Which Day is the Sabbath?

by CNS · August 29, 2022

Photo: Grant Whitty/unsplash

By Fr Kenneth Doyle –
Question: Is it true that the church changed the day of the Sabbath? I have always felt that the Sabbath occurred on Saturday, but I have learned that the early church decided to celebrate the breaking of bread on Sunday because that was the day of Christ’s resurrection.

Answer: Technically, it is not true that the Christian church changed the Sabbath day. The Sabbath is still on Saturday (or, more properly, from sundown on Friday), marking the fact that God rested from creation on the seventh day.

In the very earliest days of Christianity, believers — who were mainly Jewish — observed the seventh-day Sabbath with prayer and rest; but very quickly (as Col 2:16 shows) Christians began to see this as no more obligatory than Jewish rules on food and drink. The followers of Jesus gathered instead to break the bread of the Eucharist on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7) — the day on which Jesus, completing a New Covenant, had made sacred by rising from the dead.