Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy (Exodus 20:8).
That’s the fourth of the Ten Commandments. It concludes the commandments concerning our relationship with God. The next six concern our relationships with other people. By the way, those commandments start with one concerning our parents.
We rightly interpret any passage from the Bible, including this commandment, by understanding it in its context. For any biblical passage, the final context in which we need to understand is Jesus Christ.
With Jesus, what once were commandments now become invitations. Today Jesus calls us to remember and hallow each Sunday. Even more, the Holy Spirit grants us all the power we need to hear these words of Jesus as invitation and cheerfully do them.
Every single moment of our lives, Abba (God the Father) is for us, Jesus is with us, and Spirit is in us. With this dynamic presence of God for us, with us, and in us, we live already in the Kingdom of Heaven. This Kingdom of Light is the wondrous world in which we now find ourselves by grace (God’s unmerited favor).
True, this wondrous world is not the only world in which we find ourselves. We each are confronted, inside and out, by enough evil to convince us of that.
But even now God’s wondrous world takes precedence. Jesus has already made it our definitive future and invites us even now to participate in it. And that dreary Olympian world, that passes for the only one, Jesus has already made it our definitive past and even now enables us to leave it behind more and more.
To participate in Christ’s wondrous world and leave the dreary Olympian world behind, Jesus invites us to remember and keep holy each Sunday. He invites us, one day out of seven, to focus our attention on his wondrous world, that world sparkling with all the truth, freedom, love, and vitality that are ours through him.
When once again saturated with the ways of that wondrous world, Jesus then invites us to remember it, and witness to it, as we plunge into the daily round. That way we may bring Christ’s light to the dark and warmth to the cold to which the gods of dreariness would otherwise consign us all.
We may now live in the wondrous world of Jesus: not because we have to or should, but because he loves us and frees us to do so.
