The Ten Commandments 5
The Fourth Commandment: Hallowing the Sabbath
Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son our your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made haven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (Exodus 20: 8-11)
If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath, from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob, for the mouth of he Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 58 13-14.)
For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, says the Lord; so shall your descendants and your name remain. From the new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath; all flesh shall come to worship before me, says the Lord. (Isaiah 66:23-24)
Introduction
Two recent articles, commenting on the Fourth Commandment, offer a window onto the landscape of yearning and frustration which thinking about the Fourth Commandment arouses for some thoughtful people today. Both articles appeared as essays commenting an Art Exhibition about the Ten Commandments.
Alexander Meschnig’s article expresses the concerns of a contemporary person who is thoroughly disheartened by the transformation of modern western societies into cultures of events and consumerism.1 Our culture, he says, is filled with restlessness, and worships consumer products. The passions of the day are bargains, a full shopping basket and a Sunday in which stores are open. Today, he laments, free time or leisure has been wholly integrated into the capitalist market economy. Today “free time” is the time for shopping, for purchasing the products that workers produce during the rest of the week. Alternatively, free time is when people consume “events” to fill the unendurable emptiness of time not “filled” by working. Capitalism has totally mastered the whole of life; the global market not organizes our time, 24/7. Leisure is no longer a break from work, a transcending of work; it has been harnessed to the system of production and consumption.
Meschnig notes that modern, industrial cultures replaced agricultural societies’ “circular time” with a modern, inhumane “linear” time that knows no interruptions. Our modern sense of time is chronological, linear time. The global economy makes no distinction between day and night, week day and days off, because somewhere in the world workers are producing and consumers are purchasing; stock markets are open somewhere. For Meschnig, CNN, Blumenberg and MTV, i.e., 24 hour, nonstop entertainment, world and financial news symbolize our age and its distinctive sense of time.
Technology, especially information technology, melts the distinction between work time and leisure time. Information technology makes the worker available and makes work available to the worker in the evening, on vacation, on the weekend. He or she can work at home or on the beach. The ideal of the modern economic system would be workers who did not sleep, did not rest, and did not take vacation. Meschnig does not mention robots; but they fit very well the specifications of the ideal worker. Robots meet the ideals of modern capitalism, which regards workers as the major cost factor, complicated by the quirks of human psychology, illness, pregnancy, and unrelenting demands for more benefits. For market capitalism, human beings are burdensome necessities as a production factor and necessary as potential consumers. For without consumers, there would be no demand for production and the whole system would collapse.
Meschnig does not discuss, though well he could have, how instilling insatiable desires for consumer goods is essential for modern economic life. In many modern countries, the great majority of the population enjoy essentials for sustaining life: a dwelling, clothing, food, access to health care, access to education.. If consumer demand were limited to these things, the world economy would collapse like a house of cards. Therefore, each day new “needs,” cravings, desires, wishes, wants must be planted in the minds of the masses. This is the indispensable work of advertising and marketing, and this is why they are so essential to the modern economy. Thousands of the best and brightest young people around the world study consumer psychology in business school programs. Their goal: learning how to melt the consumer’s resistance to new products and services. On the intelligence of these young people, on their success in getting us to want to buy what we did not think we needed or even know existed, rests the future of the global economy. Advertising and marketing also tries to plant the idea that the latest development (in TV, computer, home appliances; cars) is desirable.2 Given that the whole of life, including the survival of government administrations, depends on economic growth, purchasing has become the highest civic duty. 3
Meschnig contrasts the circular paradigm of time associated with an agricultural society with the linear, clock time of industrial societies. People in agricultural societies organized (and still organized to some extent) their time according to the recurring seasons of the year and the recurring rhythms of day and night: a time for planting, a time for growing, a time for harvesting; the circular movement of the sun governed the workday itself: rising for work at daybreak; resting after the sunsets.
Industrial society is governed by linear, clock time. With the development of artificial lighting, first gas lighting then electric lighting, the alternation of day and night and the rotation of the seasons became less important for increasing portions of the working population. Workers can be assigned to three shifts; they now can work at any hour; production can continue 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Time, chronological time, has been “capitalized,“ has become a key factor in the cost of production. Television shopping programs, and E-Bay on television make 24 hour shopping possible. Production and consumption thrive on uninterrupted clock time.
Meschnig notes that labor unions fought for a 40-hour workweek and Saturday and Sundays as days off. But these “work-free” days are not of a different order from the working days in our industrialized societies. The days off are the days to obey the highest law of a capitalist society: shopping and consuming.
Meschnig predicts that soon in advanced western societies, and perhaps also economically developed parts of Asia, people will find that their “free time” is empty, meaningless. Time off will be simply “work-negative” time, i.e., time when we don’t work. This time off will become more and more of a burden, to be made bearable by “shop ‘till we drop” and by “events” like rock concerts, sports events, parties, and TV spectaculars. Consumer products that offer a superficial experience of meaningful life will fill the emptiness of nonwork time.
Meschnig seems to make capitalism, or the contemporary global market economy, the culprit, the enemy of humane leisure and rest. He speaks of the capitalist system as having transformed our sense of time and as threatening to bring us unendurable emptiness when we are not working. On the other hand, he does briefly mention that in modern socialist countries —- Mao’s China, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic– the worker was also elevated to the status of a hero. Perhaps Meschnig thinks that not capitalism but industrialization is the real culprit for the malaise of modern time as a curse.
