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National Student Essay Contest
Creation, Sabbath, and Sunday:
Genesis 1.1-2.3 as Common Ground for a Judeo-Christian Ethic
of Sacred Time
by Adam Meredith-Ployd In America, we know the meaning of time. Our speech is ripe with cultural catchphrases expressing our intimate relationship to time. We constantly need more of it. We fear it is running out. We divide our commitments and responsibilities into those that waste time and those that are time well spent. We even speak of "buying" some time, because, after all, time is money.
Or is it?
In a society where a life of faith is too often synony-mous with an "American life," it behooves us to reflect upon the rhythms that give meaning and purpose to our lives, to consider the very nature of Time itself. Genesis 1.1-2.3 offers a view of Sacred Time that orients the liturgical and practical lives of both Jewish and Christian faith communities. Conversation between these two communities regarding the origin and significance of the Sabbath and the Lord's day should lead to a shared ethic of Sacred Time reflecting what it means to abide by God's Time in a world which winds its watches to the ticking of political and economic rhythms.
The priestly Creation narrative of Genesis 1.1-2.3 depicts the origin of Time within the creative action of God. In a cycle of deed and blessing, day and night, work and rest, God brings forth the rudimentary ele-ments of existence -- space and time -- ex nihilo, out of nothing. Our reality, and our time, has its ontological grounding in the very will and action of God. The first action of the Creator is to bring forth Light: "God called the Light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day" (1.5). Before there is substance or space, there is Time. The unceasing rhythm of night and day, light and dark, the most basic timeframe of human existence, is made holy by its origin in God's creative work. On the sixth day, "God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (1.31). Time itself, the first creation, receives God's blessing.
God does not simply bless Time itself but also conse-crates a certain rhythm and cycle within it. Genesis 2.2 attests that God, having "completed his work which He had done," rests from labor on the seventh day. Though ostensibly completed on the sixth day, Creation comes to completion in the fullness of Time. This is to say, when God "blesse[s] the seventh day and sanctifie[s] it, because in it He rested" (2.3), God completes the cycle of Time with which Creation was begun. Creation indeed continues on the seventh day. On this day God creates and hallows both the seven-day week and the cycle of work and rest that is to define our observance of it.
Both Judaism and Christianity find the rhythms for their Sacred Time within Genesis 1.1-2.3. Both the Sabbath and the Lord's Day, the fundamental markers of time for Judaism and Christianity respectively, serve to renew and honor God's Time in the midst of the world's itin-erary. The historical and theological origins of the Sabbath and the Lord's Day illuminate both the nature of Sacred Time within the two communities as well as the distinctions between Jewish and Christian thought and practice.
The development of the Jewish Sabbath is complex at best. In fact, the Bible gives two variant explanations for its significance. Whereas Exodus 20.8-11 commands the observance of the Sabbath for the sake that God "rested on the seventh day," Deuteronomy 5.12-15 describes the Sabbath as a remembrance of slavery in Egypt and God's saving act of liberation. Though source criticism reveals many possible explanations for these variations, we may also understand this as a juxtaposi-tion of two understandings of Sacred Time that are interwoven within Jewish thought and practice. A brief look at these two notions of Sacred Time will further enrich our understanding of the Sabbath.
In The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade explores the nature of Sacred Time especially as it relates to creation myths. "Every religious festival," he posits, "any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, ‘in the begin-ning.’"1 Sacred Time, then, is a means by which we invoke divine reality, epitomized in primordial creation, into our own realm. The religious life moves not to the rhythms of agriculture, society, or the body, but to the sanctified rhythms of the gods. Though Sacred Time may echo the "natural" processes of life, it is not defined by them. In this way, sacred import is leant to times of ritual, rest, and renewal. The human, whose life is toil, decay, and death, now holds a share in the divine mys-tery of eternity, celebrating a cyclical view of history in which the creative work of the gods is ritually renewed in a sacred time-out-of-time.
