Mark Brians
Christian feast days—what are they? Far from being a strange and sour corruption from the late middle ages, the feast days of the church—or what is called the liturgical calendar—offer Christians a gospel-centered way of walking through the year. They help us celebrate what God has done in history, rejoice in what he is doing in the present, and anticipate what he will do in the future.
Much in the same way that putting music to the psalms helps us sing, setting our year to the rhythms of these feasts makes our passage through time ring with the praises of the Lord. Additionally, the Christian festal calendar offers us opportunity for mission, to show hospitality to our neighbors in connection with the story of the gospel.
In this article
The keeping of time
Humans keep time. We know this. We all mark, measure, and observe it.
The nature of time
We often conceive of “moving through time” in terms of mathematical measurements—seconds, hours, and days. But these measurements do not exhaust how we keep time.
We also keep time along calendars which trace seasons, cycles, and feasts. Some of these can be mapped nicely onto mathematical time—a birthday or a wedding anniversary, for instance, has a hard date with clear twenty-four-hour edges. Other calendrical events, however, defy easy quantification.
Autumn, for example, may seem to come later in certain years (regardless of when Starbucks begins selling pumpkin spice lattes). Spring may take a longer time to arrive after a particularly severe winter. Easter is a moveable date, and so all the things that accompany it (Good Friday, for instance) vary from year to year. And then there are other events, like Christmas, which, while having a fixed date (Dec. 25) have this profound capacity to bleed freely across undefined stretches of days, coloring the weeks around them with the significance of their festivity.
Time is a creature; i.e., something created by God. Eternity, meanwhile, is an attribute of God. So eternity, as such, cannot be infinite time but is beyond time. Meanwhile, the nature of time is elastic, experienced in degrees of hard and soft, fast and slow, which, like music, can harmonize. Keeping time is more like keeping tempo than counting out identical grains of sand one after the other. Time is not a mere abstract concept, but something that shapes our constant experience.
The God who keeps time
We may keep time, but does God?
We often hear the statement “God is outside of time” proof texted with Scriptures like 2 Peter 3:8: “one day with the Lord is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like one day.”1 Verses like this, taken out of context, lend to a belief that the keeping of time, while important for humans, is something God cares little about.
The subtle error in this mode of theologizing is that it pits God’s eternality against his presence in history, making us high-functioning classical deists. We seem to assume that because the Lord is eternal he cannot also be fully engaged in human time with all of the messy particularities of clocks and seasons and weekends and bank closures and festivals.
Insofar as we assume this, we are dead wrong. And we are dead wrong because we are no longer dealing with the God of the Bible. Just as the God of the Bible cares about the hairs of your head and the falling of sparrows (Matt 10:29–31), so he cares about the times and seasons (e.g., Gen 8:22; Ps 65:11; 74:16–17; Eccl 3:1–8).
We seem to assume that because the Lord is eternal he cannot also be fully engaged in human time.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that God is “inside of time” in a creaturely way, or that he is bound and limited to temporal constraints. I do want to highlight, however, that God works transcendently in and through time. Our use of the language “outside of time” can incorrectly imply that time is this kind of zone from which God is removed. But God works in and through time—neither “outside of it” nor begrudgingly in spite of it.
In fact, one might say that it is precisely because of God’s eternality that he cares deeply about all the times which are in his hand, both my times (Ps 31:15) and the larger geopolitical times (e.g., Dan 2:21; Acts 1:7). God’s eternal nature does not mean that he is “outside of time,” but rather that he is “full of time.” He is, after all, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev 1:8).2
It was not from a kind of vacuity of timelessness that God sent his only Son into the world, but rather in “the fullness of time” (Gal 4:4–7; cf. 1 Tim 2:6). Jesus doesn’t abrogate time when he began his earthly ministry; he fulfilled it: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe in the gospel!” (Mark 1:15).
God keeps time fully. In fact, his eternal time-full-ness becomes the basis whereby we, his people, faithfully keep the time he has given us.
Observing feasts and stories
While there are many ways we can move through time faithfully as Christians, the church has often followed God in keeping his time by observing a calendar of feast days which commemorate the marvelous things God has done.
Calendrical storytelling
A central feature to the way God keeps time in the Bible is through a calendar of feasting and festivity in which the narrative of God’s salvation is proclaimed on specific days throughout the year. Each year renews in festive glory the story of God’s faithfulness.