Meschnig’s essay has a note of disheartenment because he offers no alternative to the misery of an age in which time has become linear and is threatened with becoming unendurable to modern people. He seems to yearn for an age which time can be not simply cronos, linear, clock time, but kairos, time fulfilled, time as shalom, peace and human plenty. He concludes his essay noting:
Abstract time with its linear logic, which knows no interruption, is not identical with living time as such. It is rather a social construction. But, with the increase in speed, freedom, which always needs a minimum of safe space, shrinks. The Utopia of free time in a leisure society has become perverted; it celebrates a hedonistic capitalism. Today, no one can claim any legal rights against the insanity of constant, global production. To try to establish the rights of an emancipated time, for example, a work-free Sunday, is impossible. 4
Meschnig’s essay implies a yearning for a human kairos time, i.e., a time fitted for human fulfillment. Such a time would not be the linear, chronological time of our industrial-technological age. He contrasts the clock time without interruption of contemporary society with the circular time, governed by nature which earlier generations enjoyed. His essay gives no hint of a call to return modern societies to agricultural societies, as if that were possible. Thus, his essay is a trace in our time of a sense of loss, a loss of humane time or time to be human, a time not controlled by an impersonal, global, all-determining law of production and consumption.5 His essay gives no indication that he personally believes such a humane time can ever come. The essay contains no breath of hope; its tome is more lament and negative assessment. His essay may, indeed, be sound the voice of many unbelievers today.6
The Sabbath in the New Testament
The New Testament authors deal with the Sabbath in two ways. The Gospel writers recount events in which Jesus, by acts of healing, challenges the existing interpretation of Sabbath observance, as a day in which no “work” is allowed. These stories serve to let Jesus stand forth as “the lord of the Sabbath”; each of these stories concludes with an announcement about Jesus special status as the Messiah.7 These accounts of Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath by no means dismiss it as unimportant, but they make the Sabbath radically relative to the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Second, the earliest Christians honored the Sabbath at the same time as they moved its observance from the last day of the Jewish week to the first day of the week. In shifting the Sabbath from the last to the first day of the week, the earliest Christians were not repudiating the Jewish Sabbath. They did not think the Sabbath should not be celebrated. Rather, they believed that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection transformed the meaning of the Sabbath. Therefore they celebrated the Sabbath on “the Lord’s Day,” the day of the week when Jesus was raised from the dead. This shift from the last to the first day helped signify the transformed meaning of the Jewish Sabbath.
The second way the Sabbath comes to speech in the New Testament is in the Letters. One key passage explains and legitimates Christian celebration of the Sabbath on the first day of the week, rather than the last day. This text present interpretations of the First Covenant Sabbath as a sign or mystery that is replaced and fulfilled by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ. Thus, the First Covenant Sabbath (i.e., the Sabbath in the Old Testament) is, in the New Testament, a trope, a symbol, for Jesus Christ. Thereby the Sabbath is related to the center of the New Testament witness, at the same time that the Christian community exchanged the first day of the week for the Sabbath (the seventh day) for their worship. We will now discuss these two ways the Sabbath, and by implication, the Fourth Commandment is appropriated in the New Testament.
One important way the Fourth Commandment comes to speech in the New Testament is in accounts of the Jewish religious authorities charging Jesus with breaking it, and of Jesus’ defense of his actions. Two such episodes are recounted in Matthew 12: 1-14 (parallels Mark 2:23-3:6; Luke 6:1-11.). Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and his disciples plucked heads of grain and ate them. The Pharisees accused Jesus of allowing his disciples to do “what is not lawful on the Sabbath.” Jesus also healed a man in the synagogue on the Sabbath. For this Jesus was also criticized. The Gospel writers use these accounts not to discard or discount the Sabbath, but to present Jesus Christ as “greater than the Sabbath.”
Jesus’ begins his reply to the Pharisees’ criticism of plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath by reminding them of what King David and his companions did when they were hungry, namely they entered the Temple and ate the Bread of the Presence (twelve loaves of bread continually kept on a table in the holy place of the temple, as symbol of communion with God). Jesus reminds the Pharisees of accounts of the priests in the temple breaking the Sabbath and remaining guiltless. Then Jesus declares that “something greater than the temple is here. “ And Jesus states “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 of the Sabbath.”
Mark’s account of this event ends with the very significant statement by Jesus: “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-8)
We next inquire what Jesus’ two assertions could mean.
We begin with Jesus’ statement: “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.” This declaration obviously is important for inquiring into Jesus’ understanding of the Sabbath. At one level, Jesus’ meaning is clear. By quoting “I desire mercy not sacrifice” Jesus elevates serving others as a moral norm above ceremonial and ritual regulations associated with Sabbath observance. Jesus is teaching that God’s Commandment that Israel ‘observes’ the Sabbath was meant to benefit them, individually and corporately. When God commanded that the Sabbath be “remembered” and “kept holy” God intended a benefit, a blessing, a boon for the people of Israel. Therefore, when Jesus heals a crippled person or finds needed food to eat on the Sabbath he considers these “innocent” acts. That is what Jesus surely meant by saying that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)
What view of the Sabbath did Jesus reject? By his action of healing on the Sabbath, he implied that any interpretation of Sabbath observance that prohibited helping a person in need was a wrong interpretation. An example of an inhumane observance of the Sabbath would be refusing to help an obviously needy neighbor on the Sabbath. Such an interpretation of the Sabbath indiscriminately counts any action, no matter how life supporting, as “working” and, therefore, as a violation of the Sabbath.8 This interpretation Jesus rejected and, in so reinterpreting the meaning of the Commandment, placed him “above” the commandment.
Immediately following this account in Matthew’s gospel is the account of Jesus healing a man in a withered hand. Jesus entered a synagogue in which a man with a withered hand was present. They (the Pharisees?) asked Jesus whether it was lawful to cure on the Sabbath, with the hope that Jesus’ reply would incriminate him. Jesus responds with a question: “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls in a pit on the Sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Jesus then told the man to stretch out his hand and it was restored.
Mark’s account of the synagogue healing differs from Matthew’s account by speaking of Jesus anger at “the hardness of heart” of those who were silent when Jesus asked them “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill.” In Mark’s account the silence of his critics prompted Jesus declaration that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
A similar event is recounted in Luke Gospel (13:10-17). Jesus was teaching in a synagogue on the Sabbath. A woman with a “spirit that had crippled her for 18 years” was present. Jesus, unasked by the woman or by anyone on her behalf, called her over and declared, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” He laid hands on her and immediately she stood straight and began praising God.
