Friday 17 May 2019

The Third Commandment


REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY, TO KEEP IT HOLY.

God commands the people to rest after six days of work and to keep the seventh day as a Sabbath to the Lord. According to the Book of Exodus the reason for this is that the Lord made all things in six days, rested on the seventh, and so blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy (Exodus 20:8-11). According to the Book of Deuteronomy, the reason is so that the people might remember that they were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord brought them out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm (Deuteronomy 5:12-14).

The great acts of God – creation, redemption – are to be remembered on the seventh day and this is why the people are to rest and keep it holy. They are to remember God, God’s gifts, and God’s actions on their behalf. They are to remember that it is in God’s world they live and that their history too is within God’s care.

Christians, of course, no longer observe the Sabbath day. Instead they keep holy the Lord’s Day, Sunday, the first day of the week. Not that they have forgotten the great work of creation. Christians see creation transformed by God’s power into the new creation that begins with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Nor have they forgotten the great work of redemption, when God led the people out of slavery in Egypt to freedom in a promised land. Christians see this first exodus as pointing towards a greater exodus, the one accomplished by Jesus when he passed through death into the freedom of eternal life.

The Lord’s Day is both the first, and the eighth, day of the week, the day of creation and new creation, the day of redemption and eternal redemption. Christians believe they have even more reason to celebrate this day, remembering God and the wonderful things God has now done in Christ for all people.

In many places Sunday has become a day for remembering shopping rather than God. More and more, Sunday seems to be Mammon’s day rather than the Lord’s. It can seem old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy to say that Sunday should be kept different from other days of the week. Common sense ought to tell us that life will become very tedious indeed if every day is exactly the same, if we have no feasts, no times for rest, no interruptions to the ordinary run of days. But the ‘iron reign’ of commerce tends more and more to invade the days of rest. Already the holy days that used to remind people of the more important kingdom to which they belong – Epiphany, Whit Monday, Ascension Thursday, Corpus Christi – these are being pushed aside by the demands of business and bureaucracy.

What is in danger of being lost is a sense of grace, of free gift, of God’s sheltering wings beneath which we are invited to rest. Sometimes people think that pushing God away will leave more space and freedom for human beings. But experience shows that it is exactly the opposite. A God-less world inevitably becomes inhuman. We need God to teach us how to be human. Human beings flourish only in the light and warmth of love, grace, gratitude, generosity, friendship and peace. The Sabbath of the Old Testament and the Lord’s Day of the New Testament guarantee that there will be free time each week to remember these things, to enjoy and celebrate them, and to think about the One who is their source.

The most important way of keeping the Lord’s Day holy is through attendance at the Eucharist. From the earliest times this has been the practice of Christians. ‘Leave everything on the Lord’s Day’, an early writer says, ‘and run diligently to your assembly, because it is your praise of God. What excuse will they make to God, those who do not come together on the Lord’s Day to hear the word of life and feed on the divine nourishment which lasts forever?’

In 1998 Pope John Paul II published Dies Domini, a letter about keeping the Lord’s Day holy. It is a wonderful meditation on the spiritual riches of Sunday, riches freely offered so that people might enjoy the rest they long for.



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