What’s so Holy about the Sabbath?
By Doug Culp

"Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day." Exodus 20:8

As I reflected on this commandment, I couldn’t help but feel that as a society we have lost some of the meaning and richness behind it. It seems that this command has been reduced to an obligation to take one hour of our weekend to attend the Mass – and not one minute more than that! Then, it is back into the chaotic world of "horn-blowing" and creative "hand signals" for our neighbors on the streets as we return home.

Sure, for many of us in the United States, Sunday still represents a "day off." Whether we attend Mass or not -- and studies imply that fewer and fewer of us are doing even that -- Sunday is a day for catching up on household chores and shopping, watching sports on television and/or spending time with our families and friends engaged in any number of activities. At the same time, for more and more people, there is nothing special about Sunday at all. It is just another work day, indistinguishable from any other day of the work week as the modern marketplace demands 24 hours/day and 7 days/week of production in order to satiate our ever-growing desire for the consumption of goods.

Have we lost the sense this commandment? Well, in approaching this question, we need to understand what this sense is in the first place. The starting place for such a quest naturally begins in the Old Testament, from which the commandment had its birth.

On the Seventh Day…

The first creation story of the book of Genesis tells the familiar tale of God’s creation of the world. It explains how on each of six days, God brought forth another aspect of the created order until the world was completed. God then rested from His work on the seventh day, blessing it and making it holy. Thus, this is the essence of the commandment: because God rested from His work on the seventh day and made it holy, we are to do the same.

Keep the Sabbath Holy…

So, we are to do something and it seems obvious enough. Nevertheless this "what" is crucial for living in a proper relationship to the commandment. In short, the commandment does not instruct us to make the Sabbath holy. No, we are told in Genesis that it is God who makes the Sabbath holy and not humanity. The commandment clearly calls for us to keep the Sabbath holy in the sense of continuing to participate in it and to honor it instead of placing the responsibility for making it holy on us.

Why is this distinction so crucial? The teacher J. Krishnamurti might be able to help us here. He was once speaking on the topic of the "sacred." During the course of the discussion, he challenged his students to conduct an experiment involving a stick. He asked them to take any stick, place it on a mantel, put a flower in front of it everyday, and repeat the same words while doing this (he added that the exact words did not matter.) He then predicted that after a month, the stick would have become holy and precious to the students.

The point is that God, who is love, is the only source of holiness. If creation is sacred it is only because it has its source in God. While humans certainly assign meanings to things and "make things holy," sin has caused this capacity to be prone to error, to illusion, to misunderstanding, and more times than not to idolatry (God’s recognition of this as perhaps the greatest danger/concern in the spiritual life is evidenced in His prohibition against idolatry in the very First Commandment).

The beauty of the Sabbath therefore lies precisely in the fact that the source of its holiness is God, not us. It is set apart for God by God and is thus goodness itself. We can then trust fully in its sanctity, free from the fear of believing in that which is false or simply manufactured by others to manipulate or control us.

A Commandment of Love

Further, because God is the source, this commandment is at its core about love. And it is in this love that the true richness of the commandment comes to the fore. For example, in Exodus 20:10, God explains to Moses his view of what it means to fulfill this commandment: "No work may be done then either by you, or your son or daughter, or your male or female slave, or your beast, or by the alien who lives with you."

In Leviticus 25:1-7, God sets forth the requirements for a whole Sabbatical year, whereby even the land partakes of the Sabbath. Its produce is to be equally for the owner of the land, the male/female slaves, the hired help, the tenants, the livestock and the wild animals - for God made all these in the six days and saw them as good. Therefore, all are to partake of the goodness of the Lord on His day.

Hence, regardless of how the historical reality of life during this time differs from our own sensibilities, we get a glimpse of the wonder of this commandment. All creation belongs to God, not us, and therefore is sacred, made holy for God by God just like the Sabbath. It follows then that the all-encompassing love of God would exclude no one from the rest and benefits of this day.