The leader of the synagogue was indignant because Jesus cured on the Sabbath. The leader repeatedly told the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the Sabbath day.” Jesus charged them with hypocrisy, reminding them that each on the Sabbath unties his ox or donkey to lead it away to water it. “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?” The story concludes with the observation that Jesus’ opponents were put to shame and the crowd rejoiced at “the wonderful things he was doing.”
Very clearly these accounts do not present Jesus as ignoring, belittling or dismissing the Sabbath. He is not dismissing the Sabbath or ignoring it; he is interpreting its meaning, and therefore how it may properly be observed, differently from the Pharisees and Herodians. The Sabbath should serve human welfare; humans are not to serve the Sabbath.
The second way the Sabbath, and by implication the Fourth Commandment, appears in the Second Covenant is when it is interpreted in the light of Jesus Christ, who is “greater than the Sabbath.” An example of such interpretation is in the Letter to the Colossians 2:16-17 “Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths [annual, monthly, weekly rituals]. These are only a shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ.”
Referring to believers being condemned “in matters of observing. …Sabbaths” implies that Christians were criticized, presumably by fellow Jews, for worshipping on the first day of the week rather than the last day of the week.9 The author justifies this Christian practice by describing the Sabbath as a “shadow of what is to come.”10 What is to come is obviously Jesus Christ, who has come, whom the author declares is the “substance” that replaces the “shadow.”
This verse is especially important because it interprets the Sabbath in terms of Jesus as the Christ. Jesus is the substance, i.e., the meaning and fulfillment, of what the Sabbath, (and other cultic days and ceremonies) were the shadow. We can identify two important aspects of this passage.
First, this verse is another example of the principle that the New Testament writers interpreted the Old Testament in the light of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of God’ promises in the Old Testament. The Old Testament, in its self-understanding, is not the measure of the New Testament, but vice versa. The New Testament writers, i.e., the earliest Christians, interpreted their Scriptures, i.e., the Hebrew Bible, in the light of Christ. Specifically, Jesus Christ is the content, the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the creation and therefore the basis for a new understanding of God’s “rest” after the six days of creation.
A Christian interpretation of the Sabbath, and the Commandment to observe the Sabbath, must follow this way of interpretation. Otherwise, not a Christian interpretation of the Sabbath results but an interpretation that keys the interpretation to some other norm, standard or principle of interpretation.
We will discuss the meaning of the Sabbath in the First Covenant in the next section. To anticipate that discussion, however, we can say that the Sabbath was the God’s invitation, in the form of a Commandment, to share in God’s own joy, celebration, and freedom in relation to God’s creation. God “rested” on the seventh day, i.e., on the day after his six days work of creation.11 Since neither Jewish nor Christian teaching holds that God rested to recover from physical tiredness, this resting must mean a time of taking satisfaction in the work accomplished, in the creation as a competed creative act. Just as humans pause and take pleasure in a piece of good work accomplished, so the Bible describes God resting in the satisfaction of his work. When God commands the Jews to observe the Sabbath, he is inviting them to share with him in this enjoyment of the creation as a divine work.
What, then, does it mean to claim that Jesus is the substance of the Sabbath? It means that in Jesus Christ, i.e., in his whole life, death, resurrection and ascension, God brings his creation to a new completion, a healing and the possibility of a fulfillment in relation to Himself, and that God takes satisfaction in that work of His Son. The celebration of the Sabbath on the first Day of the week, the day of Jesus’ resurrection, therefore, means to enter into God’s joy and satisfaction of the work that God, in Jesus Christ, accomplished for the salvation of the world. God on the seventh day rested from his labor of creation of the world. Jesus’ saving work was not to remove humans from the world or to declare the world of no value. On the contrary, God so loved the world that he sent Jesus Christ to redeem the world. Jesus Christ is the promise of the renewal of God’s creative intention in the creation of the world. Therefore, Jesus Christ, i.e., what Christ in his person and work, becomes the new content for defining the meaning of the Sabbath. To celebrate the Sabbath as Christians is to share in God’s joy and freedom in relation to the creation as created and redeemed by God in Jesus Christ.
The Fourth Commandment in the First Covenant
What, then, is the blessing or benefit God wished to bestow on the Jews in this Commandment? Karl Barth explains this blessing or benefit as follows.12 God’s own rest on the seventh day came after God had finished creating the world. The work of creation completed, God could “look back” on the “good” work He had accomplished and take pleasure in it. God, so the Bible presents God’s rest, takes pleasure in “a job well done.” At the human level, such a taking pleasure in a job well done, includes many aspects of satisfaction: appreciation of what has been created—appreciating the creation’s intrinsic worth; enjoying a sense of accomplishment, i.e., a satisfaction in the self as free, sovereign maker, as creative, and a less easily namable new sense of self as in relation to something, though created by oneself, yet is other than the self, something with an independent existence. These many aspects of satisfaction, we can think, by analogy, God enjoys on the seventh day, when His creation is completed.
Barth stresses that God commands humans to honor the Sabbath before man and woman have done any work of their own. God does not command humans to honor what they have accomplished, because they have as yet accomplished nothing. God has created them on the sixth day; they have done no work of their own. Therefore, when God commands them to honor the Sabbath, God is commanding man and women to honor God’s work: that is to share in God’s satisfaction. Barth specifies God’s rest as the time of God’s Feier, Freude und Freiheit (celebration, joy, and freedom) . To honor the Sabbath is to share in God’s joy, celebration and freedom in relation to the cosmos God has just created, a cosmos that includes humans themselves. Honoring the Sabbath is to acknowledge what God has done, not what humans have done.
