Keeping the Feast-Christ and the Sabbath

Commandment 4

And the Lord said to Moses, “You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, ‘Above all you shall keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who profanes it shall be put to death. Whoever does any work on it, that soul shall be cut off from among his people. Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death. Therefore, the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.’” (Ex 31:12-17)^[1]

These are the last recorded words of the Lord to Moses in his first trip up to Mount Sinai. The pride of place given to the sabbath commandment is here contained in a dense, symbolical passage which repeats the word “sabbath” seven times and affixes the threat of capital punishment to any who break the sabbath command.^[2] Of course, this sabbath commandment had already been given to Israel at least three times prior to this point in the Exodus story: in God’s provision of Manna (Ex 16), in the Decalogue itself (Ex 20), and in occasional laws in Exodus 23 the sabbath commandment is repeated once again: “Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your servant woman, and the alien, may be refreshed” (Ex 23:12).

As the opening passage from Exodus 31 suggests, “Sabbath observance is a matter of life and death.”^[3] Why so much emphasis on the weekly rhythm of ceasing from labor? What is the big deal? The answer to this question is rooted in the wider story of creation and covenant.

The Decalogue, as written in Exodus 20, roots the Sabbath commandment in the creation narrative: “Remember the Sabbath day, to 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 . . . For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Ex 20:8-10a,11). Riffing on the medieval scholastic principle that “what is last in execution is first in intention,”^[4] one early modern Jewish rabbi wrote, “Last in creation, first in intention.”^[5] The Sabbath is the goal of creation.

God’s creating work was intended for creaturely participation in the divine rest. That is why each day of creation in Genesis One concludes with the words, “and there was evening, and there was morning,” but the seventh day has no such conclusion. The Sabbath is the essence of the creation’s relation to God, marked by rest and dependence. It involves the suspension of the workaday passage of time and is the creaturely ascension above time to enjoy the rest of God’s eternity. In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, “the Sabbath preceded creation and the Sabbath completed creation.”^[6] To truly practice the Sabbath is to enjoy a taste of eternity.

After the fall and exile from Eden, man’s labor became frustrated, and he was alienated from God’s rest. The Sabbath become for man a recollection of the life of Eden and a longing for return to Paradise. When God’s people found themselves burdened by the oppressive taskmaster of Egypt’s Pharoah, God sent Moses to release Israel from bondage to servile labor and bring them into the promised land where they would rest and worship the one God. The Exodus is a new creation story that leads to the people’s Sabbath rest in Canaan. Sabbath is the goal of creation and redemption.

Of course, the first generation of Israelites failed to enter the promised rest of Canaan because of their hardness of heart: unto this generation, Psalm 95 writes, God swore in his wrath, “that they should not enter into my rest” (Ps 95, 1928 BCP). God did not give up on the people but promulgated his law to the next generation a second time on the outskirts of the promised land in Deuteronomy. There the Decalogue is recorded once again in chapter 5. This time, the rationale for the Sabbath commandment has shifted from the creation account to the redemption from slavery in Egypt. “Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you . . . You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day” (Deut 5:12,15).

This rationale change for the fourth commandment turns on the logic of redemption itself. Israel’s liberation from Egypt was a new creation event and their ongoing commitment to keeping covenant with the one God is essential to their identity as the people God redeemed for himself from the land of Egypt and its diabolical ways. Creation and redemption are linked here in these two rationales for the Sabbath commandment. Creation and redemption both have Sabbath rest as their goal. This development is crucial for our understanding of the Christian significance of the Sabbath to which we shall now turn.

Christ and the Sabbath

At the inauguration of Christ’s public ministry in the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus is found in the synagogue on the Sabbath day. There, he reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke’s account continues: “And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’” (Lk 4:18-21).

