I call an expert witness who will testify as to the power of the Jewish Sabbath.
One of the most important worship traditions of the Jewish people was the observance of the seventh day of the week as the Sabbath. This was more than just a custom by the time of the life of Jesus—it was part of the Jewish identity. Its power had a deep emotional hold upon the lives of the people. This power was primarily a result of the period of the Babylonian exile from 597 B.C. to 538 B.C.
The Sabbath day of rest seems to have had its most ancient origin as a monthly festival of the new moon. Much later, under the influence of the Sumerians who adopted a seven-day week, the Sabbath evolved into a one-day-each-week festival. It was, however, at this time not related to the creation story. That was to come much later.
In the Deuteronomic version of the Ten Commandments (Deut. 5) written perhaps centuries before but serving as a basis for King Josiah’s Deuteronomicreformation in 621 B.C., the injunction to rest on the Sabbath day was related to a Hebrew passion against human or animal exploitation that appears to be a far earlier tradition than the creation story. Rest, according to Deuteronomy, was a right to be demanded, not a privilege to be extended. Do not forget, said the Deuteronomic writer, that you were slaves in Egypt subject to exploitation, so every seventh day every creature has the right to rest from labor. This, however, did not have the force of law, and the Sabbath observance had been generally abandoned until the period of the exile.
In 598 B.C. the little nation of Judah was attacked by the Babylonians under the command of King Nebuchadrezzar. The outnumbered Jewish army, following the historic pattern of defense in this area, had retreated into fortress Jerusalem where they held out for months until food and water gave out and they were forced to surrender. In keeping with Babylonian policy for dealing with conquered people, a massive population shift was ordered. Many of the able-bodied Jewish men, women, and children were sent on a long march into captivity in Babylon, and non-Jewish people were brought in to resettle the land. This policy seemed to the Babylonians to destroy future rebellion and to keep at a minimum nationalistic feelings against Babylon in the conquered provinces. When Assyria had employed this policy in 721 B.C. against the northern ten tribes of Israel, the result had been the loss of national identity, miscegenation, a gradual melding of Israel into the bloodstream of Middle Eastern peoples. The exiled tribes of the Northern Kingdom disappeared as a recognizable entity from the face of the earth and came to be known as the ten lost tribes of Israel.
This was well known to the Jewish leaders of the Southern Kingdom who were transported into the Babylonian exile, among whom was the prophet-priest Ezekiel. These leaders determined that for the sake of the historic survival of their nation, they must maintain the separateness and the identity of the Jewish people. The chosen people must not vanish. No matter how long it took, they must return to their holy land. Hence, they set out deliberately to create a nationalistic awareness that would survive separation from their homeland for perhaps several generations.
Two symbols of their past they resurrected and reinstalled into the consciousness of their people as the identifying signs of their Jewishness. Both symbols had fallen into general disuse. They were the rite of circumcision and the Sabbath day observance. By these two symbols they sought first to place the unmistakable sign of Judaism on the body of every male Jew and secondly they sought to segregate the whole people from the society by making them look and act differently on the seventh day of every week. They invested these two traditions with emotions, history, and nationalistic fervor.
They rewrote or edited their scriptures to undergird this new practice. The seven-day creation story of Genesis 1:1–2:4 was edited into the existing traditions at this time and placed at the opening of the written account of their sacred history. They edited such stories as the manna in the wilderness narrative to allow for the Sabbath to be observed properly (Ex. 16:29). On the sixth day the children of Israel gathered twice the daily supply of manna so they could refrain from gathering on the seventh day and thereby not violate the prohibition against work. In every way possible the Sabbath day observance was heightened by the exiledpeople. It was part of the way the conquered nation resisted even in captivity their conqueror. It was a mark of both worship and patriotism—two powerful emotions. More and more precisely the meaning of this day was interpreted and the restrictions of this day defined.
When Judah did return many years later from the exile under the leadership of Zerubbabel, the nationalistic consciousness was even more enhanced. With the next century and a half Nehemiah, a Jewish Persian governor, and more especially, Ezra, a scribe, taught that the Babylonian exile had been God’s punishment upon Israel for not keeping the law and the traditions rigidly enough. They sought to purge the nation of alien influences and weak-willed religious resolve. It was almost a nation reborn with only religious zealots for citizens. The sacredness of the Sabbath and the proper observance of the Sabbath were at the head of the list of how good Jews defined their Jewishness. A theocratic state was created in which the laws of the religious tradition became the laws of the state. The emotional appeal of the Sabbath was immense. It was like the American flag, motherhood, Sunday blue laws, and God all rolled into one.
The Jews spelled out quite explicitly the Sabbath day restrictions. Thirty-nine different kinds of work were specifically prohibited. You could not embalm the dead on the Sabbath. This prohibition is acted out in the resurrection narrative. The deaths of the victims of crucifixion were hastened by breaking the legs of the thieves and hurling the spear into Jesus’ side. They were quickly removed from the cross and buried without the normal preparation of the bodies. The first moment in which they could embalm the body was dawn on thefirst day of the week, and for this purpose the women went to the tomb carrying the spices of embalmment.
One could not minister healing arts to a chronic disease or set a broken bone unless life itself was threatened. Jesus healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath and incurred the wrath of the religious establishment. A withered hand is a chronic situation. It would not have hurt anyone to wait until the first day of the week, his opponents argued. Criminals were not arrested on the Sabbath. That was unnecessary work. It was a day of relative sanctuary for outlaws. This also, I believe, becomes a factor in the resurrection narrative, making it unnecessary at least for all of the disciples to flee Jerusalem, for on the Sabbath they did not fear arrest.