Barth draws out two implications of this sharing in God’s rest. On the one hand, humans are invited to celebrate, before they have done anything. Sharing in God’s joy is not a privilege earned by man and woman working for it. This sharing is a gift, a blessing as God’s Covenant People. God grants humans a share in His celebration. On the other hand, celebrating the Sabbath puts the command to work for six days in a new, very specific light. Because the work of the coming six days is not performed to earn God’s favor and grace, that work must have another meaning.
Human work, human labor, can share in, be shaped by and show forth God’s gracious construction of a world fit for human habitation, serving human needs, supporting a life in relation to God in covenant partnership. Human labor can be the action of fellow-workers with God. Human labor, from the perspective of the Sabbath, is not merely grinding out an existence from the stubborn earth. Sin may make it that for some people some of the time or for all people some of the time. But, in principle, human labor on the six days can be a participation in something greater than survival: a sharing in and being shaped by God creative intention for the world. Work, from the standpoint of the Sabbath, is, therefore, an opportunity, permission, a blessing whereby human work may be taken up into the horizon of God’s life and action.13 Humans may work; they may imitate and participate in God’s constructive endeavors, of course in finite human ways. Human labor is a sharing, in human ways and in a human dimension, in God’s own creativity, especially that of the creation of the world.
This understanding of the meaning of human labor has two important aspects. On the one hand, as we already noted, labor loses it’s the awful weight it would have if only through our work, our achievements, our merits, we could have any sharing in God’s creative purposes. And, in relation to the world, the Sabbath frees human work from the fate of creating a world fit for humans.14 Being in relation to God, i.e. in right relation to God, is the most important thing in the world for achieving one’s humanity. This is possible only through God’s gift; we do not come into this right relation through our working. Therefore, our working loses its awesome and frightful dimension. And, God takes responsibility for the world, as Creator and as providential guide. Ultimately we human beings are not responsible for creating a humane world. This is the perspective on human work, both in relation to God and in relation to the world, opened by the Sabbath as the Command to share in God’s rest.
When work is not how we come into right relation to God, human labor does not become unimportant. It becomes humane and bearable. In the first place it is important for the maintaining of our own lives, and the lives of others dependent on us. God does invite us, indeed commands us, to work for six days, as fellow workers in His world. We do have a responsibility, given by God, for helping construct a livable and hospitable life for others, the near and distant neighbor and the generations to come. As the Parable of the Talents suggests, we are responsible to God for what we have done with the share in God’s creation that God grants to us, whether that share be greater or smaller. The possibility of true human life does not rest on this human work; but humans can be fellow workers with God in God’s work of humanization.
Further, because this hard work and great responsibility is not a matter of eternal salvation or damnation, our engagement can have a freedom, certain lightness, enabling even more creativity. Work without dread and Angst can becomes at times an opportunity for self-expression, for sharing the best of our energy, ability, and intelligence with others. Our work can be a means of actualizing ourselves. At times our work, drained of the dread of ultimacy, can even have a playful character. 15
Granted, the third Chapter of Genesis makes clear that human work, as well as human relationships, stand under the shadow of sin. Human work is alienated from sharing in and showing forth God’s creative, constructive labor. Labor, cursed by sin, must be redeemed, if it is to make a world fit for humans to be in relation with their God in relation with each other. Men will till the ground but it will bring froth thorns and thistles, and the bread they win from the earth will only “come by the sweat of their face.” The shadow of sin reveals itself in fruitless work and in returning to the ground from which one has come. Nevertheless, God invites his human creatures, created in His image, to participate in His rest, His satisfaction in the created worked and in His sovereign freedom in relation to the world.
Further, one passage in the Old Testament (Isaiah 66:24, quoted at the beginning of this essay) refers to a future day when every day will be a Sabbath. This day of rest anticipates another kind of rest when every day will be a Sabbath. Thus, the Sabbath on the last day of the week has a perspective that opens out into eternity.
A Medieval Appropriation of the Sabbath Commandment: St. Bonaventura
St. Bonaventura devotes his fourth Collatio (Lecture) of his Lectures on the Ten Commandments to the Fourth Commandment. We recall that Bonaventura divides the Ten Commandments into the First Table, containing only three Commandments, and the Second Table, containing the remaining seven. His reason, as we have noted in previous essays in this series, is that Bonaventura reflects theologically on the Decalogue through the lens of the Trinity doctrine. He correlates each of the first Three Commandments to one of the Three Persons of the Trinity. The Commandment to observe the Sabbath Bonaventura correlates with the Holy Spirit. This means that this Third Commandment is about love to God: Dico , quod hoc praeceptum: Memento, ut diem sabbati sanctifices, est de caritate; et quidquid patet et latet in aliis in isto mandato consumatur. 16 (I say that this Commandment, “Remember that you keep holy the Sabbath” is about love, and whatever opens and broadens in others (i.e., in the other Commandments) is completed in this commandment.
Bonaventura’s teaching is that the Commandment to keep holy the Sabbath is about love to God and whatever serves love in the other Commandments is completed in this Commandment. Since for Bonaventura, loving God (St.Augustine’s frui= enjoyment of God) is the greatest obligation and fulfillment for believers, he thinks this Commandment is the most important of all. Love to God is the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, according to Bonaventura (and the New Testament, cf. Romans 5:5.) Hence, to understand Bonaventura’s appropriation of the Fourth Commandment, we must understand how he relates the Holy Spirit to the life of the believer.
Bonaventura’s theology “locates” the work of the Holy Spirit as that Person of the Trinity who works in the human heart as God’s love orienting them to the worship of the Father in and through the Son, Jesus Christ. Thus, Bonaventura begins his lecture by reminding his hearers:
Dicebam vobis, quod in prima tabula continentur tria mandata ordinantia nos ad Deum secundum tria appropriate tribus personis divinis. In primo mandato praecipitur humilis adoratio divinae maiestatis, in secundo fidelis confessio summae veritatis, in tertio sincera dilectio summae bonitatis. Et hoc est tertium praeceptum, et est summa verborum: Memento, ut diem sabbati sanctifices. 17 (I was telling you that in the first Table are contained three Commandments directing us to God according to the three Divine Persons. In the first Commandment is prescribed humble adoration of the divine majesty; in the second, faithful confession of the highest truth; in the third, sincere delight in the highest goodness. And this is the third Commandment, and is the greatest of the Words: Remember that you keep holy the Sabbath Day.)