On one level, this is what all calendars do. Calendars connect our passage through time with commemorations. “This is the day when this happened, and thus we do (or don’t do) these things.” Time, kept this way, tells stories. A calendar brings my personal story (who I am, what I’ve done, and what life looks like for me right now) and our contemporary story (who we are, and what events are taking place in our world) into a living conversation with the stories memorialized by holidays.
Commemorating Independence Day in Washington, DC, after the conclusion of the War of 1812 deepens the meaning of the day. Whatever else the day means, it now caries a kind of treble voice: “We’re independent still and we’re repainting the White House after the burning of Washington.”
Likewise when we celebrate, say, Good Friday, we are not merely referring to a historical moment: We are proclaiming that what happened on this day many years ago (the atoning death of Jesus Christ on a cross outside of Jerusalem) continues to have transformative import for peoples and individuals throughout time. The meaning of calendar days compounds with time.
In so doing, calendrical feast days connect generations across time. I can remember keeping the festival of Christmas with my maternal great-grandparents (faithful Christians who have now all gone to be with the Lord). My memories with them have shaped my experience of Christmas in the present with my own children. My eldest daughter is named after one of my great-grandparents, bearing the name Rose. I tell her stories about my Christmases as a child, initiate her into inherited Christmastide traditions, and thus connect her across my times to that older generation of Roses in the celebration of Christ’s Nativity. God was faithful to humanity at that first Christmas, he was faithful to my great-grandparents in all their Christmases, and he is faithful to us in the Christmases we will share this year.
Thus, the calendrical shape of time is deeply formative for both individuals and for societies. A community that holds an annual celebration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as one example, is different from a society that doesn’t. Changes in calendars are, therefore, nothing short of revolutionary. Many times they have a more long-term impact on a culture than legislative changes.
For instance, in order to secure his control of the Northern Kingdom, or so he hoped, Jeroboam established not only a new cult in his dominion but a new calendar (cf. 1 Kgs 12:25–33). He not only forsook God, his law, and his covenant, but also God’s calendar, his cycle of feasts, effectively writing himself and his people out of God’s story. It is hard to be a joyful participant in an event you refuse to commemorate.
The God who feasts
At the heart of Christian feast days is a God who feasts—a God who “himself is festival.”3
When God invited Adam into creation he gave to him every “plant that bears seed” and every “tree that bears fruit” for food (Gen 1:29). Creation is a massive banqueting table to which God has invited Adam and Eve. Existence is, from the beginning, a feast. Likewise, the fall is a kind of anti-feast. We refused the food God prepared for us, and instead chose to take of the fruit of the tree of knowledge without permission, eating not with God but with his enemy.4
Creation is a massive banqueting table to which God has invited Adam and Eve. Existence is, from the beginning, a feast.
All throughout the drama of Scripture, God invites his people to eat with him. He communes with Noah after the flood at a table of sacrifice (Gen 8:20–22), he eats with Abraham (Gen 18:1–15), and he gives his people a calendar of festivals which celebrate God’s mighty acts in story and food (Lev 23).
Likewise, when Jesus arrives on the scene he does so “eating and drinking” (Matt 11:19). He is the God of feasting incarnate.
- His first miracle hallows a wedding feast with the miraculous transformation of water into wine (John 2:1–11).
- He lays a gladsome spread of food in the wilderness for thousands of people (Matt 14:13–21; 15:32–39; Mark 6:31–44; 8:1–9; Luke 9:12–17; John 6:1–14).
- On the night he is betrayed, Jesus holds a feast in which he transfigures those previous feasting miracles. The bread multiplied in the wilderness is exchanged for bread identified with his body (Luke 22:19). The wine of Cana is exchanged for the wine of the cup, which is identified with his shed blood (Luke 22:20).
- On the cross he promises the penitent thief that he will be with Jesus in Paradise (Luke 23:43) which I think is safe to assume means, among other things, that he will be among those blessed ones who “eat bread in the kingdom of God” (Luke 14:15; cf. Rev 19:9).
- The occasions on which he greets his disciples after the resurrection are often festal and involve food (Luke 24:13–49; John 21:1–14). This is Jesus and not a ghost, we realize, because he is doing what Jesus does: making a feast with us.
