In the Gospels, the Pharisees complain about Jesus performing miracles on the Sabbath. Our Lord famously turns to them and says “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” (Mark 2:27).
Jesus says this to refute the excessive legalism of the Pharisees. The Sabbath is to be a day dedicated to the Lord, but the Pharisees have lost sight of this. They have missed the spirit of the law because they focus completely on the letter of the law. Sometimes we Catholics fall into the same trap. Perhaps we become obsessive about the number of prayers we pray in a day, but we lose site of the fact that prayer is meant to bring us into intimate connection with God. What good is to pray 50 rosaries a day if it doesn’t make me a more loving person?
In this passage, Jesus is trying to explain to them that people are more important than the rules. The rules are there to help us love and take care of each other. If the rules don’t help us do this, then perhaps they are unnecessary.
This is what Jesus meant when He said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.”
But, there is another sense where the opposite is true.
There is a sense where man was made for the Sabbath.
Pope Benedict XVI, before he was elected pope and was simply known as Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote a homily about the Sabbath. He was speaking about the account of creation given in Genesis. And he noted something odd about the fact that God rested on the seventh day. “Creation is oriented to the sabbath, which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind.” (Ratzinger, The Meaning of the Biblical Creation Accounts, in the Beginning…” pg 40) God had finished making all of creation on the sixth day. But He was not done with His project. He has nothing more to create. But then on the seventh day, He rests.
Obviously, God has no need of rest since He is all-powerful. So what is going on here?
God is showing us that creation points to our worship. God gave us a Sabbath day so that we could focus on a day to worship Him. There are actually ancient accounts of other cultures thinking that the Israelites were lazy because they did no work on the Sabbath. To engage in a Sabbath is to be counter-cultural. The history of humanity has been one of constant toil. People needed to work with heavy toil in order to earn their daily bread. But God insists that man cease his labors for one day so that he can focus on God.
God did not make us out of loneliness or boredom. “We can say that God created the universe in order to enter into a history of love with humankind. He created it so that love could exist.” (Ratzinger, pg 43) We are not mere products of God’s creativity. We are His children and He brought us into the world because of love. The Sabbath is a day where we remember why we were made. Throughout the work week, we focus on many practical matters, but like the Pharisees we can lose sight of the main reason we do our work in the first place. The Sabbath gives us a palate cleanser. “It means to return to the source and to sweep away all the defilement that our work has brought with it. It also means going forth into a new world in which there will no longer be slaves and masters but only free children of God.” (Ratzinger, pg 44)
Slaves work without reward or rest. We are not slaves. We are His children. He is our reward. And we take time to enjoy our reward by spending time with Him on the Sabbath. And this time is for all people in God’s family. It does not matter if you are rich or poor, man or woman, or any other station in life. Ratzinger writes that “the sabbath brings about universal equality.” (Ratzinger, pg. 44) We must all come before the Lord and give Him our worship.
But modern humans have become slaves to their work. Ratzinger cites a philosopher named Ernst Bloch who said that human beings were so focused on their worldly labors that “people will no longer need to distinguish between Sundays and workdays. There will no longer be any need for the sabbath, since the human being is his own creator in every respect. And he will also cease to concern himself with merely dominating or shaping nature; now he will transform nature itself.” (Ratzinger, pg 51) What he means by this is that human beings want to be the ones who decide how the world should be. That is the Original Sin of our parents: deciding for ourselves what is right and wrong. And so we give ourselves over to the things that we place as more important than God. On Sundays, do you focus on God and His works? Time with family? Cultivating peace? Or do we make it about other things? Is it just another day where we try to cram in all our pre-Monday work?
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