The first Three Commandments prescribe adoration, confession and delight—adoration of God in His Majesty; confession of God as the Truth; adoration of God as our Highest Good, whom we are to love for His own sake. Bonaventura, following St. Augustine and the whole western theological tradition, viewed God as origin of creation, as restorer of creation and as the highest good (Summum Bonum). As Summum Bonum, God was the One desired by every human heart, even of the hearts of those who did not know or confess God as the ultimate object of their yearning for fulfillment and happiness. God’s goodness is reflected in all the good that men and women desire in creaturely things, because God is the giver of all the being and goodness possessed by creatures. The worth and desirability of creatures not only derives from God, as their Creator, but their goodness, their desirability , mirrors the ultimately desirable Being, God. Bonaventura probably said the Third Commandment was the greatest, precisely because that Commandment ordered us to God not as Creator or Redeemer but as our End, i.e., the fulfillment of our lives.
This theological framework, i.e., the doctrine of God as Trinity, within which Bonaventura worked, was and is a rich one. This Trinitarian framework located human beings in three relationships to God. In relation to God the Father, beyond and transcending the world, humans are dependent, receiving their natures and existence. From God, the Father/Creator, they receive their being from moment to moment, in and through the world. In this relation, humans’ proper attitude and response to God should be thanksgiving and adoration of God in his transcendent power and freedom. In relation to the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, we are related to God as the Truth through whom the world was created and by whom humans are redeemed to a right relation to God. Jesus, the Incarnate Word, is God besides us in history, “truthing” human beings, making possible a true and right relation to God. Jesus Christ, as the true Image of God, restores the broken images which humans became because of sin. The third relation is grounded in the Person of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit is God working in us orienting us to God, whose richness of being, whose goodness, alone can fully satisfy our craving for fulfillment. The Three Persons are thus the ground of three relations we have to God: God beyond us, God beside us and God within us.
Within this theological framework, Bonaventura explains the full meaning of the Commandment. By attending carefully to the grammar and syntax of the biblical verses, Bonaventura discerns three aspects to the Commandment. In his Third Commandment God prescribes something, allows something and forbids something.
God prescribes that believer’s rest on the Sabbath Day. This demand of God gives Bonaventura the opportunity to respond to the Jewish criticism, apparently still heard in the thirteenth century, that Christians violate God’s Commandment because they don’t “keep the Sabbath” but regard the first day of the week their Sabbath day.
Bonaventura replies that the Commandment contains a moral aspect, a merely ceremonial aspect and an aspect that combines moral and ceremonial aspects. The moral aspect, most important for Christians, is to love God above all things, i.e., loving God for God’s sake and not for any other reason.
The Commandment also has a figural or ceremonial aspect, the designation of the seventh day of the week. For Christians “seventh day” signifies, Bonaventura says, the quiet of the soul, the quiet of Jesus in the grave and the cessation of all physical labor for the sake of rest and contemplation of God. Finally, the Commandment combines a ceremonial and moral aspect, i.e., the cessation from all work, which is both ceremonial and moral. If this is understood generally, as do the Jews, it means the cessation of all manual work. Christians interpret (insinuere) this as the abstaining from sin. If the Command is understood not generally but specifically, it means one should abstain from some things, but not from others. It remains morally allowed to follow the church institution of worshipping on Sunday, to perform work which is necessary to maintain life and health and to enjoy oneself. What the church prohibits on Sunday is all merely servile work. But the church allows what is necessary to life and what adds pleasure to life (quae sunt continuae necessitates and quaedam, quae sunt merae iucunditatis. …quia propter pronitatem nostrum permittuntur ab Ecclesia. )
Having responded to the criticism of the Jews, Bonaventura returns to his main idea: this Commandment concerns love of God. Three things are required, Bonaventura teaches, for the perfection of love. One is time for God, i.e., turning the soul toward God ( divina vacatio, convertens animam in Deum. ) The second in imitating Christ in good works ([s]ecundum est imitation Christi in bonis operibus.) The third is ceasing all servile works, which helps renders the heart pure and clean. ( Tertium est cessation ab omni mere servili, quae cor reddit purum et mundum.)
In typical scholastic fashion, Bonaventura analyses each of these aspects, identifying their components. Conversio autem in Deum est secundum septem opera, sine quibus anima non convertitur ad perfectam vacationem in Deum; quorum tria sunt intrinseca, quae fiunt meditando, orando et exultando; et ex his tribus resultat contemplatio. (Conversion to God involves seven works, without which the soul is not turned to God in perfect availability. Three of these (works) are intrinsic, i.e., meditation, prayer and exultation, and these are the components of contemplation.)
Alia quattuor sunt extrinseca, quae fiunt legendo, psallendo, sacrificium offerendo et divinam legem adimplendo’; et hoc fit sive audiendo, sive docendo, sive cum aliis conferendo. (Four other activities are external (extrinsica). These works (opera) are reading, saying the psalms, offering the sacrifice (of the mass) and the completion of the divine law, and this occurs by hearing, teaching or by conferring with others.
Imitation of Christ is referred to in the reference to working on six days. We are to be imitators of God’s beloved children. There are six works of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving the thirsty drink; dressing the naked, welcoming strangers (colligere hospites), visiting the sick and redeeming captives. None of these works is possible unless one is conformed to Christ.
We don’t need to follow Bonaventura as he correlates each of the six days to specific ways of imitating Christ. In that exposition we see Bonaventura’s attempt to interpret each facet of the Commandment in terms of the Trinity Doctrine, specifically in relation to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which orders our hearts to the love of God and the love of the neighbor in God. What we have set forth of Bonaventura’s teaching on the
Sabbath Commandment suffices to display the basic orientation of his thought.