To understand the significance of this event, consider once more the meaning of the Sabbath in the Old Testament. It’s importance is not reducible to the weekly seventh day rest, but Sabbath is nested in the larger world of Israel’s ethical and eschatological worldview. The Sabbath touches Israel’s weekly ordering, but it also touches every single feast of Israel’s liturgical calendar starting with the Passover and the seven-day observance of the feast of unleavened bread. The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost) is celebrated seven weeks plus one day after the Passover celebration. The Feast of Trumpets is celebrated, next, on the first day of the seventh month (a kind of Sabbath month celebration) and within the seventh month are the two final feasts of Israel’s liturgical calendar: the Day of Atonement (on the tenth day of the seventh month), followed by the Feast of Tabernacles which is a seven-day commemoration of Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness.^[7]

To these yearly rhythms are added the Sabbath year, wherein Israel was to leave off from working the land in the seventh year and then the year of Jubilee, which falls on the seven-times-seventh year plus one (the fiftieth year). The year of Jubilee is the Sabbath of Sabbaths, a year for the restoration of property, the release of debts, and the liberation of slaves.

The Sabbath was meant to form the entire imagination of the Israelites in their status as God’s covenant people, witnesses of the one creator God’s goodness to the nations. By taking the scroll from Isaiah and reading from the passage concerning the end-time hope of Israel, “the year of the Lord’s favor,” Jesus is framing his ministry in the context of the final Sabbath rest he will usher in through his life, death and resurrection.

Much of Jesus’ controversy with religious leaders in the Gospels turned on his activity on the Sabbath. A close reading of these controversies scattered throughout the Gospel narratives reveals, in the words of Ratzinger, “[that] the heart of the Sabbath disputes is the question about the Son of Man – the question about Jesus Christ himself.”^[8] After he was questioned by the Pharisees for allowing his disciples to pluck and eat heads of grain on the Sabbath, Jesus utters the shocking words, “something greater than the temple is here. And 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” (Matt 12:6b-8). One contemporary Jewish commentator puts the issue starkly when he asks, “Is it really that your master, the son of man, is lord of the Sabbath? . . . I ask again – is your master God?”^[9]

The radical Christological reinterpretation of the Sabbath is evidenced in the Christian observance of the Lord’s Day. Therein, we see the Christian claim that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection ushered in the new creation. Sunday is not simply a new day of observance over against the Jewish Sabbath observance. It is, according to the Christian claim, the fulfillment of the Sabbath. Sunday as “the eighth day” is not so much an attempt at moving the Sabbath as it is an expression that the Sabbath has been fulfilled and extended: Sabbath rest has broken into history in the resurrection of Jesus. Sunday is not a replacement of the Sabbath but its fulfillment. John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, Dies Domini, captures this insight well:

This aspect of the Christian Sunday shows in a special way how it is the fulfilment of the Old Testament Sabbath. On the Lord’s Day, which — as we have already said — the Old Testament links to the work of creation (cf. Gn 2:1-3; Ex 20:8-11) and the Exodus (cf. Dt 5:12-15), the Christian is called to proclaim the new creation and the new covenant brought about in the Paschal Mystery of Christ. Far from being abolished, the celebration of creation becomes more profound within a Christocentric perspective, being seen in the light of the God’s plan “to unite all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10).^[10]

Much more needs to be said about the significance of the Sabbath, especially in the biblical development of the Sabbath and Jubilee themes throughout the later Hebrew prophets, but these initial observations clear enough ground for a more practical consideration of the Sabbath commandment for the Church.

The Christian Significance of Sabbath

My reflections on the first three commandments of the Decalogue thus far have shown that it is a false step to think of the Christian relationship to the Hebrew Bible as one of abolishment. The programmatic dictum for thinking about the Christian relationship with the Old Testament is the words of Christ from the Sermon on the Mount: “do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt 5:17). There was already a forward leaning momentum to the Sabbath commandment from within the creation account itself (there was no evening or morning listed on the seventh day). The Sabbath commandment’s later development in the two records of the Decalogue and the liturgical calendar of Israel bear out this forward momentum. That is, the Sabbath theme in the Old Testament longs for the expansion and fulfillment it receives in the New Testament.

At the heart of the Christian proclamation is the good news of God’s redemption which has broken into the world in Christ. The very essence of Christianity is the proclamation of the glad tidings: “Christianity is, by its very nature,” says Ratzinger, “joy – the ability to be joyful. The χαῖρε: ‘Rejoice!” with which it begins [in the angel’s greeting to Mary] expresses its whole nature.”^[11] Ratzinger and others^[12] have argued that the festive heart of Sabbath-keeping belongs to the fundament of Christianity.