How different then is the Lord’s day from the normal order of things on earth! It is truly holy, set apart.

"God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good." (Gen 1:31)

How exactly the Sabbath day became holy is explained in Genesis itself. It tells of how a formless wasteland, an abyss covered in darkness, and the water swept over by a mighty wind became, over the course of six days, the dwelling place of all living creatures, plants, and people. In short, it is the story of how God established order in the world, an order which would support life and be the dwelling place of the one created in the divine image. And God did not rest until all order had been established.

He then looked upon this created order, saw that it was good, and affirmed it. This is in fact what made the seventh day holy. Its holiness followed naturally from the activity of the previous six days. It did not precede the bringing about of order in the created world. As we have said before, the creation of the world was an act of love since God is love. It is God’s continuing affirmation of the world as good which holds it in existence. This affirmation makes all of the things created by God sacred, not because humanity says they are, but by their very nature as created by God and further because God has already recognized them as such through his affirmation.

Of Grains, Holy Bread and Temples

This understanding of the goodness and order of creation as leading to the holiness of the Sabbath sets the stage for Jesus’ teaching on the Sabbath and what it means to keep it holy. First, Jesus reaffirms God as the source of the holiness of the Sabbath and God’s intention for all to partake of the benefits of God’s goodness.

In Matthew 12:1-8 (see also Mark 2:23-28 and Luke 6:1-5), Jesus responds to the protests of the Pharisees against His disciples pulling off the heads of grain to eat as they walked through a field on a Sabbath. Jesus reminds them that David’s men had once eaten the holy bread, normally reserved for the priest, and that the law allowed priests on temple duty to break the Sabbath rest without guilt. He then said, "I assure you, there is something greater than the temple here. If you understood the meaning of the text, ‘It is mercy I desire and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned these innocent men. The Son of Man is indeed Lord of the Sabbath."

Goodness shall flower

Hence, by reminding the Pharisees that God is the sole source of the holiness of the Sabbath and God’s intention for all creation to share in His goodness, Jesus is then able to demonstrate the proper stance we are to take toward this commandment. Matthew 12:9-13 (see also Mark 3:1-6, Luke 6:6-11, and John 5:1-8) retells the story of Jesus being questioned after the grain incident above upon His entrance into the synagogue as to the legality of curing someone on the Sabbath (other passages put the question in Jesus’ mouth). Jesus’ response gives us the definitive answer and reveals to us the will of God on the matter: "Clearly, good deeds may be performed on the Sabbath."

Put another way, goodness shall flower even on the Sabbath for it was goodness which created the Sabbath. While the Jewish people had taken the commandment to heart, making elaborate rules governing behavior on the Sabbath, the Pharisees in the previous passages illustrate how rules can become mired in unconscious habit, followed only out of fear for the condemnation of the authorities, and/or can attain the status of idols instead of springing from that goodness and love which is the very source and life of the commandment.

Nor does Jesus advocate the opposite of such adherence to the rules to the detriment of the intention of the commandment, i.e. He does not do away with the rules. He states that good deeds may be performed on the Sabbath – an active doing of good (agape) and not a passive being good or talking of good, which all too often occurs in our life when the concept of being good is confused with doing good itself.

Conclusion

In short, the Sabbath is a gift of God to the world. It is a time to step back from the busyness and noise which typically dominate our days and to reflect on the goodness of the created order and God’s presence as the source of this order. It is also a reminder that we have a responsibility to participate in the work of God in the world: to bring about order from chaos; to call back into a full participation in the society and the Church those at the margins; and to enter into a loving relationship (in the sense of the proactive agape of the New Testament) with all creation in order to allow the light of God’s love to embrace creation in His goodness and rest.

Douglas Culp is the Assistant Academic Dean at the University of St. Mary of the Lake and a graduate theology student at Catholic Theological Union. He currently resides in Oak Park, IL with his wife Yvette. He can be reached at dculp@usml.edu.