Eliade fails, however, to represent the complexity of Sacred Time within the Jewish tradition. According to Eliade, the main innovation of Jewish Sacred Time is a move from "cosmic time" to "historical time," a ritual paradigm shift from cyclical renewals of primordial crea-tion to celebrations of God's theophanic actions within linear history. Though the Exodus and Zion traditions attest to the historical revelations and works of God, Eliade's statement that God "no longer manifests himself in cosmic time"2 cannot be reconciled with the procla-mation of Genesis 1.1 that "in the beginning God created Heaven and earth." This is indicative of the complexities of the Hebrew Scriptures and their view of God's rela-tionship to Israel and the cosmos.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the seemingly divergent accounts of Sabbath origins. The theological wonder of the Sabbath is that it blends cyclical ritual with linear remembrance. The Exodus is not the begin-ning of Time but the beginning of a people's relationship with the God who is the very source of Time. With the Exodus event, the reality of Time itself is reshaped. The God who delivers Israel from captivity is also the God who forms the heavens and earth. The creator-god who acts "in the beginning" is also the YHWH who intervenes in human history. The One who is beyond Time acts within it as well. This is both the tension and the testi-mony of the community's faith.
In the Torah, Sabbath observance emerges in the wil-derness after the flight from Egypt. This narrative position illustrates the thematic and theological import of the Sabbath. Not only are former slaves, "recently liberated chattel . . . [whose] lives had been all about work,"3 granted the commandment to rest on the seventh day, but, furthermore, the direct allusion to Genesis 1.1-2.3 in Exodus 20.11 evokes the motif of creation to illustrate the establishment of God's holy people. The seventh day, consecrated by God in time immemorial, now hallows the people of God chosen to live in a unique relationship to the Creator.
If the slopes of Sinai hold the thematic origins of the Sabbath, the Exile holds the key to the Sabbath's sig-nificance within the life of the community. "Deprived of its Temple, capital city, and homeland," Daniel Harrington explains, "the Jewish exiles emphasized the Sabbath as a very important obligation."4 Removed from its Sacred Space, the Jewish community holds on to Sacred Time as a way to define itself as distinct from the foreign culture, a way to maintain its covenantal relationship to God, and as a source of hope.
The impact of Exile on the worship life and religious identity of the Jewish community is readily apparent in Second-Temple and Rabbinic Judaism. In a time of re-creation, a time in which the rebuilding of the Holy Place of God is paramount, the priests and the people reorient their new birth to the cosmic creation, embracing their own creative acts and weekly rest as recapitulations of the divine work. At this time, the Sabbath also adopts a definitively eschatological flavor. "As a proleptic antici-pation of that perfect age to come," Herold Weiss explains, "the Sabbath made essential qualities of the divine realm available in this life."5 Seeking to actualize this divine realm, some groups tie the Sabbath to mes-sianic prophecies, viewing perfect observance of the Sabbath as a precursor to the Messiah's coming. Though the ancient origins of Sabbath rest may be murky, its centrality in Second-Temple Judaic thought and beyond is clear. Whether as a newly established community in the wilderness or a displaced nation in exile; whether seeking to find holy rest from toil or to usher in the messianic age; the people of Israel intimately seek to live in Sacred Time, to honor the rhythms of Creation that God declared to be "very good."
This is, of course, true for the first Christians as well. Two variant misconceptions pervade the modern Chris-tian understanding of the Sabbath: that it was replaced by Sunday worship or that our Sunday ritual is the Sabbath in Christian clothing. Though the first statement has some theological basis, neither view represents the complexity of early Christian thought regarding the Sab-bath and the Christian relationship to Genesis 1.1-2.3.
The paramount significance of the priestly Creation account for early Christians is irrefutable. Samuele Bacchiocchi, citing New Testament texts such as Mark 2.27 and Hebrews 4.3, concludes, "the creation origin of the Sabbath is not only accepted but is also presented as the basis for understanding God's ultimate purpose for his people."6 Conflict between Sabbath observance and Christian worship arises out of the Christian interpreta-tion of the Christ event in the context of the seven-day creation. For many, Christ is the Telos of Creation, the Messiah that the Sabbath observance has been antici-pating. In the words of Athanasius of Alexandria, "The Sabbath was the end of the first creation, the Lord's day was the beginning of the second in which He renewed and restored the old."7 Here we see that the Lord's day, or Sunday worship, is not simply the Sabbath on a new day. Like the Jewish community, Christians live their lives to the rhythm of God's seven-day Creation. They do not, however, simply choose the first day, the primordial day of Light, to replace the day of rest; they proclaim the Good News that, through the salvation of Christ's incarnation, the Creation, once fallen, has truly been renewed. This is now the eighth day, the new Creation of God.
