23rd Sunday in Course
We learn our place and earn our bread with hard labor. We become wise, Lord, and begin to understand our place and yours only when our hair is white, our minds slowed, our joints unable to leap to do your will. And we build fantastic towers and plan grand campaigns without the resources to complete them. Teach us, Lord, to hear Your Word today, so that we may number our days rightly and be truly wise.
In the beginning, the two first humans had it all together. Their life and their work was one. God had loved them into existence. Every day in the cool of the evening He walked with them in a garden He had planted and tended. They learned how to be human, and how to become divine, from the mouth of God Himself. The rules were simple: eat and drink what they needed, obey their Creator and Father, and make lots of babies. “Fill the earth” with their offspring. God wanted to share His divine life with billions of men and women made in His own image and likeness.
It wasn’t good enough, I guess. The adversary–our adversary–tempted them with a shortcut, drew them into his great rebellion, and we lost it. We lost the garden, the intimacy with our Maker, and we no longer had it all together. Man became alienated from woman, and woman from man. The labor of the man became hard labor over an earth that yielded little. The labor of the woman became hard labor not just in the act of birth, but in the ongoing action of childrearing and coping with her man’s gripes about his work, not to mention her own work.
The ancient world developed along predictable lines. As some humans attained power through war or commerce, they actually bought and sold other human beings. These slaves then, a vast army of permanent indenture, did the hard labor so a privileged few could enjoy a life of leisure. Slaves worked the mines and fields and kitchens seven days a week so their masters might be able to run the businesses and study philosophy. Man alienated from man, and woman from woman.
But in one nation the terrible structure of sin issued in a revolution. A people mired in servitude heard a champion speak the word of the God who loved them: “let my people go,” he roared to Pharaoh. And the God of love worked mighty portents in bloody water and frogs and locusts and darkness and even the death of the best children of Egypt to free His people from their long bondage. And He gave them the Sabbath–one day every week so that no man could enslave even himself, so that every man and woman could for at least one day a week regain the freedom of Eden, and celebrate the love of God.
The worst slavery of all, of course, is slavery to sin. Sin seems attractive at first glance–a little larceny so you can enjoy the good life, a little adultery because your spouse doesn’t really listen to you, a little wasting of time when your homework seems boring. But in the blink of an eye the one sin becomes a whole series of injustices, until you are mired in vice, enslaved to sin. God became human, really man like us, to live and learn and heal and teach and even die in our place so that we could be freed from that slavery. And in the process He taught the Church to teach and heal and spread that liberation over all the world.
So weekly the Church celebrates that freedom, the freedom we enjoy because our baptism brings us into the resurrected life of Jesus Christ. We celebrate the day of Resurrection, the day after the Sabbath, the day the Church Fathers called the eighth day–Sunday. And in celebrating, the Church gives us two very reasonable commands.
First, the celebration involves Eucharist, praise and thanksgiving and sharing a Eucharistic banquet. In love, the Church tells us that numbering our days aright, living as God’s children involves at least once a week coming together, acknowledging our weakness and sin and receiving the forgiveness and healing and nourishment we need. We take the same food and drink to become one body in Christ, and to be empowered to share that joy, that celebration with those who have no hope. That’s what we deacons mean when in the last words of Mass we say, literally, “Go out, Church, you are sent to work as Jesus did.”
But the second command is a literal celebration of the liberation from slavery. The Church asks us to refrain from any work that might enslave ourselves or anybody else. That means staying away from the office–the Lord’s day is time for worship and family, just like the sign on a local restaurant says. That means tear down the fence or build a new one some other day–you might give scandal to your neighbor. Instead, spend time in family discussion, or Bible study, or a review of the catechism, or helping Junior with his religion homework. Do charitable work as a family–visit the sick or play big brother to an orphan.
It also means not supporting those institutional structures that keep other people from celebrating the Lord’s day. In my lifetime, we have gone from a situation in which it was illegal for stores to open on Sunday to one in which Sunday is the biggest or second-biggest shopping day of the week. Thousands of families are affected by this new thing, this seven-day work-week. This particularly affects the poor. They come to us with their children, and confess that they are too exhausted to come to Mass on Sunday because they’ve had to work an eight or ten-hour shift at the store. How easy it would be to help these folks move to a work week that does not involve profaning the Lord’s Day, by our shifting all unnecessary Sunday shopping to Monday or Saturday? And then, of course, we would be freeing ourselves for worship and family and charitable deeds on the Day of the Lord.
The commandment to keep holy the Lord’s Day, this day, is, then, made because God loves us. He knows that this constant running after money and goods is a substitute for His love, that we cannot be satisfied with work or possessions or anything on this earth. So He, in His mercy, gives us one day a week to liberate ourselves and those around us, to free us to attain a little taste of that original blessing of Eden, and to look forward in this Eucharistic banquet to the eternal banquet He wants to share with us. All He asks of us, is to take a little one-day vacation with family and friends, just once a week.