The Decalogue, in its first Table, spells out three aspects of the First and Great Commandment, Thou shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength. The Second Table of the Decalogue specifies ways we are to love the neighbor as ourselves. If we concluded that Bonaventura’s interpretation of the Decalogue teaches a works righteousness, a coming into right relation to God by our own efforts, we would be in error. The key to correcting that wrong interpretation is that Bonaventura interprets the First Table of the Law through the lens of the Trinity, the three Persons of the Trinity and their work of creation, redemption and sanctification. In this Trinitarian “reading” of the First Table, God is the chief actor, creating, redeeming, and working in our hearts to direct our desire to God. This working of the Trinity in relation to us indeed engages our willing, our working. But our working is a being shaped by, a sharing in, and a showing forth of God’s work in relation to the world and us, all of which can occur because of God’s gracious initiative. This priority of God and grace in relation to our working must be kept in mind whenever Protestant believers, properly concerned about justification by grace through faith, engage Bonaventura’s theology. This brings us to classical Reformation appropriation of the Fourth Commandment.
Luther and Calvin on the Sabbath
Two places Luther writes about the Sabbath are the Larger Catechism and the Sermon on Good Works. His fuller exposition of the Commandment is in the latter work. Luther distinguishes a superficial understanding (grobes Verstand) and a Christian understanding of the Sabbath Commandment. The former simply views the Sabbath as a day of not working and a day to go to church. The deeper, Christian, understanding is that the Sabbath is any time in which believers carefully attend the Word of God and let that Word work in their lives. True listening to the Word of God is a listening with earnest and care ( mit Ernst und Sorge). For, says, Luther, the Devil never rests day or night from his attempts to ensnare the heart of believers and to alienate the heart from all the Commandments.
In the Sermon on Good Works, Luther begins by pointing out that that attending worship and the rote saying of prayers, without trust in God’s grace, mean nothing. In fact, Luther thought having fewer church holidays would be spiritually advantageous, since these are usually spent with mussig gehen, fressen und saufen, spielen und anderen boesen Taten (laziness, stuffing oneself with food, drinking, playing and other evil deeds.)18 Merely attending Mass, attending only by listening and watching, but not being present with the heart, is worse than not attending at all. On the other hand, participating in the Mass with faith, without doubting, is to share in the saving work of Christ, and this is a great blessing. How many masses there are in the world, but how little faith in the saving work of Christ, laments Luther.
The sermon should be about the New Covenant (das Testament) that is sealed in Christ’s saving death on the cross. But how can this good news be heard if it is not preached, asks Luther. But since the preachers themselves don’t know this gospel, their sermons wander off into fables and forget Jesus. Not preaching this Gospel is itself a great sin, greater than most of the sins believers otherwise commit.
Similarly, authentic prayer is not measured by counting kernels19or turning many pages but by earnestly bringing our needs before God. True prayer is made in trust and sincerity, not with mere repetition of the words of the prayer. Here Luther points out that the land is full of monasteries where prayer is ongoing, but this has produced little real improvement in the life of the church. The cause must be that such prayer is without sincerity and trust.
Such sincere and earnest prayer is the greatest possible work of a Christian. And, Luther adds, common prayer in a congregation or a diocese, for enemies, for those in needs, for one’s own sins, is a great work. The church on earth has no greater power or work than such common prayer, when this prayer is done with sincerity and earnestness. 20
Clearly, the topic of the Commandment about the Sabbath is another occasion for Luther to return to his basic principles of justification by grace through faith and his emphasis on the heart and sincerity in contrast to mere external observance of the law. The high value he places on the (sincere) participation in the Mass and on the corporate prayer of the Church, however, helps correct superficial evaluations of Luther’s theology as individualistic and anti-ecclesial.
John Calvin’s discussion of the Sabbath Commandment in his Institutes of the Christian Religion begins by identifying its meaning for the People of the First Covenant. For the Jews, the Sabbath was a day of rest, so that God could work on them, i.e., instill in them their identity as the covenant people and as those obligated to fulfill the Law. Further, it was a time for rest, especially for animals and people who served the needs of others.
Christ, whose death and resurrection, created the basis for a new, right relation to God, fulfills the Sabbath. Thus, Christ is the fulfilling of the Sabbath promise. Calvin sees the Sabbath, in conformity with the New Testament (Colossians 2:16) as a sign of something fulfilled by Christ.
However, Calvin emphasizes that in this life, no Sabbath is entirely fulfilled. Therefore the weekly Sabbath has a forward-looking character that is also identified in the Old Testament. That is, e weekly day of rest and worship is a sign and foreshadowing of the promise in Isaiah 58: 13-14, that humankind will “take delight in the Lord.”21 “The mystery [that] is principally set forth is the perpetual repose from our labor”; that is, eternal life with God. He writes, “But with the Lord’s coming, the ceremonial part of this commandment was abolished—he is the truth that replaces all figures—the true fulfillment of the Sabbath.”
While highlighting the fulfillment of the Sabbath Commandment by Christ and its forward looking, eschatological meaning, Calvin also gives its present and weekly meaning an important place. The Christian day of rest, Sunday, the first day of the week, is important as such. The church should worship regularly, and good order requires having a designated day for this worship. Further, those who work, especially those who provide menial service to others, require rest. For this the weekly observance of the Christian Sabbath is important.
Like Bonaventura, Calvin’s interprets the Commandment to honor the Sabbath in the light of Christ. Calvin, however, takes a step beyond Bonaventura. Calvin says that the weekly Sabbath is a foretaste of the eternal abiding with God. Bonaventura would not deny that. But Bonaventura concentrates this eschatological meaning of the Sabbath, the eternal contemplation of God, on and in the monastic life of contemplation. Thus, we see that the eschatological impulse in the Christian life was, for Bonaventura and the Middle Ages, institutionalized in monastic prayer, the vita contemplative. Calvin, following Luther, will not make this radical distinction between the vita active and the vita contemplativa. Daily work can be a calling from God in and through which we can serve the neighbor. Therefore, the Sabbath as a foretaste of eternal life becomes something that all Christians, not just monks and nuns should appreciate.