Christians continue to wrestle with the relationship of the Sabbath to the Lord's Day. How does a Christian living in the New Creation honor the fourth command-ment? Are Christians obliged to keep both the seventh-day Sabbath and the Lord's Day, or does the latter take precedence? Weiss illustrates that the New Testament authors do not speak in unison on this issue but offer a spectrum of answers to the problem. For instance, whereas the writers of the Synoptic Gospels defend, to varying degrees, the continual observance of the Sab-bath, Paul and the author of John see it as unnecessary for those born anew into Christ's new reality.8 Ulti-mately, Sabbath observance fades in Christianity, but the language of the Sabbath is increasingly applied to the eighth/first day worship.
Christianity is fortunate to have this false understanding of Sunday as Sabbath. In a time in which little is said of the "eighth day," the juxtaposition of Sabbath with Sun-day, a connection which is not completely inappropriate, draws us back to the origin of our shared tradition of Sacred Time. The recognition of our mutual yet unique orientation to the world and to God is a first step in promoting interfaith conversation. Having established this shared heritage, our next step is to articulate to and with one another what it means to live a conse-crated life. By appreciating Genesis 1.1-2.3 as the common pacemaker of our liturgical rhythms, Christians and Jews may begin to construct a joint ethic of Sacred Time. This ethic arises from our respective callings to live into the rhythms established and hallowed by God at the foundation of Time itself. In a desire for true ecu-menism, we will offer one distinct contribution to this ethic from either tradition and join them with a final, uni-fying theme.
The Sabbath offers an appropriately priestly understand-ing of this ethic. Samuel Meier notes that, within Torah, the counting of seven days is not reserved to the week-ly Sabbath cycle alone. Within the priestly tradition, he argues, "the standard purification period with few excep-tions is a seven-day period that is independent of the weekly cycle and the Sabbath."9 Examples of these purification periods include those for menstruating women, leprosy quarantine, and corpse contact. Seven days, then, represents the shift from impurity to purity. By observing the Sabbath we are participants in God's Sacred Time of renewal and purification. An ethic of Sacred Time, therefore, includes the conviction that, by simply observing and honoring the consecrated time of God, we not only become ritually pure, but we purify the time around us, invoking the presence of God's holy rhythm within the profane syncopation of human time.
Whereas the Jewish contribution proceeds from a close, priestly reading of Genesis 1.1-2.3, the Christian offering constitutes a radical reinterpretation of it. By proclaiming Christ to have inaugurated a new Creation, the eighth day, Christians "announce that God's creative activity [is] continuing."10 An eighth day suggests the possibil-ities for a ninth and a tenth. Christians proclaim both the present reign of Christ and the Kingdom to come, expressing a theologically rich paradox: Christ both perfected and is perfecting Creation. To live in Christian Sacred Time is to be ever vigilant and ever hopeful, aware of one's holy position within the Creative Days of God. To live in Christian Sacred Time is to celebrate in the fullness of Creation through Christ, mourn the continuing brokenness of the world, and strive for wholeness, for that ninth day in which the present and future Kingdoms of God may be one.
At the heart of both these ethics is the resounding dec-laration that God's reality is not the world's reality. This is the ethical core of a Judeo-Christian ethic of Sacred Time: A life lived in God's time speaks a thundering "No!" to the timetables of this world. No! Time is not money. No! Time is not able to be bought. No! Time is neither running out nor can you attain more of it. This is the purifying action of the Sabbath life, indicting the profane rhythms that govern our society. This is the wholeness that eighth-day living proclaims. We say "No!" to the rhythms of greed that live and die by the tolling of a bell on Wall Street. We say "No!" to the rhythms of class that do not have time to love the neighbor. We say "No!" to the rhythms of war that seek justification in the past and vindication in the future for the atrocities of the present.
We say "Yes!" to the good Creation of our God, a Creation that begins and ends with Time.
Endnotes
1Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1957), 68-69.
2Ibid., 110.
3David Capes, "The Eighth Day," in Christian Reflection: Sabbath, ed. Robert Kruschwitz (Waco, TX: The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, 2002), 18.
4Daniel Harrington, S. J., "Sabbath Tensions: Matthew 12:1-13 and Other New Testament Texts," in The Sab-bath in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Tamara Eskenazi (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 51.
5Herold Weiss, A Day of Gladness: The Sabbath among Jews and Christians in Antiquity (Columbia, SC: Univer-sity of South Carolina Press, 2003), 169.
6Samuele Bacchiocchi, "Remembering the Sabbath: The Creation-Sabbath in Jewish and Christian History," in The Sabbath in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Tamara Eskenazi (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 77.
7Ibid., 78.
8Weiss, 88.
9Samuel Meier, "The Sabbath and Purification Cycles," in The Sabbath in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Tamara Eskenazi (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 6.
10Capes, 17.
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