This festive conviviality at the heart of the life of God’s people overflows into the marking of time in the Christian calendar of feasts.
Keeping God’s time: Christian feasts
While other kinds of calendrical days may be helpful and good (Labor Day or Thanksgiving, for example), when we talk about “Christian feast days,” we mean in particular the calendar of feasts which keeps God’s time by telling the story of Jesus and proclaiming the mighty acts of God.
Sabbath or Lord’s Day
Foundational to the biblical concept of feast day is the Bible’s concept of “Sabbath.” At the end of the six days of creation, the Lord “rests” (Gen 2:1–3). He crowns his creation with a feast.
“Rest” here doesn’t mean what we often mean by it in contemporary culture.5 God does not “crash” and pass-out from exhaustion, nor does he go away to practice some much deserved “self-care,” nor does he go and binge on something. Rather, he holds a day of rest and festivity. He shares with his creation in fellowship and communion.
Sabbath is the first feast day, in which all of creation memorializes and celebrates God’s great act of creation—and celebrates it by enjoying it. God keeps time by punctuating each week in his world with a small festival.
The Sabbath cycle is renewed when Israel comes up out of Egypt (Exod 20:8–11). Amidst all of the “thou shalt nots” of the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath is one of two positive commands—two commandments which are things we ought to do (for the other, see Exod 20:12). If the “shall nots” are a protective layer, the Sabbath is the delightful goodness at the center of God’s law. This is what life looks like in God’s time: all of creation taking a break from work and labor to give thanks to God, to give life and rest, and to receive from God our week again.6
Paul is careful to include the Sabbath among the rites and ordinances that have been, in some way, fulfilled or “accomplished” in Christ (Col 2:16). Christ’s resurrection from the dead has opened up the eternal rest, the Final Sabbath, for God’s people to enter into (Heb 4:9–11). So we see a gradual transformation of the Sabbath into the Christian Lord’s Day (Sunday) over the course of the New Testament. Thus, when John receives the book of Revelation, we find him worshiping on the Lord’s Day (Rev 1:10).
Though various traditions treat the Sabbath or Lord’s Day differently, Christians everywhere acknowledge the convivial core of it: It is a day for the people of God to gather to enjoy and glorify him, to acknowledge that all we have comes from him as a gift.7
Major festivals: Pascha and Christmas
Major feasts build on the festal gladness of Sabbath/Lord’s Day by taking the same event, the resurrection of Jesus, and making it the major frame of reference for our keeping of the year. All of the feasts of Israel (i.e., Lev 23), all of the agricultural rhythms of planting and harvest, and all of the movements of the lights in the firmament, the solstices and equinoxes—in other words, all those things by which we mark the passing of the year—find their fulfillment in Christ by gathering the local passing of time (which varies depending on location on the globe) into the celebration of Jesus’s life. In keeping the liturgical year, we bring the natural year into the music of the gospel. Leonel Mitchell summarizes it helpfully:
In the renewed understanding of the Christian year, the paschal mystery of dying and rising with Christ is celebrated not only weakly on the Lord’s Day, the day of resurrection, but in the framework of the whole year, with Easter as its theological and structural center.8
This level of “major feasts” is known historically as the temporale and consists of two cycles: the paschal cycle and the Christmas cycle. While we may not use these terms in the West, many Christians worldwide are familiar with the chief feasts of the temporale.
Importantly, feast days are intensifications of things which, on one level, we always hold to be true. It is not like my family and friends only remember the fact of my birth once a year and then pretend like I was never born for the interstitial 364 days. No. My birthday is an intensified celebration of the event of my birth which is real every day. So also, Christian feasts of the temporale are not days and seasons for remembering things we otherwise pretend not to believe, but rather days for intensified commemorations of things that are true all the time.
In keeping the liturgical year, we bring the natural year into the music of the gospel.
The paschal cycle begins in the late winter or early spring (depending on the date of Easter) with a season of preparation for Easter, the main portion of which is called “Lent” (the days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday).
Far from being a joyless time of strange introspection, Lent is a season of thoughtful reflection, of picking up our crosses and following after Jesus (Matt 16:24). It is like an annual spring cleaning of the soul and the local church. I encourage individuals and congregations to read through the letters to the seven churches (Rev 2:1–3:22) during this season and ask—both the Lord in prayer and one another in conversation—where these letters hit home in our lives this year. For folks who believe that forgiveness is given freely at the foot of the Cross (Luke 23:34; Eph 1:7; 1 Pet 2:24), a season of deep renewal and repentance is a welcome gift. Lent makes a feast of God’s forgiveness.
