Eight Days a Week
I’ve loved the Beatles for as long as I can remember. While many of their melodies remain at the top of my musical favorites list (Here Comes the Sun), I recognize that some of their tunes from the 1960’s might seem a little dated and corny all these years later. In fact, one of their biggest hits from 1964, “Eight Days a Week,” has always seemed to me to be the rare Beatles gutter ball.
However, I’m trying to change my mind on this. Not because the lyrics of that little song are any good (they’re not), or because the melody is so compelling (again, not their best in my opinion), but simply because of the number eight. The songwriting concept that seven days in a week just isn’t enough to contain the Beatles’ romantic sentiments is kind of cheesy, but the concept that seven days aren’t enough to contain the love of God is a concept that I can theologically get behind.
Many of us can recall the pattern introduced in Genesis Chapter 1 when God created the heavens and the earth. God works for six days, deems his creativity “good” at the end of each day, and after creating human beings in his own image on the sixth day, rests on the seventh day – the Sabbath – and makes it holy. That pattern was woven into the fabric of Creation, and wise followers of God have been observing it ever since. Work, labor, and create for six days, then celebrate the Sabbath on the seventh day through worship, rest, and play.
God even worked within this pattern in a mighty way when he raised Jesus from the dead. The Son of God was buried on the seventh day, aka Saturday, the Sabbath, and rested there in the silence of the tomb. But on the next day, Resurrection Sunday, God went back to work with great power! Early Christians loved to call this the “Eighth Day” because it was so much more than just another first day of a new week. Not your average Sunday. The power of God had brought Jesus back from the dead. A new era began. The new life! An eighth day. So widespread was this idea among the first Christians that most surviving baptistries from the early centuries of the A.D. era are eight sided.* Emerging from the waters of baptism as part of God’s chosen family marked a person as an eighth- day person, joining Jesus in a new way of life.
You see, Easter is more than a day. It’s even more than a season. Easter was the opening day of a new era in which all of Creation has come under new management.
Over the next month and a half in Sunday worship services, we’re going to lean into this reality that Jesus’ resurrection has unleashed something new and beautiful into the world that is still – even now – in its early stages of development. We’ll be guided by Luke 24:13-35, the story of Jesus walking with two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It was on that road that the Eighth Day began to spread far and wide.
I’m really looking forward to being on this particular journey with you.
– Pastor Gregg
