This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
It’s a common scenario. For years you are busy about life and routines — showing up daily for work and tending to the home fires — when suddenly you hit a wall. Dissatisfaction and restlessness set in. You’re unable to answer the big question: Why? Why am I doing these things?
You might call it a midlife crisis or the seven-year itch or something more sophisticated like ennui. But, whatever it is, you can’t seem to fix it.
You are tempted to imagine, moreover, that the universe is as devoid of purpose and meaning as you feel you are. Shakespeare gave voice to this feeling in the king’s soliloquy at the end of “Macbeth.”
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. …
The soliloquy is one of the purest expressions of despair in the English language — casting time as a series of absurd, indistinguishable days.
Macbeth concludes that life and time are purposeless: “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”
This is the very antithesis of biblical religion.
The form of time
Our sense of purpose is bound to our sense of time. Are we moving toward something? Or is the future just a treadmill to oblivion?
The Lord God answered such questions “in the beginning,” at the dawn of creation, as the story is told in the Book of Genesis: “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation” (Gn 2:2-3).
Until the seventh day, time was “without form and void,” as matter had been until God spoke. It was “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” But by hallowing the seventh day, God set a measure for time forever. With form came definition and purpose. God worked for six days, but he worked for the sake of the seventh day, which he blessed and made holy by his repose.
In 1998, Pope St. John Paul II discussed the significance of this “weekly reckoning of time.” In his apostolic letter Dies Domini (“The Lord’s Day”), he observed that the establishment of the Sabbath-directed week is of supreme importance. It is the calendar that propels the chosen people through history. At Mount Sinai, God expressed the Sabbath duty as a commandment: “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Ex 20:8). Much of the Old Testament is the story of their success or failure in keeping that commandment and following the divine model.
For God did not establish the Sabbath for his own sake. He did not rest because he was weary. He did not need to rest. God is all-powerful and does not grow weary. He is entirely self-sufficient. He lacks nothing and has no needs. He rested from his labors and hallowed the seventh day so that his human creatures, the crown of his creation, would follow his example.
In God’s plan, the Sabbath gave shape to the passage of time. Every week had a goal, an end, an objective. Time had a measure, a pattern, a purpose. Like God, the chosen people worked six days for the sake of the seventh.
If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
When Israel neglected the Sabbath, things began to fall apart (Neh 13:15-18):
In those days I saw in Judah people treading wine presses on the sabbath, and bringing in heaps of grain and loading them on donkeys; and also wine, grapes, figs, and all kinds of burdens, which they brought into Jerusalem on the sabbath day; and I warned them at that time against selling food. … Then I remonstrated with the nobles of Judah and said to them, “What is this evil thing that you are doing, profaning the sabbath day? Did not your ancestors act in this way, and did not our God bring all this disaster on us and on this city? Yet you bring more wrath on Israel by profaning the sabbath.”
When the people profaned the Sabbath, they turned to other gods, false gods. Perhaps they excused themselves by saying they had never turned to graven images and never entered heathen shrines or temples. But they did something just as idolatrous. They fashioned a god out of money, productivity and the bottom line. They made a god out of work.
According to the divine pattern, they should work six days for the sake of the seventh. Instead they were working seven days for the sake of profit.
Idols of work and rest
People can make an idol out of anything, really. By Jesus’ time the Pharisees had even managed to make an idol out of the Sabbath observance! In creation and in law, God had established the Sabbath to be a sweet obligation: a time of leisure for worship, contemplation and family. The Pharisees, in trying to eradicate infidelity, had made the Sabbath a straitjacket. They even harassed Jesus for healing people on the Sabbath (Jn 5:10, Jn 9:16, Lk 13:14 and elsewhere).
Jesus brought them back to basics: “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mk 2:27, RSVCE). Again, God has no need for the Sabbath. He doesn’t need to rest. He has no need to be reminded of his purpose. We are the ones who need the weekly rest, the weekly reminder, the weekly reinforcement.
But then Jesus went a step further. He identified himself not merely as a teacher of the Sabbath, or a healer on the Sabbath, but rather the “lord even of the sabbath” (Mk 2:28).
Only God could be lord of the Sabbath. In saying this, Jesus was revealing his divinity. He was identifying himself as the fulfillment of the primordial Sabbath. In his ministry he would transform and elevate the observance.
It was in the paschal mystery — Jesus’ dying and rising — that he launched a new creation (Rv 21:5, 2 Cor 5:17, Gal 6:15). Thus the celebration moved forward from the seventh day (the Sabbath, Saturday) to the first day (Sunday). This reset the calendar, so to speak, bringing the cosmos back to the beginning, the day on which creation began with God’s command: “Let there be light” (Gn 1:3). Now, in Jesus, the true light has come into the world (Jn 1:4-9, 12:35-36, 12:46).
Jesus has not abolished the Sabbath, but fulfilled it and enhanced it.
In Scripture and in all subsequent Christian works, Sunday is called the “Lord’s day” (cf. Rv 1:10). In A.D. 107, St. Ignatius of Antioch identified Christians as those “no longer observing the sabbath, but fashioning their lives after the Lord’s day on which our life also arose in (Jesus).”
The early Church also referred to Sunday as the “eighth day” in order to emphasize its superabundance.
