Sunday is the mystery of knowing the truth which is not received with our flesh and blood as it is beyond thought. In this life we don`t have the eighth day or the true Saturday.
Six days were given for the tillage of life and they are fulfilled by keeping the commandments. The seventh is fulfilled in the tomb. And the eighth by coming out of it.
By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. (Genesis 2, 2)
The true Saturday is the cease of everything saddens and the rest from everything troubles. It is the tomb which shows what means the complete cease of the troubles and passions and of the toil which stands against them. In it rests the whole human nature meaning the soul and body.
God created this world in six days and made the natural elements. And they won`t stop from their way until disintegration. This is what Adam was told:
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food …And until when? Until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return and this ground will give you thorns and thistles.
But from that night when Christ sweated in the Garden of Gethsemanes, the Lord turned the sweat which brought thorns and thistles into the sweat of prayer and the tillage of righteousness.
So he did not order the complete cease only the change. Therefore if we stop our toil in prayer we will surely reap thorns. Because the lack of prayer causes the tillage of the ground in our flesh which ingenerates thorns from nature as the passions are real thorns which grow within us from the seed hidden in the flesh.
As long as we wear the face of Adam we also wear his passions; it is not possible for the ground to stop ingenerating an offspring resembling its nature.
Our Saturday is the day of the burial. Then our nature rests for real (it becomes Sabbatical)
Thus it is needed to take out from it the thorns as long as the ground rests in it.
Excerpt from Word about the saint endeavours – Saint Isaac The Syrian, Philocaly, vol. X, The Publishing Company of the Biblical and Orthodox Mission Institute.
