This past sunday, Ian shared at the Church in Toronto from Galatians 4:8-20. In these verses Paul is astonished that the Galatian believers are keeping Jewish days (Gal. 4:10), including the Jewish Sabbath. N. T. Wright's article below presents a very clear picture of what the Sabbath represents, both in its origins, our present and the future.
By N. T. Wright
Jews in Jesus’ day and Jews in our own day have a very special sense of time. …The Jewish view of time is part of the Jewish view of God and creation: God has a purpose for his good creation, a purpose to be worked out in time. Indeed, the Jewish people think of themselves as living within the long story of how that purpose is to be worked out.
In the opening of the Bible…When God made the world, he “rested” on the 7th day. This doesn’t just mean that God took a day off. It means that in the previous 6 days God was making a world — heaven & earth together — for his own use. Like someone building a home, God finished the job & then went in to take up residence, to enjoy what he had built.
Creation was itself a temple, the Temple, the heaven-and-earth structure built for God to live in. And the 7th-day “rest” was therefore a sign pointing forward into successive ages of time, a forward-looking signpost that said that one day, when God’s purposes for creation were accomplished, there would be a moment of ultimate completion, a moment when the work would finally be done, and God, with his people, would take his rest, would enjoy what he had accomplished.
Sabbath: when Human Time & God’s Time Meet
One of the few things that ancient pagans knew about the Jewish people was that, from the pagans’ viewpoint, they had a lazy day once a week. From the Jewish point of view, it wasn’t laziness; it was the chance to celebrate time in a different mode. The Sabbath was the day when human time & God’s time met, when the day-to-day succession of tasks & sorrows was set aside & one entered a different sort of time, celebrating the original Sabbath & looking forward to the ultimate one.
This was the natural moment to celebrate, to worship, to pray, to study God’s law. The Sabbath was the moment during which one sensed the onward movement of history from its first foundations to its ultimate resolution. If the Temple was the space in which God’s sphere & the human sphere met, the Sabbath was the time when God’s time & human time coincided. Sabbath was to time what Temple was to space.
The Jubilee--Sabbath Year
This sense of looking forward was heightened by the larger sabbatical scheme in which the 7th year was a year of agricultural rest and the 7-times-7th year the year of jubilee, the time for slaves to be freed, for debts to be cancelled, for life to get back on track… We don’t know …to what extent the jubilee (Leviticus 25) was actually practiced in Jesus’ day. But it remained in the scriptures as a reminder that God’s time was being marked out week by week, 7 years by 7 years, half century by half century.
“70 weeks”—the Super-Jubilee
Matthew hints at all this in his own way, right at the start of his gospel, by arranging Jesus’ genealogy in 3 groups of 14 generations (that is, 6 sevens), so that Jesus appears at the start of the Sabbath-of-Sabbaths moment. …People in Jesus’ day were pondering, calculating, & longing for the greatest super-jubilee of them all, the “70 weeks” (i.e., 70 times 7 years) of Daniel 9:24. The great Sabbath was coming! Soon they would be free!
Now… we see what Jesus meant when he said the time is fulfilled. That was …right at the start of his public career (Mark 1:15). Only this… will enable us to understand his extraordinary behavior immediately afterwards. He seems to have gone out of his way to flout the normal Sabbath regulations. Most people …imagine that this was because the Sabbath had become “legalistic,” a kind of observance designed to boost one’s sense of moral achievement, and that Jesus had come to sweep all that away in a burst of libertarian, anti-legalistic enthusiasm. That [concept], though commonplace, is a trivial misunderstanding. It is too “modern” by half.
The Sabbath a Signpost
Rather, the Sabbath was the regular signpost pointing forward to God’s promised future, and Jesus was announcing that the future to which the signpost had been pointing had now arrived in the present. …Jesus was explaining what he was doing by talking about what God was doing. The time was fulfilled, & God’s kingdom was arriving.
“Don’t need the Sabbath when the time is fulfilled”
…Jesus came to Nazareth & announced the Jubilee [Luke 4]. This was the time — the time! — when all the 7s, all the Sabbaths, would rush together. This was the moment Israel & the world had been waiting for. When you reach your destination, you don’t expect to see signposts anymore. [When you’re outside the city you need signposts saying “Washington 100 miles” or “London 100 kms.”] Nobody puts up a sign on Capitol Hill [in the center of Washington DC] pointing to “Washington.” Nobody needs a signpost saying “London [UK]” in Piccadilly Circus [in London’s city centre. You don’t need signposts once you’ve arrived. Likewise…] You don’t need the Sabbath when the time is fulfilled. It was completely consistent with Jesus’ vision …that [He] said, again & again …that the time had arrived, that the future, the new creation, was already here, & that one no longer needed the Sabbath.
The Sabbath law was not, then, a stupid rule that could now be abolished (though some of the detailed Sabbath regulations, as Jesus pointed out, had led to absurd extremes …e.g. not healing the sick on the Sabbath). It was a signpost whose purpose had now been accomplished. [The Sabbath] was a marker of time pointing forward to the time when time would be fulfilled; and that was now happening…Jesus is a walking, living, breathing Temple. He is also the walking, celebrating, victorious Sabbath…
Edited extracts from “Time Fulfilled” by N. T. Wright
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