears in only one other place in the entire New Testament: 1 Corinthians 11:20, where Paul writes about gathering to eat the Lord’s Supper. Not the Supper of the Lord in a prophetic or judicial sense, but the supper that belongs to Him, that is His. The parallel is striking. Just as the supper belongs to Christ, this day belongs to Christ. The Lord’s Day is simply His day.

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