Lent culminates with Holy Week, during which we commemorate the events of the last week of Jesus’s ministry before his Resurrection:
- Palm Sunday
- Temple Monday and Tuesday
- Spy Wednesday
- Maundy Thursday
- Good Friday
- Holy Saturday
Finally, we arrive at Easter Sunday on which we celebrate the Lord’s resurrection from the dead, his vindication by the Father, his appearing to the disciples, and his victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil (Matt 28:1–10; Mark 16:1–15; Luke 24:1–12; John 20:1–20).
Easter is kept as a kind of season unto itself for fifty days. On the fiftieth day, the church celebrates Pentecost, the day on which the Holy Spirit descended from heaven in tongues of fire and filled his church (Acts 2:1–12).
The Christmas cycle also begins with a countdown, the four weeks of Advent. While this is a season commonly caught up inside of “Christmas,” Advent is historically dedicated to reflection on waiting. We remember how the Israelites waited for deliverance from Egypt and how the world waited for the coming of the Messiah at the first Christmas, just as we ourselves wait for his glorious coming again in power (Exod 2:23–25; Gen 3:15; Isa 7:14; Mic 5:2; Luke 1:46–55; Luke 2:21–23; Heb 9:28; Rev 1:7).
Advent gives way to the feast of Christmas, during which we celebrate Christ’s birth. Christmas and the eleven days that follow it were once a big mid-winter party. Although it happened a long time ago, God became incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and was born unto us, and we just can’t seem to get over it (Luke 2:1–20)! It’s the biggest birthday ever.
Christmas closes with the feast of Epiphany, where we celebrate that Jesus, while being David’s heir and the king of the Jews, is not only their king; he’s the Gentiles’ king, too. We make a feast and read about the visit of the magi from the east who, following in the wake of angels and shepherds, came to hail Jesus as their Lord and Ruler (Matt 2:1–11).
Beyond Easter and Christmas: more feasts
In addition, Christians also observe the sanctorale, feasts throughout the year which tell the story of Jesus but which typically do so by placing a special emphasis on the way in which Jesus displays his glory in the lives of his people. Often these days commemorate the way in which God chose “the foolish things of the world” for his glorious purposes (cf. 1 Cor 1:27). I will not give an exhaustive list here of all those days and dates (some rank “higher” in importance than others), but some examples may be instructive.
Some of these sanctorale feasts celebrate dates in the life of Jesus in which his life and the life of his people bleed into one another, in which his halo interlocks with ours, as it were. For instance:
- March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation, commemorating when Gabriel brought tidings of the incarnation to the Virgin Mary nine months before Christmas (Luke 1:26–38).9
- May 31 is the feast of the Visitation, commemorating when Mary visited Elizabeth and John danced in his mother’s womb (Luke 1:39–56) at the presence of the yet-unborn “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
Other sanctorale feasts celebrate dates of those, like the apostles, whose lives uniquely glorified Jesus:
- December 26 is the feast of St. Stephen, one of the first deacons and martyrs of the church (Acts 6–7). Right on the coattails of Christmas joy we remember that the babe in the manger came to give his life as a ransom for many (Mark 10:45) and remember Stephen who was unafraid to bear witness to that truth.
- July 22 is the feast of Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus delivered from demonic oppression (Luke 8:2) and who, in turn, followed after him. It was Mary who, after others had left, fled, and forsaken Jesus, found his empty tomb on Easter morning; and it was she whom Jesus again encountered and sent to his brothers with good news (John 20:11–18).
Different local and regional and historical feast days have and can be added to this list as lesser feasts, but the heart of the feasts remains the same: Look what mighty things God has done in and through his people.
The major feast of the sanctorale is All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1). Setting aside for our purposes here the various opinions among different traditions about what exactly is meant by “saint,” All Saints’ Day summarizes all of the various lesser feasts in a single day. Sitting on the “opposite side” of the calendar from Easter, All Saints’ Day proclaims the gospel truth that what happened to Jesus on Easter will happen to all those who have been baptized into Christ:
And if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also make alive your mortal bodies through his Spirit who lives in you. (Rom 8:11)
On Easter, we rejoice and remember the Lord’s victory and sing “Where, O death, is your victory?” (1 Cor 15:55). On All Saints’, we take up the anthem again, this time looking forward to our victory in Jesus.
