Memorial of Saint Anthony, Abbott
I love the next-to-last line in today's gospel (Mark 2:23-28): "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath." It proclaims so much about who we are and what God wants for us. In Genesis, God has a day of rest on the seventh day and in Jewish Law, all people were required to observe the sabbath. Here, Jesus is proclaiming that the sabbath was not made FOR God but God considers us so important and worthy of love, that we are the ones who are gifted with the sabbath.
It is easier to see this important point when we compare our Creation story in Genesis with the creation stories of other Near Eastern ancient cultures. The Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish, for example, contains many of the same features as the Jewish/Christian one (a world made from chaos, with successive creations of plants and animals) but one of the key differences is in the way humans are understood. In the Enuma Elish, humans are meant to be slaves to the gods. The gods have a day of rest but only because humans are there to serve them. This is a very striking contrast to Genesis and Jesus, then.
But it becomes even more striking when we recall that the Babylonians were bad guys for the Jews because they forced the Israelites to walk 500 miles into exile from their homes, and then forced them into slavery. The Babylonian creation story was a mirror of the way people in society as a whole thought about humans, slavery and rest. In ancient Israel, however, even slaves had the Sabbath (see Leviticus 25 for example).
And so, in today's gospel, Jesus is emphasizing what a gift for us the sabbath is meant to be. We are meant to rest, not really because it is a law (though it is that) but because it is a gift from God to remind us that our work does not make us who we are. Work is important, of course. But on one day a week, we remember that rest (and all the things that go along with rest, like play, and laughter, and really good food we don't eat the rest of the week) is a big part of what it means to be human.
Today's first reading (Hebrews 6:10-20) discusses the utter gift that Jesus is for us. Through Jesus, who is God himself, God shares the gift of what it means to be truly human but also keeps all of the promises he has ever made with people. Today let us meditate on being truly, joyfully human, in all the ways that God hopes and intends for us through God's own love.
- Jana M. Bennett