Pope St. John Paul II, in Dies Domini, proclaimed that Sunday, the Lord’s day, is “more than a ‘replacement’ for the Sabbath. … Sunday is its fulfilment, and in a certain sense its extension and full expression in the ordered unfolding of the history of salvation, which reaches its culmination in Christ.”
The Pharisees were quite wrong about the remedy for Sabbath negligence. What the people needed were not more laws or stronger laws. What the people needed was Jesus, the fulfillment of the law.
The components of the Lord’s day are evident from the beginning, from the aftermath of Jesus’ resurrection. What model does he establish in the new creation? In Luke’s Gospel, we see that he walked from Jerusalem to Emmaus with two disciples and discussed the Scriptures along the way; then he broke bread with them and was “known to them in the breaking of the bread” (24:35).
Thus we see a reprise of the themes from the Old Testament. On the Lord’s day there is unforced leisure for the discussion of divine matters. And there is sacramental communion. Sunday, says Pope St. John Paul II, “is an invitation to relive in some way the experience of the two disciples of Emmaus, who felt their hearts ‘burn within them’ as the Risen One walked with them on the road, explaining the Scriptures and revealing himself in ‘the breaking of the bread.'”
The fundamental feast
Think for a moment about those two men who walked with Jesus on the road to Emmaus. They were dejected. They had lost their sense of purpose. As disciples, they had once found new meaning for their lives in Jesus. But then came Calvary, where they saw him die, and with him died their dreams, their ambitions and their purpose. “We had hoped,” they said with a sigh, “that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Lk 24:21).
In his teaching on the road, and in the Eucharist, Jesus did something far greater than restore their hope. He gave them more exalted reasons for hope. He brought heaven to earth and then to the disciples’ hearts.
This was not a one-and-done event. It was a resetting of the calendar. Consider the strong words of Pope St. John Paul II: “For Christians, Sunday is ‘the fundamental feastday,’ established not only to mark the succession of time but to reveal time’s deeper meaning.” And again, “Since Sunday is the weekly Easter, recalling and making present the day upon which Christ rose from the dead, it is also the day which reveals the meaning of time.”
It is in Jesus that we see and receive time’s meaning. And meaning yields purpose. We see that he is the reason not only for the day, but for every day. Sunday momentarily draws our eyes away from the work at hand, so that we can look upward and recover the vision that draws us forward. Sunday reminds us of the reason we work. Sunday restores us to return to work with greater vigor, stronger purpose.
Pope St. John Paul II was emphatic about our need to remember Sunday and keep it faithfully. We are not less obliged than the Pharisees to honor the observance, but far more so.
I would strongly urge everyone to rediscover Sunday: Do not be afraid to give your time to Christ! Yes, let us open our time to Christ, that he may cast light upon it and give it direction. He is the One who knows the secret of time and the secret of eternity, and he gives us “his day” as an ever-new gift of his love. The rediscovery of this day is a grace that we must implore, not only so that we may live the demands of faith to the full, but also so that we may respond concretely to the deepest human yearnings. Time given to Christ is never time lost, but is rather time gained, so that our relationships and indeed our whole life may become more profoundly human.
The sainted pope wrote his letter on the Lord’s day in 1998, when the Church was preparing for the Great Jubilee of the year 2000. Thus it is especially significant this year as Catholics observe yet another jubilee year.
In ancient Israel, a jubilee year was like a super-Sabbath. It took place at the end of 49 years — that is, seven “weeks of years” (Lv 25:8). It was meant to be not just a commemoration of the Sabbath, but a return to the purity of the original creation, before the cosmos was profaned by human sin — before human purpose was chronically obscured.
We need to recover that jubilee spirit, and thus recover our sense of purpose, by recovering Sunday.
Practically speaking, what does that mean? In the words, again, of Pope St. John Paul II, it means “keeping the day holy by means of prayer, works of charity and abstention from work.”
Once upon a time it was easier to do this. States and municipalities enforced blue laws that guaranteed a day off on Sunday for nonessential businesses. The Sabbath spirit was evident in lighter traffic, less rushing around. Sunday had a different pace, a different vibe.
Gradually, blue laws were weakened by an accumulation of exceptions. Now they’re all but gone.
So we have to make an effort, and it should begin with a deep examination of conscience.
It goes without saying that we should fulfill the Church’s Sunday obligation. Our country is in the middle of a Eucharistic Revival, and we mustn’t miss out on it.
But “hallowing” the day is not reducible to Mass attendance. We need to do more, incrementally. We can change the day a little bit at a time. Here I offer just a few suggestions for recovering Sunday. Every individual and every family will approach this in differing ways.
• Consider screenless Sundays — or a simple block of screenless hours every Sunday. Use that time to talk to each other and look at each other. Talk about your lives rather than what’s fed to you on social media or a shared TV.
• Add a time of common prayer. If you start with a decade of the Rosary, maybe you can build to a whole Rosary over a few months or years. (My family did this!) You can also hold a brief study of a passage from Scripture, perhaps the Sunday Gospel.
• Start right now to catch momentum from the Jubilee Year of Hope. But let the momentum carry you long past this year.
Recovering Sunday is the cure for any midlife crisis and the only lasting remedy for despair. God designed our lives to keep this rhythm of work, followed by worship and refreshment, followed by work once again. Only the Sabbath can give meaning to all the days that precede and all the days that follow. We need the reminder. We need the rest. Remember what Jesus said: The Sabbath was made for us. And it was our creator who made it.
I am convinced that in the Lord’s day we find our purpose.