“Now is the day of salvation”
All of us keep time according to special days: birthdays, anniversaries, vacation days, state holidays, etc. And whether or not we realize it, these days—feasts, if you will—deeply form how we inhabit time.
I do not mean to suggest that Christians should necessarily abstain from feast days that fall outside the Christian calendar. I like birthdays, for example, and recognize the importance of certain civic holidays. Nor do I intend to suggest that keeping the liturgical calendar is a mark of authentic Christianity. Some Christians have reasons for not observing portions of the liturgical calendar (though most of us keep days like Christmas and Easter). What I’m arguing, however, is that, amidst all our other mechanisms for “keeping time,” we keep it in step with God’s story.
Feast days provide opportunity to extend a kind of Sabbath, a life-giving welcome, to others, to break bread and share a meal with them in thanksgiving for all that God has done for us. In this way, Christian feast days are inherently missional moments: Go! Invite your friends and neighbors to your home for a Christian feast. Share with them what God has given you, tell them the story the day remembers, and invite them to join you in prayer.
When lived like this, the Christian calendar takes on an eschatological character: This little feast day, this extra seat pulled up in my dining room for a guest, a Scripture reading—I find myself caught up in the drama of the gospel: “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor 6:2). We sing a song after prayers for the food, I receive an extra serving of pie on my plate, we share stories from last year’s celebrations, and offer prayers for the future. Suddenly I’m inhabiting time in a new way: “Wake up, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you!” (Eph 5:14).
As Allan Hauck summarized it over seventy years ago:
a study of the Church here should be of more than historical or antiquarian, or even liturgical, interest for the Christian. It should be a means of enabling the Church Year to bring us into closer fellowship with our Lord and Savior … The Church Year lives for us as it enables Christ to live in us more fully.”10
Mark Brians recommends these resources for further reading
The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life – The Ancient Practices Series
Regular price: $11.99
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The Church Calendar: How It Helps Us Remember Our Story
What Lent Is Really about—and How We Miss the Point
What Is Advent? And Why Is It Important for Believers?
What Is Holy Week?
Why the Meaning of Ash Wednesday Matters
- Unless otherwise specified all Scripture quotations are from the Lexham English Bible (LEB).
- I explored this theme in slightly greater detail elsewhere. See Mark Brians, “Keeping God’s Time,” The Gospel Coalition Hawai’i (blog), September 22, 2022. https://hawaii.thegospelcoalition.org/blog/post/keeping-god-s-time. The content managers at TGC Hawaii have graciously given me their permission to re-purpose some of those lines of thought here.
- I got this phrase from Peter Leithart, The Ten Commandments: A Guide to the Perfect Law of Liberty (Lexham Press, 2020), 55. He cites Ramon Lull, De Proverbiis moralibus, tertia pars caput VIII- caput XVII, tome II, in Opera omnia (Mainz, 1721; repr., Frankfurt am Main, 1965), as quoted in Pual Kuntz, The Ten Commandments in History: Mosaic Paradigms for a Well-Ordered Society (Eerdmans, 2004), 53.
- I think we were always supposed to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil though, but in God’s timing. For more see my “2 Trees of Eden & What They Mean: Knowledge of Good & Evil vs. Life,” Word by Word (blog), October 10, 2023. https://www.logos.com/grow/hall-tree-knowledge-good-evil/.
- Which Byung-Chul Han refers to as our “burn-out society.” See The Burn-Out Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford University Press, 2015).
- For a more thorough overview of the heart of festive biblical Sabbath-keeping see Leithart, Ten Commandments, 55–60.
- For an in-depth exploration of both Sabbath and the Christian Lord’s Day, see Jack Franicevich, Sunday: Keeping Christian Time (Athanasius Press, 2023).
- Leonel Mitchell, “Sanctifying Time: The Calendar,” in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey, eds. Charles Heffling and Cynthia Shattuck (Oxford University Press, 2006), 1077.
- Tolkien fans may be surprised to know that this is the date that the Ring of Sauron is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.
- Allan Hauck, Calendar of Christianity (Association Press, 1961), 127.
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