You could not walk more than two thousand cubits, or three-fifths of a mile, without breaking the Sabbath. Two thousand cubits was the distance a priest had to walk in the temple to do his Sabbath duties. So that much walking became regarded as a Sabbath day’s journey and was allowed. To go beyond that violated the Sabbath. The book of Acts (Acts 1:12) refers to the Mount of Olives as “a Sabbath day’s journey” from Jerusalem. This also becomes a factor that may have impeded escape from Jerusalem for the disciples after the crucifixion and may support Luke and John’s contention that suggested that at least some of the disciples remained in Jerusalem until the first day of the week after the crucifixion.
The observance of this day was rigidly codified, and these rules were written into civil law as well as religious observance. The Sabbath was a deeply emotional, religious, national, patriotic mark of Jewish identity. It had an enormous hold upon the people. Itwas among the most sacred and the best observed of the traditions of Judaism. No one who knows anything about tradition, religious custom, the resistance to change of emotionally held, pious practices can overestimate the power of the Sabbath. When anything or anyone arises to minimize or to challenge the power of that tradition, the response will be less than rational.
We joke about this constantly. There is always the story of the lady who said, “If the King James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me.” Every major church that attempts to change its liturgy confronts an angry, emotional response from many devout worshipers. I remember well a lady with dyed red hair who was the self-appointed guardian of traditional liturgical practices in a small eastern North Carolina town where I spent eight very special years. She monitored everything I did and never hesitated to tell me what I did wrong. I turned on the lights my first Maundy Thursday night, not knowing that this parish always celebrated Maundy Thursday in the dark. By my first Easter I had accumulated about twenty black marks in her book, and when it rained on Easter and prevented us from having our traditional sunrise service in the churchyard, she exploded. Confronting me in the cloister, she exclaimed, “It never rained on Easter until you became our rector!”
People are emotional, irrational, and deeply committed to the worship traditions of their lives. One of the holiest and most emotional religious traditions of the Jews was the proper observance of the Sabbath day. It was deep-seated, touching all of the nerve ends of their lives. All of the disciples and all of the women who followed the disciple band were Jews deeply related to this worship pattern and tradition.
Yet something happened in the lives of these people, something profound, life-changing, and emotional. This something is identified by Paul and all the Gospel writers with the first day of the week. This identification gave birth to a new holy day for worship. Christian Sunday and Jewish Sabbath were not the same. Christian Sunday was not the Christian version of the Sabbath, at least not when the tradition of the first day of the week was born. They have different meanings, different origins, different characters. The perhaps inevitable blending of the two days in history has diminished our awareness of just how powerful and how strikingly new the choice by the Christians of the first day of the week as their holy day really was.
The first day of the week was the day of the Resurrection, the day God acted. The Sabbath was the seventh day of the week, the day God rested. Christians observed the first day of the week by festivity and celebration. The phrase a celebration of the Holy Communion was derived from the basic character of this day. On the other hand, the Jewish Sabbath was observed with solemnity and by refraining from labor. So deeply have the two days been blended that many people grow up feeling that Sunday carries with it a prohibition against working. But in fact there is not one verse of holy writ that suggests that one should not work on Sunday. The confusion of the Jewish Sabbath with the Christian Sunday was a much later development and is still used today in an attempt to keep community blue laws operative. Sunday blue laws may be pointed toward a noble goal, but using an inappropriate biblical text to support them is hardly a noble tactic. Sunday was different from the Sabbath. It was special, dramatic, a new holy day, a new worship tradition.6
All of the Gospels and Paul locate the first experience of Easter on the third day or the first day of the week. By A.D. 56, according to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 16:2), Sunday, the first day of the week, was established and kept as “the Lord’s Day.” In Acts 20:7 Luke records the fact that the members of the Christian community were in the custom and habit of assembling on the first day of the week for the uniquely Christian worship act of breaking bread together. The Fourth Gospel indicates that the disciples’ first experience of Easter took place on the first day of the week following the crucifixion. This was the occasion, we are told, when Thomas was not present. No further experiences of the Easter Moment occurred, says the Fourth Gospel, until “after eight days,” or according to the way the Jews counted time, this would mean the first day of the second week. John appears to be asserting that what happened on the first day of the first week was so exciting, so powerful, so life-changing that the first day of every week was changed into a day on which the Moment of Easter was reenacted. By the time of the book of Revelation (Rev. 1:10), the Lord’s Day is a clear synonym for Sunday. In the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas, the author asserts, “From the earliest times Christians kept the first day of the week as the day upon which Jesus rose from the dead.”
There is little doubt that a new holy day was created from the Easter Moment, a day that rivaled and in time replaced the most sacred worship tradition of the Jews. That is an event of momentous power. What does it take to create a new holy day? What does it take for people raised in the Sabbath day tradition of the Jews to move away ever so slightly from the observance ofthat day? What does it take first to admit the Christian Sunday alongside the Jewish Sabbath and then to watch it replace the Sabbath in their emotions?
Let us not forget the Jewishness of the first disciples and of Paul, the former pupil of Gamaliel. The energy it takes to develop a new holy day, a new worship tradition, is enormous. Where did that energy come from? Here is an effect that can be measured, an historic phenomenon that can be studied. It exists in history and time, but it points to an originating moment that may have been beyond time or history. Feel its power. Listen to its witness. Weigh its evidence.
The witness steps down.