The Sabbath
This is the second in a series on the Jubilee Year of 2025.
Last week, we learned about the Church’s jubilee, a year of favor given by God for the forgiveness of sins and the gaining of graces. To understand where it came from, we have to start at the beginning (a very good place to start). When God created the heavens and the earth, he placed man and woman at the center of his creation as his children to work and guard the garden of Eden. At the end of the first creation story, the narrative concludes: “So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation” (Gen. 2:3). This hallowed day, the Sabbath, literally means “to cease, to stop” because man is called to stop, to refrain, to cease from his normal routine to worship his Creator and enjoy the creation he was given. We all know how the story of Adam and Eve continued: given all they needed by their Creator and ordered to rest, they reached out to grasp something that didn’t belong to them. In doing so, they forfeited the many gifts of Eden for a hard life of toil out in the world. The rest of salvation history can be seen as man’s attempt to recover these gifts of Eden: God’s forgiveness, total freedom, a family relationship with their Creator, and the fullness of God’s blessing.
The second dimension of the Sabbath was Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. Often seen as merely a political liberation, God’s rescue of his firstborn son Israel was primarily spiritual. The people’s worship of the Egyptian gods for the last four centuries had enslaved them to these false deities, and God through the Ten Plagues strips his people from these spiritual shackles by showing the weakness of these so-called ‘gods’. The people of Israel were politically enslaved to the Egyptian Pharaoh, and spiritually enslaved to his gods. When God liberates Israel and leads them to Mt. Sinai, he renews his covenant with them with the Sabbath at the center. To honor the gift of their freedom from slavery, the people of Israel were invited to rest from the slavery of work and rejoice in God’s gifts. Every Sabbath, they inconvenienced themselves by stopping from their work and intentionally resting in God. They were called to recognize that they were not the master of their own existence, but that God was the author of the Sabbath and every other day. On Mt. Sinai, they were forgiven by God, brought into freedom, entered into a family covenant, and promised the fullest blessing through the promise of the Land. In response, they returned one day of each week back to God in gratitude. We’ll learn next week how Israel was challenged to trust God even more by resting for an entire year, the so-called ‘Sabbatical’.