What are we to make of appearances to the contrary? Nietzsche, the prophetic nineteenth-century critic of Christianity, put the question in the following words:

But you, if your faith makes you happy, show yourselves to be happy. Your faces have always done more harm to your faith than our reasons! If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion. Your words, your actions should continually make the Bible superfluous—in fact, through you a new Bible should continually come into being. As it is, your apologia for Christianity is rooted in your unchristianity, and with your defence you write your own condemnation. If you, however, should wish to emerge from your dissatisfaction with Christianity, you should ponder over the experience of two thousand years, which, clothed in the modest form of a question, may be voiced as follows: ‘If Christ really intended to redeem the world, may he not be said to have failed?’^[13]

There is no easy way to resolve this critique. For Nietzsche is indeed correct. Like Israel, we have all too often failed to embody the spirit of the covenant mercy of God, we have turned aside from evangelical joy and substituted it with the titillating pleasures of our frenetic age. “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”^[14] These words come from the great seventeenth-century Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal. They will prove significant for any Christian attempt at recovering the attitude of Sabbath joy which should possess the Church but which, for reasons we shall begin exploring, seem far from the contemporary Christian experience. A recovery of Sabbath-keeping in the Church today will necessarily require a thoroughgoing critique of the technological and economic milieu in which we live. In order to recover some of the credibility of the Christian Gospel in the modern world, Christian reflection and implementation of the fourth commandment will prove essential.

The Lord’s Day

It is a false step to over-regulate the observance of the Lord’s Day as divine law. It seems reasonable to me to argue that an assembly of the church for the worship of God and the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper is required of Christians on the Lord’s Day, and that this follows in certain ways from abiding authority of the fourth commandment. At the very least, this would be a part of ecclesiastical positive law which would be almost unthinkable to change based on its historic precedent. The long and short of the matter is this: Christians should hallow the Lord’s Day as the fulfillment of God’s Sabbath commandment, and they should honor it by striving to set it apart for the worship of God and charity to their fellow man.

The above paragraph intended to leave space for a variety of different local or cultural inflections of the practice of the Lord’s Day without leaving it entirely up to local discretion. That said, the Church will find herself at various times in cultural settings where certain Sabbath practices are impossible to keep. The early Christians under the Roman Empire sacrificed to hallow the first day of the week and did not benefit from centuries of Christian cultural influence (as we do) that make honoring the Lord’s Day a less socially and economically costly thing to do. They may not have been able to take the first day of the week off from economic labors, but that did not stop them from gathering for worship and the eucharist.

In our present cultural context in the United States, we do have the space to sanctify the Lord’s Day in a more thoroughgoing way. That is not to suggest that we do, in fact, so sanctify it. What I will offer here are a few provocations on the subject of practicing the Lord’s Day. It is worth bearing in mind, once again, that much of these recommendations boil down to prudent decisions made by individual Christian families, communities and governments. There are some non-negotiables (assembling, if possible,^[15] for worship), but there is much left up to personal and communal discretion. The main thread that should be held in all these reflections is the essential goal of sanctifying the Lord’s Day; that is, for Christians to make space for ritual worship and rest in God because of his saving acts in Christ and the Spirit. All the abstentions and disciplines of the Lord’s Day are ordered to that ultimate goal.

Economics

Cultural critic L.M. Sacasas wrote, “One way of telling the story of modernity would be to describe how commerce colonized more and more of our world and our experience by overcoming the technical and cultural limits that stood in its way. Aspects of the world now appear to us framed by the implicit challenge: Commercialize this.”^[16] The eclipse of blue laws which restricted the purchase of select goods at certain times or the operation of business on Sunday is one evidence of this commercial colonization. So is the dominance of online shopping and the ubiquity of advertisements. There is no hour, there is scarcely any physical space, left untouched by the impetus of the marketplace.

