Sabbath: A Case Study

Following up last week's blog of reflections on N.T. Wright's newest book, Scripture and the Authority of God, I wan to explore one of the case studies offered at the end of the book. Taking his basic thesis of scripture as a five-act story, Wright shows the interpretation behind how the church today should interact with the commandment to keep the Sabbath. The seemingly obvious contradictions between the Old Testament's commands and the complete lack of mention in the writings of the very Jewish Paul (particularly its absence in his list of the ten commandments in Romans 13)  and Jesus' bold opposition to at least what the the Sabbath had become leaves one to wonder what to do. Wright suggests that we must observe the Sabbath's role in the five-act story if we are to understand why and how the New Testament writers used it.

The first act finds God in the initial creation account. After six days, God finds rest and provides the foundation for Sabbath observance. While the passage is simple, to the culture in which it was first told and then repeated, something much deeper but also obvious is happening on that seventh day. The Genesis account is a near mirror-image of other creation accounts from the ancient middle-east. Yet the striking differences are what make Yahweh the unique God he is. All the creation accounts climax with the creating god/gods residing in a temple, yet in Genesis, God resides in the Temple that is his entire creation and his "image-bearers," humanity, will do what their God does.

Act two involves the fall, albeit the actual occurrence only takes up a mere chapter among the thousands of the Bible the ramification of man's choice to sin are seen on every page that follows. Our role as "image-bearers" is tarnished if not completely ruined in the disobedient act and God sets forth in the third act to to right this wrong to return us to the "rest" in the Temple of the perfect creation. Its is and has been a long process.

The next time we see Sabbath spoken of explicitly is in the dispensation of the Law in Exodus. Interestingly here the Sabbath begins to take up a deeper meaning than mere rest. While its undoubtedly a day to worship God, it is also ties tightly to justice and freedom. God makes it clear that the Sabbath would be a day for slaves to be free, not just from work but there very indentured state.  The Sabbath becomes a day for the poor and even the animals. God is interested in protecting everything in His Temple. Another feature of Sabbath that will eventually bridge us to the forth act is Jubilee.

Jubilee was a an act of year-long Sabbath every seven years when debts were canceled and ever 49 years (seven times seven) liberty for all, returning to ancestral boundaries, freeing slaves, and rest for the land from plowing and harvesting. Isaiah 61 ties Jubilee to Sabbath observance and offers a picture of what Jubilee (and consequently Sabbath) is ultimately pointing towards, the restoration of God's creation and God's people. It is a day when Israel, His people, can not only observe this restoration but take part in implementing it, a great privilege indeed.

This brings us to the fourth act in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus opens his public ministry by reading from the Jubilee passage from Isaiah 61, announcing the freedom for the captives, good news for the poor, and such. He caps this reading by proclaiming"Today, this  scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." And in those words, His Jewish audience heard Jesus claiming to be the fulfillment of God's plan of restoration, the very thing the sign posts of Sabbath and Jubilee had been pointing to all along. Time had reached the Jubilee of Jubilees. Jesus goes on to make other statements to emphasize the fulfillment of the Sabbath (and also of all markers of God's plan of redemption in the Old Testament). He is the "Lord of the Sabbath," one must come to him to find "rest" and the time is "fulfilled" in the at hand Kingdom.

John conducts a new creation account of sorts in the passion of Jesus. The work of the new creation is "finished" on the sixth day on the cross as Jesus breathes those last words, "it is finished." He finds rest in the grave on the seventh day and "on the first day of the week" Jesus is resurrected and a new creation is born, the first day. The New Testament authors realized the fulfillment of God's plan for Israel coming in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, that a new day, a new act, had dawned with the rising Son. The book of Hebrews make this the most clear in 3:7-4:11 detailing the entire new age inaugurated by Jesus as a great "Sabbath rest." And that we enter God's rest, the seventh day, by faith in Christ.

So we find ourselves in an interpretive dance in the fifth-act. The Sabbath as practiced by the Jews is not to be ignored but cherished as an integral part of our story as the rudder on the ship that brought us across the sea.  Wright sums it up like this:

"My central point in this section, then, is that the Sabbath command of the Old Testament was a true and necessary signpost, pointing forward to God's purposes for his creation and to the place of Israel in relation to those purposes. but it was always, from the perspective of Genesis 2:3, a sign which spoke of God coming to live in his heaven-and-earth creation, taking up residence, dwelling in the midst of his people. ...Sabbath is a sign of the [end] to come; the New Testament speaks of Jesus acting as if he were the [end] in person, sacred time come to life. This...is what lies behind the wholesale disappearance of the Sabbath command in early Christianity. And this is the clue to the way in which the surprisingly complex scriptural material about the Sabbath can be powerfully authoritative for the Christian in our day, or in any day."

