Salvation in the Bible hinges upon the presence of God, linked to his relationship to creation in his Sabbath rest (or Sabbath peace), the sacred time into which he invites those (being) created in his image. God’s rest contains and extends the divine reflection, “It is good, it is very good.” This reflective time is returned to creation as revelation: “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen 2:3). This permanent day, without morning or evening, is God’s significance, his sanctifying presence, given to and revealed in this day. The six days of creation, of activity, of motion, of control of chaos, etc., are for and lead to the seventh, containing the divine reflexive goodness. It might be said nothing happens on this day, but this day is the happening, the significance, the meaning arising out of and enfolding the other days. It is the final marker, contained within the sequence of events, each with its own sort of goodness, but culminating in the eternal goodness. According to Sigve Tonstad, “By the act of hallowing the seventh day God drives the stake of the divine presence into the soil of human time.”[1]
This day, in the description of Maximus, has no “created origin, since it is the manifestation of realities beyond limit and measure.”[2] It is subsequent to the created realities of the previous six days, with their measured beginning and end, morning and evening. It is unlimited and uncircumscribed, as he is in this eternal day. This “perpetual day, is the unalloyed, all-shining presence of God, which comes about after things in motion have come to rest.”[3] Maximus links the day with eternality in three modes or through three ways: being, well-being, and eternal-being. It is not that God’s Being is contained on a continuum with being, but it is out of the “essence” of God” that creation’s being occurs. This is a potential, actualized through human well-being and free choice. Given the reality of creation and nature, there is the potential to enact (or not), well-being. Eternal-being, contains and fills out the potential and activity of the others, and it is not a “natural potential within beings.”[4]
Maximus sidesteps an ontotheology which would put God on a continuum with being, through the division of the six days from the Sabbath. We do not get to God through creation directly, due to its own nature or its own essence, but we come to God in creation as on the order of a temple or a resting place for God, in which the meaning is in the added divine declaration. The motion and free choice of that which has a beginning and whose activity and motion has an end, cannot come to eternality through itself. There is an eternality to which creation gives access, through Sabbath, but the motion of the other days must cease. All activity, evolution, creation, even of an infinite or ongoing kind does not come to eternality, in fact it ensures, in its continual beginning and ending, that eternity will be obscured. All process (as in materialistic evolution or continual creation) does not allow for encounter with the agent behind the process, and this is the meaning given in the seventh day, otherwise lacking. It links creation with the Creator, not only by implication, but through presence, enunciation, and participation.
Nature and creation are not everything, though the world religions build upon this presumption in worshipping nature, and human philosophy often concludes the world is all that is the case (materialism, atheism, animism etc.). Sabbath puts a limit on creation from within, which opens onto or is eternity. Nature and free choice have a potential but there is a limit to their powers and activity, but that limit is the eternal. Their limit accords with the eternal principle for which they were created. We might say time is circumscribed by eternity, but this seventh day is an interpenetrating time. It is encountered among the other days and time as goal, as eternal possibility. God speaks on the other days (manifest in what is made), but God’s Word on this day is a direct manifestation and reflection of himself. The other days can be seen in what they produce, but this day is devoted to God’s word, to his delight and declaration, and to hearing. This difference marks the limits of what is made (manifest, seen, objective) from what is unmade (God himself).
There is activity, creating, working, tending, and eventually sweating and toil (which must end but is not its own end), then there is God’s sharing of himself. Nature and free choice have a potential which grace fulfills, and this is the significance (the symbol and the reality) of Sabbath. It is not that the eternal is outside of creation, but in Sabbath the eternal is conjoined and resting in creation. The eternal is not limited by the finite, but the finite is precisely for and intersected by the eternal. Eternality, God, Goodness, True Essence, are not limited, as if eternity were limited by time, or God excluded or limited by creation, but the opposite is the case; the created and finite are limited by the Eternal. This day without beginning or end, without created origin, is not succeeded by another, but is the terminus of all days and ages. This terminus though, is met among the others, as its own day and an alternative way.
The problem is that Sabbath presence is obscured for humans, and the story of the Bible might be read as Sabbath (re)gained. The faith founded on divine presence begins with a Judaism dealing primarily in absence. God speaks to Abraham, but shows up intermittently, though “Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws” (Gen 26:5), which points to Sabbath remembrance. The first lesson of Israel in the wilderness concerns remembering Sabbath rest, which had already been given (Ex 16:1-31). They were to trust in God to provide double manna on the sixth day and to preserve it on the seventh, though they feared starvation. God shows himself in Sinai and the Tabernacle, but the Jews approached the sacred space only in trepidation and through representatives (Moses, Aaron, the high priest). He was hidden in the holy of holies, but then his glory absconded from the Temple entirely. The sacred space is lost in the exile, and sacred time is all that remains, but the prevailing sense is: “Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!” (Is 45:15). The Sabbath no longer claimed location, and its time was limited. The Sabbath was a remembrance of creation and God’s resting, holding out a promise of freedom, but in slavery, exile, and subjugation, the Jews seem unprepared for divine presence.
Jesus’ Sabbath controversies, his deliberate healing on the Sabbath, and his direct identity with God, fill out the revelation and meaning of Sabbath. Jesus explains, the Sabbath is not a day of doing nothing, but it is the day in which God is working in healing, redeeming, delivering, and saving: “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working” (Jn 5:17). Throughout, Jesus challenges the received Jewish understanding of Sabbath (as inactivity), to emphasize divine activity. In turn, the paralytic must carry his mat (Jn 5), the blind man must mix mud (Jn 9), both involving activity the Jews prohibited on the Sabbath. It is this Sabbath work of redemption, performed by God but including a joyous response (mud mixing, bed carrying, running and leaping). A burden is involved, but it is a joyous burden inclusive of healing.
Believers take up the burden of cross, the work of redemption of Christ, learning the rest of God is a cessation of one kind of work, synonymous with the work of redemption. Jesus’ direct identity with God (“I am” the life raising the dead, the light giving sight to the blind, the true water curing thirst) arises in healing, the lifting of crushing burden, exchanged for an easy life-giving yoke. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me . . . my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30). The healing is a proof of who Jesus is, but also of who God is. The absence and seeming indifference of God to human suffering is remedied in the curing of blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and death itself. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28).
This violation and correction of Jewish Sabbath expectations involves reidentifying God in Christ, re-understanding the Sabbath, and accepting that God is present and revealed. There is a burden to bear, but it is not the weight and toil of the world, but the taking up of the cross, the burden of redemption. The Creator is the Redeemer, as Jesus is true light, true life, true glory, revealed in his seventh-day work. He is the Sabbath, the life-giving rest, giving God and rest in himself, to creation.
[1] Sigve K. Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (p. 37). Andrews University Press. Kindle Edition. Thank you Jonathan for the gift of this book, and putting me onto Tonstad.
[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol II, trans. Nicholas Constas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 279.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid, 277