These anecdotes simply show that even the past situation is not as many people in former days imagined, whether inside and outside the church. Scarcely surprising is it, then, that on one occasion John Knox visited Calvin in Geneva one Sunday and found him playing bowls. But it was as well, he concluded, to keep to the usual day. John Calvin actually considered keeping Thursday instead. What is striking here, in view of what was soon to happen, is that the Reformers of the sixteenth century did not see any direct connection between this fourth commandment and the observance of the Lord’s Day: God has not commanded “the Lord’s Day”, it is the Church which has chosen to keep the first day of the week.
Martin Luther, for example, says of the fourth commandment: “ This precept, so far as its outward meaning is concerned, does not apply to us Christians.” And perhaps even more electrifying: “ If anyone says the Lord’s Day is made holy for the mere day’s sake, or anyone anywhere sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to work on it, to ride on it, to dance on it, to feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this encroachment on Christian liberty“. So, it was that the sixteenth century Reformers could say all sorts of startling things which those who then, and subsequently, venerated Sunday as “the Sabbath” would surely find amazing.
REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY TO KEEP IT HOLY MEANING FREE
Consequently, everything in creation – that which formerly was regarded as being totally secular, that from which the sacred was “set apart” – is now set free for the service of God not 1 day out of 7, but 7 days out of 7, 365 days a year. What is new about this relocation is the recognition that now there are no special sacred times, sacred days, sacred places, sacred things, sacred people, because the announcement of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the declaration that the whole world is now under his lordship. This change is not simply an arbitrary shift it is saying something fundamental about what is radically new in Christian faith. For, as is well known, Christians do not keep the Sabbath as the seventh and last day of the week, but as the Lord’s Day on the first day. This brings us to register that this fourth commandment is the one of all the ten that seems most fundamentally changed by the coming of Christian faith into the world.
The fact is that, in general, seventeenth century Puritans tended to prefer the heresy of Manichaeism believing that time itself is evil, and that the Lord’s Day alone was good – an oasis in the desert, as it were. One commentator has suggested that considering the state of Scotland in his day he should have been congratulated for managing to smile at all. In Scotland at that time, for example, one poor wretch was dragged into court for smiling on the Sabbath. Were we still able to question many previous generations, most might trace their lack of sympathy for the church to dull, negative, endless Sundays.Īlthough it was not until the twelfth century that the word Sabbath began to be applied to the Christian festival of the Lord’s Day, this negative Sabbath of comparatively modern times seems to have originated in the bitter religious strife of the seventeenth century.
The whole history of Sunday observance in the West is a fascinating if, invariably, a depressing story. This simple recognition makes irrelevant so much of the sad history of “Sabbath observance”, as we have known it. This recurring Sabbath day was originally a day dedicated both to memory and hope – a day remembering both exodus, and a day open for new possibilities in the life of Israel with Yahweh. For the first time we hear a positive and not a negative note: “ Remember the Sabbath day” to keep it holy”. No longer do we hear: “ You shall not…” as we did with the first three commandments, and as we hear again for every other except this and the fifth commandment to come: “Honour father and mother”. “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy”Īrriving at this fourth commandment, we are faced for the first time by a change of form in the words used. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)…”
0 kommentar(er)
