“Sunday as a Mark of Christian Unity” by Rev. Dr. Demetrios E. Tonias – Dean, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral of New England
The Christian Church, from its very beginning, has struggled with the concept of unity. Indeed, within the Pauline corpus we see the many ways in which the Apostle to the Gentiles struggled to keep together his young and fragile network of communities. As the church grew, there arose a variety of challenges, large and small, to threaten its unity. The Orthodox Christian Divine Liturgy bears witness to these challenges in the petitions and prayers, which are offered in the Eucharistic rite. We pray for “the unity of all,” “the unity of the faith,” for Christ to “reunite those separated” and to “unite us all to one another who become partakers of the one Bread and the Cup in the communion of the one Holy Spirit.” We recite the Nicene Creed with its portentous closing phrases stating belief in “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church,” its sacred claim to “confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins”, and its exultation of Sunday as the Lord’s Day and the gift of resurrection with the statement “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the ages to come.”
The Divine Liturgy is, most certainly, a fitting place to offer such prayers and confessions of faith, for the preeminent celebration of the Liturgy takes place on Sunday. From the moment the myrrh bearers found Christ’s empty tomb, Sunday was known as ἡ Κυριακή ἡμέρα—the Lord’s Day. By definition, each and every Sunday is a call to Christian unity since it is on this day that we are called to communion with the Lord, by the Lord. In spite of all of the challenges that have tugged at the threads of Christian unity, the Lord’s Day remains the one, unassailable marker of Christian unity since it is on this day that all of us, despite our many differences, gather together as believers in Christ.
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