Conclusion
Modern western culture will less and less support, by public law and majority behavior, Sabbath observance, in either the Jewish or Christian senses. Already in Bavaria, for example, a traditionally Roman Catholic part of Germany where more church holidays are observed than anywhere else in the country, and perhaps in Europe, Sunday is becoming a shopping day. The global economy pressures every nation to let the requirements of the free market determines the opportunity to purchase and consume as well as produce. Added to this encroachment by “fun and shopping” during non-working time is the ever decreasing church attendance. The trend in Europe is steady; less than ten percent of the population attends regular worship.22 Yet another factor is the aging population. Those who do attend church are in the sixties, seventies and eighties or older. Very few, proportionally, young people are involved in the ongoing life of the church. Thus, the culture is not going to support the observation of Sunday as the Sabbath.
This disintegration of a supporting Christian culture means that believing Christians will have to move from custom and tradition to conscious decision if they wish to sustain Sabbath observance as a part of their Christian (sub) culture. The celebration of the Sabbath has always presupposed houses of worship. Very possibly, in fifty to one hundred years, most Christian churches will have been closed, as the culture becomes increasingly de-Christianized. Then Christians will have to find ways to celebrate the Sabbath elsewhere. This should not be difficult, because Christians can learn from Jews how to celebrate the Sabbath in their homes.
The collapse of cultural support for the observance of the Sabbath opens the opportunity for Christians to appropriate anew, in a conscious way, the meaning of celebrating the Sabbath. Like all Christian festivals, of which the Sabbath is a kind of miniature model,23 the Sabbath’s meaning has three dimensions. One is looking back. The Sabbath looks back to the institution of the Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment, and to the Easter Event that the Sabbath represents when it is celebrated on the first day of the week.
The Sabbath also looks forward, as Calvin, following Isaiah, taught. The Sabbaths in this life are an imperfect celebration of and rest in the Lord. Therefore, the Sabbaths of this life anticipate a future, eternal, perfect rest in God. This will be a being with God and with one another in God that transcends the chronological time that scatters our days.
The Sabbath also has a present meaning. Each Sunday Sabbath is a remembrance of God as the Creator of the world. The Sabbath is a time apart from work that relates us to the world as an object of appreciation, pleasure and enjoyment. The Sabbath in its present meaning is one day of the week when we can look upon the work of the week to come as a sharing in, a being shaped by and a showing forth of God’s purposes for the world, the purposes renewed and reestablished in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.
David Scott
November 2005
Murnau, Germany
1 Alexander Meschnig “Permanente Ostern: Von der Musse zum Fluch der Freien Zeit” (Permanent Easter: From Leisure to the Curse of Free Time) in Die Zehn Gebote: Eine Kunstaustellung des Deutschen Hygiene-Museums, Dresden 19 Juni-5 Dezember 2004 (Dresden: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004): 106-110. This Museum is a secular institution in former Communist East Germany. Nevertheless, in 2004 it presented an exhibition of photos organized around each of the Ten Commandments. They accompanying book contained articles describing the pictures and relevant to the different Commandments.
2 Meschnig does not point out that this global economy has raised the standard of living for millions of people, for example in China alone, in the last thirty years. While the global economy does widen the gap between rich and poor and does send some people into poverty it has improved the material well being of millions.
3 Presently, the Germany economy is in the doldrums and expects little more than 1% growth. Economic advisors repeat the diagnosis that spending by German consumers must increase if the poor state of the economy is to improve. In the United States, by contrast, no one seems to need to urge citizens to buy, even though the average US household is heavily in debt. Whatever robustness marks the US economy seems heavily reliant on consumer debt, not to speak about defense spending. Needless to say, the elevation of consumption as a moral duty in developed nations, contrasting to massive poverty in parts of Africa and Asia is a moral outrage for which we in the west will have to answer in the Final Judgment.
4 Menschnig, ibid. 110; my translation from the German.
5 Christians should not be surprised at the irony of our culture’s prizing of individual autonomy and its simultaneous lament of feeling ruled by an impersonal regime of production and consumption.
6 The second essay associated in the above-mentioned volume, also coordinated with the Sabbath Commandment, Genvieve Hesse laments that today “this holiday/dieser Feiertag” (the Sabbath) is not a transcending of work but is observed for the sake of work. The function of the Sabbath is to allow workers to rest so that they will work better the other days of the week. The Sabbath does not set the meaning of the workdays. On the contrary, the workdays establish the meaning of the non- working days. Competition, profit and consuming and establishing an identity through these now determine the meaning of the Sabbath. Hesse, who has written on the feminist movement, asks whether modern women are at fault in the loss of meaning for the Sabbath. She points out that women’s work in the household made possible a day of Sabbath rest. In the second half of the twentieth century, women entered the job market to become independent of men. Hesse says that women rightly rejected the one-sided dependence of women on men. But she acknowledges that this development results in many “privaten Arbeiten” (private works) being given short change. Educational, relationship and household tasks are crammed into the weekend, with women usually held responsible for them. This undermines the weekend as a day of rest. See Genvieve Hesse, “Der Sabbat: Sich ueber alle Arbeiten erheben” pp. 126-118 in Die Zehn Gebote: Eine Kunstaustellung des Deutschen Hygiene-Museums, Dresden 19 Juni-5 Dezember 2004 .
7 An example, not dealt with in the body of this essay, is the account in John 5 of Jesus healing the lame man at the Pool of Beth-zatha in Jerusalem. The lame man, now healed by Jesus, was, on the Sabbath, carrying the pallet on which he had lain for 38 years. The religious leaders challenged him for breaking the Sabbath. Jesus replies that “the Father is working and I am working.” The account concludes: “For this reason the Jews were seeking all he more to kill him, because he was not only breaking the Sabbath but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God. “ John 5: 18.
