Saturday or Sunday?

Just as my “medical vacation” has ended (I am “back in the saddle,” as it were, although the horse is old, slow, and docile – no galloping yet), a question has come to me from a former student that probably crosses the minds of many Christians.  If God commanded the observance of the Sabbath (seventh) day of the week (Saturday) as a holy day of rest and worship, why do Christians, who presumably desire to obey God’s specific commands, worship on the first day of the week, Sunday?  The question invites a practical answer, a “Pauline” answer, and a reaffirmation of the theological purpose of Sabbath observance.

From a practical perspective, the question raises the problem of whether we can have any confidence that our Saturday actually coincides with the “original” seventh day. The first Sabbath, according to the Bible, represented the seventh day of creation, when God rested from God’s work.  We cannot have confidence that the Bible’s seven days of creation actually represented seven twenty-four hour periods.  In fact, God did not order time on earth into a presumably twenty-four hour sequence of daytime/nighttime until the creation of the sun, moon, and stars on the “fourth day” of creation, suggesting that the meaning of the term “day” is fluid in the account of God’s creation of the world.

In any case, even if one understands the seven days of creation as seven twenty-four hour periods – an understanding that virtually requires a total rejection of the body of knowledge acquired in the scientific disciplines of geology, biology, and astronomy – the gap between God’s period of rest and the issuance of the Sabbath commandment to Moses raises the question of how Moses could have possibly accurately determined the seventh day in a sequence reaching all the way back to creation.  Moreover, history records a period during which the calendar was a matter of controversy among the Jews, such that, according to tradition, Rabbi Hillel II did not finally fix it until circa 385 CE.  During the Mishnaic period, the calendar depended on the observation of the new moon, the beginning of the month. Now it is “calculated,” with the result that the calendrical beginning of the month often diverges from the actual new moon.  The coordination of the traditional Jewish calendar and the western calendar further complicates the problem of identifying the “seventh day.”  The seven-day week did not become standard throughout the Roman Empire until the 4^th century CE.  Incidentally, the Romans seem to have observed Thursday, neither Saturday nor Sunday, as a day of rest in honor of Jupiter (see I. Bultrighini, “Thursday (dies Iovis) in the Later Roman Empire” (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1542757/1/Bultrighini_Article.Bultrighini.pdf).

In sum, the issue of the meaning of “day” in the biblical creation account, gaps in the transmission of the weekly calendar, calendar disputes within Judaism, the correlation of the Jewish week and the western (Roman) week, and the passage of time make the determination of the “absolute” seventh day of the week an insurmountable obstacle as a practical matter.  It is impossible to know whether Moses’ observed the Sabbath on “Saturday.”

Paul’s mission to the Gentiles raised another question with respect to Sabbath observance.  From the outset, the church in Jerusalem, comprised entirely of Jewish Christians – Jews who confessed Jesus as the Messiah, Lord, and Savior – seems to have continued Sabbath observance (cf. Acts 2:46; 3:1; 13:27; 42, 44; 16:13; 17:2; 18:4).  In their understanding, their belief in Jesus did not abrogate their obligations as Jews, including the weekly memorial of God’s liberation of Israel from Egyptian bondage (cf. Deut 5:  At some point (Acts 20:7 [?]; 1 Cor 16:2[?]; certainly by the second century: Ignatius, Magn. 9:1; Gosp. Peter 35, 50; Barnabbas 15:9; Justin, 1 Apol. 67), Christians began to observe the first day of the week, the weekly commemoration of God’s liberating act of raising Jesus from the dead, as the day of worship. What gave them the freedom to do so?

Paul’s mission among the Gentiles soon met opposition from elements in the Jewish church (the “Judaizers”) over the question of whether Gentiles must first convert to Judaism in order to become Christians. Paul argued forcefully in Galatians and Romans, especially, that God had first established relationship with Abraham (and, by inference, with Isaac, Jacob, and the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel) based solely on God’s gracious act of election, to which Abraham had responded in simple faith. At first, this relationship involved no behavioral or ritual obligations on Abraham (although God imposed the requirement of circumcision later; Gen 17). Only centuries later, when God offered Israel the opportunity to enter into covenant relationship as God’s peculiar nation of priests, whose manner of life, including the food they were to eat, would manifest God’s character to the world.  God established the relationship in grace and delivered Israel from Egyptian bondage because of the promise made the ancestors (Exod 2:24) apart from and before Israel assumed the obligations of the covenant. Paul argued that Gentiles could respond to God’s offer of grace in the same way Abraham had done.  Gentiles need not first become Jews, ethnically and culturally assuming the detailed obligations of the covenant, Paul argued, in order then to become Christians. In fact, the issue attained such importance that a conference involving Paul, Peter, and the other leaders in the (Jewish) Jerusalem church addressed the issue.  On Peter’s testimony of his work with Gentiles (such as Cornelius; Acts 10), it concluded that: (1) Gentiles need not become Jews to follow Christ, but (2) Gentiles were not free to live licentious, antinomian, libertine lives. Instead, the fundamental moral principles inherent in Jewish ritual applied to Gentiles even when the ritual specifics did not:  “…we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood” (Acts 15:19b-20; cf. God’s covenant with Noah, the ancestor of all humankind – Gen 9:1-7).  The discussion focused on circumcision (Acts 15:5), the most essential and obvious requirement of Judaism, but Paul’s letters attest the Judaizers’ additional emphasis on holy days, Sabbaths and New Moons (Col 2:16-17; Rom 14:5-6).

Incidentally, the decision by the Jerusalem Conference succinctly embodies the nature of the authority of Torah in Christian lives – “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6; cf. the blog entry by this title dated January 5, 2016). The principle of Sabbath observance has continued significance for Christians (and Jews) apart from a specific day of the week. Arguably, between the bookends of Creation and the Consummation of the Kingdom of God, two moments reveal the character of God in relationship to humankind quintessentially, namely, God’s deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage in the Exodus and God’s resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In the Exodus, God demonstrated God’s self as liberator from oppression and exploitation; at Easter, God liberated not only from slavery and bondage, but also from sin and death. By linking Sabbath, the weekly celebration of God-given freedom, and the Lord’s Day, the weekly celebration of God’s sovereignty over even death, the early Christians acknowledged the centrality of the two moments and their relationship to one another. The relationship between Passover and the Lord’s Supper makes the same proclamation: God sets prisoners free!  Furthermore, the God of Exodus and Easter calls God’s people to participate in God’s saving liberation by both celebrating it and extending it to others – not just one day of the week, but as a matter of everyday character. As Jesus repeatedly argued to his opponents, the power and purpose of the Sabbath lie not in the observance of rules, but in the full enjoyment and facilitation of abundant life (cf. Mark 2:14-3:6; etc.).