The Lord of the Sabbath
Sabbath is remembrance. It is to remember and anticipate through a moment the world of God’s great seventh day, of Creation as it is known with God enthroned, consecrating all things and celebrating them with delight. But modern people have a difficult time approaching remembrance because they consider it a matter of ‘thinking’ rather than ‘being.’ This is not how the Scriptures communicate ‘remembrance’ to us.
For most of us, we learned that remembrance is a cognitive pivot of gathering a moment in time as an idea, an object of the intellect, and relating to it somewhat voyeuristically: as those who see but are not seen, who know but are not known. This is not remembrance in the Scriptures. There, we find instead remembrance as a moment in time offered to all moments in time. It is in itself an intersection of timelessness with the temporal that is freely available and present parabolically to all ages.
Two key moments to help us understand this concept of remembrance in the Scriptures are the Passover and the Lord’s Supper. My late mentor, Fr. David Brounstein, recalled for me from his days in Judaism a rabbinical saying which asserted that “he is no Israelite who has not set foot on the floor of the Red Sea.” This, he said, is the meaning of remembrance, that all those who participate in Passover (the feast and ritual) are understood to have done this very thing. As the Lord said to Moses: “This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you” (Ex. 12:2). Or again, “You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month Abib, for in the month Abib you came out from Egypt” (Ex. 34:18). So too, the Lord’s institution of the Eucharist: “And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19). St. Paul puts the pieces together in I Corinthians 10, when he asserts, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
These iconic calls to ‘remembrance’ together help to unlock our understanding of what Sabbath and its rest means for the Christian. The Christian understanding of the Sabbath is continuous with the Jewish understanding, but is transfigured and reoriented by the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians are still called to remember the Sabbath to keep it holy, but obedience to this commandment requires us to see how Christ draws this commandment into Himself as its fulfillment. That will determine the manner of our faithful participation in it as we are made to dwell in Him.
How does Jesus Christ transform our understanding of the Sabbath? It is clear that Jesus claims authority over the scope and practice of Sabbath. Consider this passage from St. Matthew’s Gospel:
At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. And His disciples were hungry, and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath!”
But He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place there is One greater than the temple. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:1-8).
In our Lord’s teaching is a reorientation of perspective, a way of showing what the disciples’ actions actually mean from His perspective as Lord of the Sabbath, as the One who looks upon and knows all that is. His response to the Pharisees is that the disciples are acting as the priests do in the Temple, and as the iconic King of Israel did as he endured his wilderness flight from Saul. Jesus ascribes a priestly and royal character to their actions on the Sabbath, a character that always hearkens back to the character of humanity in the Garden of Eden. That they do this while walking through the fields with Christ and receiving food from the earth without toil or striving further illustrates the Edenic quality of the moment.
There are two contesting perspectives. The Pharisees see a rabbi with undisciplined students violating one of the commandments. Their anxious judgment proceeds from a conclusion that God is displeased with a refusal of these lapsed Jews to acknowledge Him. Our Lord, however, perceives the presence of a world restored around Himself, of the shalom of men walking with their God in harmony with the Creation again, even if for a brief moment and meal. It is a foretaste of a world that will be made possible by the events of His Passion and Resurrection. In His royal exaltation as King of the Jews and the sacrificial offering of Himself as Priest and Victim on the Cross, Jesus will draw the whole Creation to Himself and finish the work, declaring the final shabbat of the old heavens and earth.
I’ve written before and elsewhere that the subtleties of Holy Saturday evade us if we are not careful to observe the Scriptures’ sense of time, marking the progress of seasons and years by way of the seven-fold cycle of days. All our doings come about in this time: darkness and light between the eve of the first day and eve of the Sabbath, culminating in a reflective rest to mirror the Lord’s own celebration of His good Creation. The Sabbath gathers the work of the week in a unifying commemoration, from which emerges the renewed time of the week to come.
St. John notes that the rush to finish the grisly business of the Crucifixion on Good Friday stemmed from the desire to partake of the High Sabbath at Passover. A faithful Israelite, our Lord declared from the Cross “It is finished” in the waning daylight of the sixth day: His work completed, He inaugurated the Sabbath rest. Holy Saturday initiated the ultimate Passover as the Lord of the Sabbath partook of the end of all human work by entering the place of the dead to survey and to bless the fruit of the Old Covenant: the assembled faithful of ancient Israel.
The riddle of death haunts the Wisdom tradition. Job laments the brevity of human life and its disparity with the cyclical renewal of nature. For how is it that a tree regrows or waters regroup, and not those people whom God had so richly fashioned like Himself, and of whom God requires so much? Yet assent to this fact is the beginning of wisdom--the fear of the Lord rises from the knowledge that we are dust. But to that dust our Lord submits: as a true man, He submits Himself to a true death, condescending not just to share in our strength but also in our frailty.
Yet to return to the dust is but the door to the depths, nearing that nothingness over which the Spirit of God once hovered. The psalmist's cry is that of Sheol: a cry from the watery depths, ever the image of the formless and void out of which God called Creation, of the flood over which the Ark floated, the sea through which Moses led the people. The psalmist voices the cry of the faithful there, who look to the Lord as the vigilant night-watch yearns for the relief of daylight. On this day, their diligence was rewarded as the Light of Light descended to preach and to lead out death’s captives in victory.
That victory, of course, is the Resurrection of our Lord on Sunday morning. In the Christian sense of time, Sunday is understood to be both the eighth day and the first day. It is the eighth day in that it is the life made possible for the first time since that first, sixth day when we fell. As our Lord perfects that Sabbath of the old creation through his death, He makes it the ground of the Sabbath of the new creation. The Resurrection breaks the bonds of death asunder, radically altering the sense of Sabbath as the weekly sense of an ending, the regular practice of commemoratively letting go of our labor. The Sabbath now knows the life of Resurrection, the peace of God and the world as it is known with Him enthroned. The center of the seventh day of creation is now beyond that seventh day in an act of new creation; it is now in a previously-unthinkable eighth day we know each week on the first day of time as we now experience it.
The Day of the Lord is each Sunday, forever. The Lord of that day is the Lord also of the Sabbath. That Lord is the Sabbath itself. He is the Lord who says “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” He does not refer us to something apart from Him, He welcomes us to Himself. If we are, as Christians, to remember the Sabbath to keep it holy, we must seek eagerly to do so at the hand of that Lord in the perpetual remembrance of the moment our Lord fulfilled the Sabbath, and that is the moment Sunday begins. The question we must now turn to ask is this: what does it means to remember and keep and to do the work that belongs to the Lord and the Lord’s Day?