Wright goes on to make some applications of how we are to still practice "Sabbath" today but in a relatively new way. To rephrase his quote, one does not place a sign pointing to Memphis at the Peabody. Our rhythms must point forward to the close of this age of fulfillment, to the new heavens and new earth and to celebrate to the presence of the Spirit in our world as opposed to "waiting" on the coming age in rest. As the New Testament states, Now is the time.

Wright paints a compelling picture of the Bible as a five-part play and gives a convincing meta-narrative to not only buy into but to live within. Reading the Bible in the midst of its entire context is a vastly overlooked discipline that as shown in this case study can deliver fresh avenues for God's authority to to work through and in the scriptures. 

A Seat at the Table

Every Thanksgiving, my family congregates at Grandma's house for a feast, sometimes as many as 60 people in attendance. My Dad would tell the story about his first Pierce Thanksgiving. He described a washtub of dressing, nine pies, and what he thought amounted to enough food to feed an army. However, he underestimated the appetites of the Pierce army and after taking a nap found my Uncle Jimmy picking the last scraps of meat off of the turkey carcass. I can assure you that this feeding frenzy we call Thanksgiving has not ceased to be a furious survival of the fittest at Grandma's house.  There is little decorum to these meals, most carry a fork in their front pockets so that they can sample the goods before Grandma prays and we take turns trying to cut each other and pushing the capacity of our paper plates to their limits. Yet there is one aspect of this meal that us newcomers refuse to intrude upon, who sits at the table. Like I said, sometimes as many as 60 people show up for this meal and sit all sorts of places, on stumps, lawn chairs, the floor, but a few, only about three, sit at the table.  These are usually my uncles: Jesse, Steve, Rocky, and Jimmy. Although no one has ever stated that it is off limits to sit there, I wouldn't dare presume to take a chance. Sometimes they do let others sit there, my brother has before and some of my cousins, but none of them lasted very long; my uncles are a tough bunch to sit with I promise you. Throughout my years of sharing this meal, I like my dad, have learned a few lessons, but most of all I learned that you must earn your seat at the table.

Jesus finds himself ,strange enough, at a table similar to my Grandma's. One Sabbath after the Jewish equivalent of church, he is invited to meal at the religous leader's house. There he finds that this extension of hospitality was actually far from it, the host sought to test his guests to evaluate their worth to sit at his table. Jesus, clever as always, addressses this act of inhospitability by reversing the table, he points to another reciepiant of the host's up-turned nose, a man with swollen joints. Jesus asks the group what is the right thing to do on this day, to heal or not to heal? The party remains silent, the answer is clear enough but in the answer they find their hypocrisy revealed. The Sabbath was a day to let go and let God, but they were using it to jockey for position, to earn a right to sit at the table. Instead of showing hospitalty to the injured man, they ignore him because he is in their way. Yet Jesus refuses to let them go along in such a manner. Into their silence, he tells them a story that gives flesh to the skeleton of a meal they are sharing. He says:

"When someone invites you to dinner, don't take the place of honor. Somebody more important than you might have been invited by the host. Then he'll come and call out in front of everybody, 'You're in the wrong place. The place of honor belongs to this man.' Red-faced, you'll have to make your way to the very last table, the only place left. 

"When you're invited to dinner, go and sit at the last place. Then when the host comes he may very well say, 'Friend, come up to the front.' That will give the dinner guests something to talk about! What I'm saying is, If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face. But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself."

Meals are indeed sacred; times when, if we are true to their intent, we are brought to the same level. We all need meat and bread, we each need sustenance and are utterly dependent upon God and each other for this food. Meals are a time to share our hopes and jokes, time to not only share the gravy but our very lives. Yet we, like the religious leaders Jesus speaks this story to, have perverted the intent of a meal. It has become a time to hoard as opposed to a time to give, a time to expose our power over another as opposed to a time to humble ourselves, and a time to lament our lack as opposed to a time to praise our abundance. But the beauty of this story like most of Jesus' stories is that it not only exposes our deficiencies, it also offers hope of a better story.

In our humility, Jesus says, we find honor. I said that I never presumed to sit at the table with my uncles; this was not because I had some great sense of humility but because I was scared of them. They are some big bad dudes, but through the years I've sought to honor the men who grew up with my Momma and in small ways I've had some of the honor and even respect reciprocated. And I promise you, those few moments and words have been some of the sweetest in my life. I think that all along, if I simply had the courage, I could have found a seat at their table, there was always room, because they had no need to prove themselves to anyone, least of all me. "But these strict Sabbath-keepers had their eyes first on Jesus to see what he was going to do, then on one another to see how they could take advantage of one another. They were betraying the Sabbath in the very act of 'protecting' it. (Peterson, 82,3)" And we betray ourselves when we use the good things God has given us to somehow prove ourselves. May we lower our noses and seek the last place and perhaps we may hear Christ himself say to us, "Friend, come up front."