I recently talked with an employee at the Trader Joes in my neighborhood who informed me that the company had unionized and the pay rate for working on Sunday is the normal hourly rate +$10. This functions, obviously, as an incentive to work on Sundays: why wouldn’t you take $10 more an hour? Is Trader Joes really necessary work on Sunday? It is for a society which has come to expect the market always to be open, a culture which simply cannot stomach any limit to its capacity to buy and sell.

To leave off from unnecessary work one day per week can offer a corrective to the mindset of the market. On a day of rest, neighbors become potential fellow worshippers, friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, rather than economic competitors or those who can provide certain goods and services to us.^[17] This is baked into the logic of the Sabbath commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy. The Israelites are commanded to leave off from work on the seventh day, but not just the Israelites: their children, their servants, their beasts and their sojourners were forbidden from working on the Sabbath. This commandment has a decidedly economic character to it, and Christian reflection on the implications of this commandment in the present-day consumer society will do well to consider it.

One additional element of the economic character of the fourth commandment is this: ceasing from labor achieves its true meaning only when our labor itself is dignified, worthy of our time and attention. The priority of the Sabbath for ancient Israel did not mean that work per se was bad, but just that work was not the final purpose of life. In order for Sabbath to attain its fullest meaning, however, the work we engage in throughout the week must be of the sort that we can offer the firstfruits of to God in worship with integrity. If our work exploits or manipulates the unfortunate or otherwise denigrates human life or is complicit in evil, then our Sabbath rest will be despicable hypocrisy in the eyes of the Lord. This critique of hypocritical sabbaths is found all throughout the OT prophets. We must learn to engage in dignified work ourselves and appeal for opportunities for dignified work for all so that our Sabbath keeping does not become a cause of judgment rather than blessing.^[18]

Technology

It is hard to divide the economic sphere from the technological, as the Sacasas quote implied above. Notwithstanding, what I am considering under the locus of technology is not so much our culture-shaping technological worldview but the nitty gritty of personal (especially digital) technology use in the home. The important distinction to be made here is between the truly festive character of Christian worship and the pseudo-festivities offered to us by our culture of entertainment.

Most of us live our lives almost constantly tethered to our digital devices, which often (intentionally or not) alienate us from giving full attention to the human faces in front of us. Personal devices function as a means of escaping the normal difficulties of life: the oddness of small talk on an elevator or public transportation, the frustration of waiting at the doctor’s office, even the anxious restlessness of the first hours of the morning. All of these inconveniences are apparently smoothed out by the smartphone (or other digital device) which can soothe us by diverting our attention from the tedium of the moment and taking us away into the land of a favorite podcast, song, social medium or text conversation with a friend who is miles away.

This is not an argument that such digital devices are altogether wrong or inhuman in some fundamental sense.^[19] The point is simply that when our engagement with such devices is left unchecked, apparently, we tend to allow them to take up more and more of the space of our lives until we are finally unable, in the words of Pascal, to sit alone in our chambers and be still. The problem with these digital distractions is that they make the most important human activities harder and harder to do. The activities I am thinking about are those such as the following: attending to a service of worship where Scripture texts are read, lengthy prayers are offered, songs are sung, sacraments are administered; private prayer; rich homemade meals; deep conversations with loved ones or even strangers; etc. In my experience, these are all activities which are rendered harder to do with the presence of digital devices in the background (not to mention the foreground). Indeed, even when (in the rare instance) our devices are nowhere to be found, we ourselves have been so formed by the shallow engagement and frenetic pace of the digital world that we find these most meaningful human activities themselves harder to engage in with all our attention.

With this in view, might we consider hanging up the digital devices for one day per week? And why not make that day Sunday? Would such restrictions really hurt us? I can only imagine that they would help us more fully engage in the really human activities of our lives.