8 One thinks of the terrible event, reported in the newspapers, of Moslem teachers forbidding Moslem schoolgirls to leave their burning school because the were not at that moment fully attired as required of Moslem girls in public. This “keeping of the commandment” about proper public dress for females caused several girls to burn to death in their school. The public outcry against the teachers’ actions reflected the same intuition about the purpose of God’s Commandments as Jesus showed when he healed on the Sabbath.
9 Since Christians considered the first day of the week the Sabbath, they may have done things on the last day of the week that were perceived by Jews as “breaking the Sabbath.”
10 “Shadow” here is not a negative or threatening image, as in the phrase “lurking in the shadows.” Rather, the term skia is a hint, a clue in the sense of foreshadow. Thus, the falling autumn leaves foreshadow the approaching winter.
11 The image of God resting exemplifies poetic or metaphorical language used to speak about God. Christian theology cannot describe God as “getting weary” after six days of creating, of needing to rest, as do human beings and other animals. This kind of metaphorical use of language, of course, is an instance when a thoughtful Christian will see that a “literal interpretation” of some passages of Scripture is a misinterpretation. On this question, one should distinguish between interpretations of Scripture that takes the biblical text seriously, without interpreting every statement literally and interpretation that places all biblical language on the same level as factual, “scientific” assertions. The Bible is filled with metaphorical, poetic ways of speaking about God. An interpreter does not take such words of the Bible seriously if he or she tries to interpret them literally.
12 Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik, III/4 51ff.
13 At the latest with the advent of the industrial revolution, , with the rise of the dehumanizing conditions of much labor, philosophers and social reformers have agonized over the dehumanizing of work. The great achievements of the labor movements in the end of the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries witness to this concern. Karl Marx’s writing and the whole Communist Movement, in its several forms, expressed this yearning. The inability of most labor unions in the US and Europe to adjust to the new global economy, the collapse of Communist states and of the utopian dream of a communist rehumanization of labor has left the modern cultural landscape littered with disillusioned cultural critics. The Jewish Sabbath Commandment and the Christian Gospel speaks about a humanization of human work, which is only possible in relation to God.
14 A secular vision of human labor, i.e., a vision that cannot see human work as sharing in God’s grace and power, inevitably assigns to work either a Promethean grandeur or, when this proves illusory, produces despair about all human work. Or, as in classical Greece, Rome and China, physical labor was viewed as unworthy, a matter for slaves or the “lower classes.” In Marxist ideology, for example, or in Secular Humanism, which view human beings as alone responsible for making a humane world and even in making themselves through their choices and works, the only two options open are a self-idolization of homo faber, human beings as makers, or the despair that comes when humans become convinced that all their best efforts are good for nothing in the long run (Jean Paul Sartre, “human being: a useless passion”). The Sabbath, as God’s Command/Invitation to share in His creating and creation, can save human labor from idolatry and from despair.
15 Karl Marx, especially in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is the modern writer who most profoundly explored the importance of human labor. He did so, of course, from a materialistic and secular worldview, which, nevertheless, did not lack religious traits, owed probably to the rabbinic inheritance of Marx’s forebears. Marx had two great ideas about work. One was that capitalism converts a person’s labor into an object, a ware, bought and sold on the market. This objectification of a person’s labor, reducing it to a sales item, alienates humans from their own labor. Marx’s second great insight is that work is both a means of self-expression and a way of sharing oneself with others in their need. To be alienated from one’s labor strikes at the heart of a person’s humanity. Since one’s work is a means of serving others and expressing oneself, to be robbed of one’s labor is to lose oneself, to be robbed of oneself and to be robbed of a way to share oneself with others. This alienation from one’s work and thereby from oneself is why capitalism, especially the brutal “Manchester capitalism” that Marx knew in England, (and is reborn on the new economic zones in eastern China) is dehumanizing, Marx taught. The dehumanization experienced by those thrown out of work testifies to the truth of Marx’s insights. The danger of Marx’s view, of course, is that work in Communist systems becomes equated with a person’s whole identity. Since in Communist systems, calling itself the system of farmers and workers, the state controls all work, the individual worker becomes merely a function of the state; the worker loses his/her identityto the state. Thus, in Maoist China, in Stalin’s Russia and in the former East Germany the worker was both elevated to the status of a hero in the public ideology, but in practice lost his rights as an individual citizen. Also, in practice, the labor morale in Communist societies was often very poor partly because command economies are inefficient (unable to correlate closely consumer needs and wants with production) and also because those Communist systems rewarded lazy workers and industrious workers equally.
16 St. Bonaventura Collationes de decem praeceptis; Collatio 4, paragraph 11.
17 St. Bonaventura Collationes de decem praeceptiis, Collatio IV, 2.
18 Luther, Sermon von den guten Werke, 3. Gebot, paragraph 1.
19 Luther may have the beads of the rosary in mind or some other way churchgoers count the number of times they say a prayer.
20 Sermon ueber den guten Werke, paragraph 12.
21 John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, Chapter viii.; Paragraph 31.
22 Statistics for Germany could be representative for all of Western Europe. In 1950, 96% of the population of the Republic of West German belonged to one of the Churches (Reformed, Lutheran or Roman Catholic). In the German Democratic Republic, the figure was 91 percent. In 1987, in the BRD, 85 percent, and in the DDR 40%; in 2001 only 32 % belonged to the Evangelical (Protestant) Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. The remaining 30% have never joined one of the churches or have left the church of their upbringing. In the news this week (November 20, 2005) was the report of the Evangelical Lutheran Church deciding to close a church in the suburbs of Munich. In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Boston, several parishes churches are being closed.
23 That is, every Sunday is a remembering of Easter.