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The possibility of a recovery

The spiritual meaning of wealth is the domination of time and exaltation of the self. The spiritual meaning of the Sabbath, the sabbatical year, and the jubilee is the dominion of Yahweh over time and the dependence of his people on his grace.

Wealth is an attempt to build a bridge across time, to store up the potential of labor to exercise control over the future. The Sabbath is a disciplined attempt to release control over time and to depend on grace.

Wealth is an attempt to gain independence from the community and from spiritual reality: He who has the gold makes the rules. But the jubilee and the sabbatical year teach that in reality interdependence and trust in God reflect the true character of existence.

The status of the Sabbath has been ambiguous in the church's history. Jesus' followers abandoned it, along with anything else that might have branded them as belonging to a sect of Judaism, within a hundred years after his death. The hellenization of the second-century church, and the incipient anti-Semitism that accompanied that process, discarded much that is rich in the church's Jewish heritage.

Yet at various times the church has rediscovered the Sabbath. Not finding New Testament warrant for treating Sunday as a sabbath, the continental Reformers rejected sabbatarianism as a papal innovation. For Calvin, as for Luther, there was an obligation to worship and an obligation to rest, but one day was as good as another under the New Covenant. The English Puritans, however, argued that the Sabbath was a creation ordinance, not just a Jewish ceremonial. And since the obligation of observing a particular holy day existed before Sinai, it also existed after the Cross. Unfortunately, in "rediscovering" the Sabbath, the Puritan divines failed to unfold its economic and social meaning as spelled out in the seventh and fiftieth years. For them it was almost pure command, and became as it were a third sacrament, a holy thing to be revered!

Subsequent sabbatarianism in England and America, most notably under the influence of the Lord's Day Alliance and among Seventh-day Adventists, has continued this Puritan tradition that focuses on the holiness of a day and the ways to avoid transgressing it. Attention to the day's economic and social significance has surfaced only in recent years among Adventists and then only among that denomination's theologians. For the Adventist rank and file, the focus of Sabbath observance is on not transgressing the day's holiness.

The Sabbath's social and economic meaning may be largely lost to our atomistic society (although political changes such as Third World land reform may be undergirded by studying the jubilee). When only isolated pockets of believers incorporate the Sabbath discipline into their spirituality, it is nearly impossible to experience the Sabbath as freedom from economic bondage. It is possible, although difficult, for an individual to observe the holiness of a day. The support of a family and a congregation do much to reinforce that observance. But without a wide acceptance of the Sabbath's relevance for our time, the social and economic significance remain sealed off from experience. Nevertheless, the vision of the Sabbath, the seventh year, and the jubilee can do much to catechize us on our relation to wealth: Thou shalt remember the Sabbath, in order to exit anxiety and to enter into grace and trust, in order to leave behind the closed, grasping hand and to open the hand to generosity.

Notes

1. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Harper & Row, 1951, 1966), 68.

2. Ibid.

3. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 36.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 39.

6. Ibid., 41.

7. M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 450.

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November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47