Speed and Noise

Catholic theologian Robert Cardinal Sarah of Guinea said, “Modern society can no longer do without the dictatorship of noise.”^[20] “Noise,” he continued, “gives [man] security, like a drug on which he has become dependent. With its festive appearance, noise is a whirlwind that avoids facing itself. Agitation becomes a tranquilizer, a sedative, a morphine pump, a sort of reverie, an incoherent dream-world. But this noise is a dangerous, deceptive medicine, a diabolic lie that helps man avoid confronting himself in his interior emptiness.”^[21]

These words are a jolting indictment of the modern world reminiscent of the aphorism of Pascal cited above. Indeed, to live in a city (as most of us moderns do) is to be constantly bombarded by the noise of automobiles, streaming music blasting from car speakers, construction work, and the general hustle and bustle of hurried people moving about. As we can see, noise and speed/mobility are related. Most of the noisy things in this world are the result of technical man’s attempt at overcoming the limitations of place (so, the automobile, airplane, train, etc.). Noise and mobility can be understood as forms of escape from one’s obligations to those things that used to characterize the investment of most of our ancestors’ lives: the investment to one’s land, church, family and neighbors.

If we are to obey the spirit of the fourth commandment, we ought to undertake a serious circumspection and examination of conscience surrounding the nonchalance with which we get in our cars and speed all around town. I am not saying the automobile is bad per se, but the mode of engagement with our place encouraged by the automobile is (to my mind) contrary to the spirit of the Sabbath. Think for a moment about the fun you might have had as a kid when you realized that your sibling’s eyes flickered back and forth at incredible speed as he looked out the window when your family rushed down the highway. Consider it a parable: the kind of attention to place that is possible on a walk is impossible in the automobile. Indeed, attention to the details of your place is downright hazardous when driving an automobile – keep your eyes on the road!

The point is this: the kind of attention required to really engage in the central activity of the Lord’s Day is hard to come by in a world of such distracting noise and speed as ours. Truly honoring the Lord’s Day means slowing down and attending to the God who speaks to us in his word, who calls us to address him in prayer and praises, and who feeds us with the sacrament of his grace. To engage in these activities well, we must adopt a different pace, and we must be comfortable with the silence required for a truly humble, receptive spirit.

None of this is to suggest that we should turn off the speakers and leave the automobile behind on Sundays. For some of us, the latter is not even an option. It may well mean, however, that we consider Sunday a day to commit to loving our actual neighbors through hospitality, to minimizing our travel to the bare necessities, to making music rather than streaming it and to seeking to adopt a slower pace. Sundays, just like the Sabbath of old, are meant to teach us that the world goes on without us, that our labor is not necessary to keep the world functioning, and that we were made for life beyond the workaday world of the 9-5. Attending to our habits of travel and entertainment on Sunday may prepare us best to receive the real gift of the Lord’s Day: the Lord himself in word and sacrament, in the faces of our family and neighbors, in the goodness of his manifold earthly blessings.

Conclusion

The Sabbath is a gift of God to his creatures. It was the original goal of creation, the purpose for which God chose Israel for himself and ransomed them from bondage and Egypt so they might enter his Sabbath rest in the promised land. The ministry of our Lord took as its theme the end-time Jubilee of release from debts, restoration of health, and rest from the burden of sin and the tyranny of death. His resurrection expanded the Sabbath and ushered in the final Sabbath rest which was the longing of Israel’s prophets. The Christian Lord’s Day is not the abolition but fulfillment of the Sabbath.

We who would honor the fourth commandment must think not principally in terms of abstentions and prohibitions for the Sabbath day, but rather in terms of the positive goods we should be enjoying on the Lord’s Day. Monday-Saturday we all live more or less like Martha to whom the Lord said, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things” (Lk 10:41). By preparing ourselves to celebrate the Lord’s Day festively, we are learning ourselves and teaching others what Christ would go on to tell Martha: “one thing is necessary” (Lk 10:42). We should consider the Lord’s Day an opportunity to cultivate Christian hope, to resist the tyranny of our distracting world, and to celebrate the creation and redemption given to us in Christ. Many prudential decisions need to be made by families, communities and even governments about how best to orchestrate the Lord’s Day celebration, but the central concern remains: do whatever will facilitate the joyful and prayerful festivity of Christian worship and resist whatever practices which will frustrate such festivity.

I’ll conclude these reflections with a personal anecdote. I live in a neighborhood of good looking, apparently put together young people. Last Spring I was reeling a bit from a yearlong engagement with the Christian critique of Friedrich Nietzsche and found, in many respects, my faith flailing. If what Christians claim to be true is in fact the case, then why do these people all around me seem to be getting on fine? Is it really any different here and now to believe?

What finally got me out of this funk was my participation in the easter festivities at my local parish. First thing Sunday morning, after a late-night vigil service, I saw people carrying in coolers, bringing in food to cook and eat. After the service, tables were spread out, white linens overlaid the tables, food was eaten and dozens of church folks sat around laughing, drinking and rejoicing. It dawned on me that this is the greatest witness to the credibility of the Christian faith. The reason why joy is so hard to come by is that we live in a vale of tears – our lives are frustrated by the presence of death in our decaying bodies, subject to illness, chronic fatigue, etc., not to mention wickedness in our own souls and in relationships and society which seem, at times, only to make life more frustrating and difficult. The mystery that needs explaining is not why Christians experience sorrow and dismay – of course they do! The mystery is how they are able to truly celebrate a festivity like Easter. To that, I’d argue, one should recall the words of the angel to the women at the Lord’s tomb. What makes Christian festivity possible? It is simply this, as the angel reported: “He is not here, for he has risen, as he said” (Matt 28:6). Let us keep the feast!

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, biblical references in this post will be taken from the The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway, 2001. ↑
2. English translations have “sabbath” six times. I get the number seven from Robert Altar, whose comment on this passage indicates that the word shabat occurs seven times, once in this passage as shabaton. This is not clearly seen in English, since the final use of the word is rendered in English translations as rested, so: “the seventh day he rested and was refreshed” (Ex 31:17). See Robert Altar, The Hebrew Bible: Volume 1: The Five Books of Moses, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2019), 337. ↑
3. Norman Wirzba, Living the Sabbath, (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006), 30. ↑
4. See Aquinas, ST I-II, Q. 1, A. 4, resp. ↑
5. Cited in Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 14. ↑
6. Heschel, Sabbath, 21. ↑
7. For more on these feasts, see the podcast, “Seven Festivals,” by the Bible Project: https://bibleproject.com/podcast/seven-festivals/. ↑
8. Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker, (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 111. ↑
9. Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, cited in Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 110. ↑
10. John Paul II, Dies Domini, [Apostolic Letter on Keeping the Lord’s Day], The Holy See, May 31, 1998, §59, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1998/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_05071998_dies-domini.html. ↑
11. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sister Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D., (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 81. ↑
12. E.g., Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, (Soung Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1965): “Christian liturgy is in fact ‘an unbounded Yea-and Amen-saying.’ . . . Christian worship sees itself as an act of affirmation that expresses itself in praise, glorification, thanksgiving for the whole of reality and existence” (37-8). ↑
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human, part II, trans. Paul V. Cohn, (New York: MacMillan, 1913), §98, EBook. Accessed April 12, 2025: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37841/37841-h/37841-h.html. ↑
14. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, (London: Arcturus Publishing, 2023), 51, §139. ↑
15. I am aware that certain vocations make the weekly assembly difficult. Emergency medical professionals and law enforcement of various kinds often do not have the privilege of Sunday worship. Their responsibility to the fourth commandment would be an appropriate subject for another post. ↑
16. L.M. Sacasas, “Notes from the Metaverse,” September 4, 2021, https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/notes-from-the-metaverse. ↑
17. This insight is very beautifully put by the host of the Greystone Institute podcast, Mark Garcia. See Mark Garcia (feat. Ephraim Radner), “The Good Life as the Ordinary Life? A Conversation with Ephraim Radner,” August 7, 2024, in Greystone Conversations, produced by the Greystone Theological Institute, podcast, MP3 audio, starting at 47:00, https://www.greystoneinstitute.org/greystone-conversations/the-good-life. ↑
18. For a more thorough treatment of the economic implications of the Sabbath, see Wirzba, Living the Sabbath, pp. 89-165. ↑
19. Though they might be, and I am open to being so persuaded. ↑
20. Robert Cardinal Sarah with Nicolas Diat, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, trans. Michael J. Miller, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 32. ↑
21. Sarah, Silence, 33. ↑