Remember—Even Before it Happens!

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God rests on 7th Day of Creation/ Mosaic Monreale (Sicily), Cathedral. – Mosaic, 12th/13th century. Centre aisle, south wall.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” (Exodus 20:8)

The 10 Commandments are prefaced with the proclamation that Israel ought to keep the commandments because “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” The delivery from Egypt is what obliges Israel to keep the commandments as an act of gratitude. But the Sabbath is different—Sabbath is hardwired into the DNA of creation because God rested on the Sabbath when making the world.

The command to “Remember!” the Sabbath is not the same word as in the command, “Do this in remembrance of me” at the Last Supper. Remembrance of the Sabbath is the Future Passive Indicative 2nd Singular form of the verb, meaning “you shall remember,” or “you shall recall,” “you shall think about,” “you shall be aware of.”

This form of “remember” is always looking ahead to something. The people are told to always live in expectation, in anticipation of the next Sabbath. The Sabbath is the chronological icon of the Kingdom of God: just as we are called to always live in expectation and hope for the Kingdom, the 10 Commandments tell the people to always live in expectation and hope of the next Sabbath. They-and we-are called to focus on the future, where we are going rather than being focused on the past, where we have been and what we have done. We look ahead and we hope.

Several years ago, I was on West 14 Street several times a week during the summer for various regular errands. There was a street-lady, disheveled and unkempt, who walked backward pushing the shopping cart of her possessions nearly every day. In the Old Testament, she would have been hailed as a prophet enacting a sermon everyday, a living example of how people spend more time paying attention to where they have been and despairing over or being proud of what they have done rather than paying attention to where they are going and hopeful about opportunities and challenges ahead.

In modern Greek, this form of the verb has become the word for “fiancé.” This suggests that the Sabbath is the “engagement ring” given by God to his bride, Israel. Many of the prophets refer to the forty years that Israel spent in the wilderness as their honeymoon period with God.

Sabbath has always been respected in the Christian liturgical practice even as Sunday, the weekly anniversary of the Resurrection, became the principal day of Christian worship. Of course, the Great Sabbath—the ultimate day of rest—is the blessed Sabbath that Christ spent resting in the tomb, during which he descended into Hell to harrow [demolish] it. The engagement of God to Israel is fulfilled when Death and all-that-opposes-God is destroyed and the wedding celebration described in the Apocalypse [Book of Revelation] begins.

(Readers will recall that the Greek text of the Old Testament was compiled in 300 BC while the standard Hebrew text as we now have it is only as old as the First Crusade , AD 1000. The Septuagint, 1300 years older than the Hebrew text that survives, is a more reliable witness—translated by Jewish scholars for Jewish readers—to the original text. I’m classical Christian thought, the medieval Hebrew is a commentary on the text rather than the source of the text itself.)

Commandments #1-3

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A contemporary icon showing the prophet and God-seer Moses at the Burning Bush and receiving the Ten Commandments, both of which happened at Mt. Sinai.


Moses goes up into the smoke and fire and receives the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai. He has set a human barricade around the base of the mountain to insure that no “tourists” or sightseeing thrill seekers climb up the rocky heights behind him, hoping to see and hear what is intended only for Moses to see and hear. Even his brother Aaron, who goes partway up the mountain with his brother Moses, turns around and goes back to the bottom before Moses reaches his destination.

The first three or four commandments are commonly considered to describe our duty towards God; the following commandments are commonly thought to reveal our duty to our neighbors. It is these Ten altogether that the Early Church thought were eternal; the other commandments of the Old Testament—according to the Apostolic Constitutions, a 4th century Syrian handbook for how to run a parish church—says that the other Old Testament commandments were all given after the idolatry of the Golden Calf and all have to do with regulating the worship of Israel (how to worship, who can worship, what is worshipped, behavior that can get a person banned from participating in worship).

The most famous and controversial of these first three commandments is the commandment condemning idolatry. Most people think idolatry means worshipping statues but idolatry is really about letting anything be more important than God. Family, ideas, food, sex, drugs (alcohol included) can become idols if any of them are more important to us than God.

People often also think idolatry means worshipping devils and demons. St. Paul doesn’t think idolatry is about worshipping demons; he thinks idolatry is a waste of time because the “god” the statue represents doesn’t exist. According to St. Paul in First Corinthians, idolatry is the worship of a thing that isn’t real whereas worship of the true God is worshipping what really exists. That’s why he thinks it’s safe for a Christian to eat meat that was sacrificed to an idol; the meat wasn’t sacrificed to a devil but it was offered to something that doesn’t exist so it wasn’t really offered to anyone or anything.

That doesn’t mean that devils and demons don’t exist. The NYTimes had a fascinating article this weekend about the differences in religious power wielded by a Christianity that takes demonic power seriously vs. a Christianity that does not take demonic power seriously.

Moses = Burning Bushes and Building Bridges

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Moses encounters the Logos, the Word of God, at the Burning Bush in the icon of Our Lady of the Burning Bush in the upper right corner of the icon; see the detail from a contemporary icon as well.


Moses was the lynchpin between God and Israel; as the Serbian proverb goes, he was the neck that turned the head (connecting the head—God—to the body, which was Israel). His encounter at the bush, as he was tending Jethro’s flocks, becomes an image of the Incarnation as the bush that burned but was not consumed is a foreshadowing of the Virgin who gave birth to God without loss of her virginity.

According to Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!), the Hebrew word in the story that is translated into English as bush is seneh(סנה‎) which refers in particular to brambles; seneh is a biblical dis legomenon, only appearing in two places, both of which describe the burning bush. The use of seneh may be a deliberate pun on Sinai (סיני‎), a feature common in Hebrew texts. (That the burning bush is a bramble bush also associates it with the bramble bush which is an important part of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.)

At the bush, Moses is commissioned to act as God’s mouthpiece, telling Pharaoh to “Let my people go” and telling the people of Israel what God wants from them. He is commissioned to build a bridge between God and the world—both the fallen world (Egypt) and the world being redeemed and healed (Israel). This role as the bridge builder between God and the world is essentially the role of a priest; one Latin word for priest is pontifex, which is literally “bridge builder.”

Even before Aaron is ordained as priest, Moses offers sacrifices to God on behalf of Israel. Moses builds the bridge between eternity and the world by his words and by sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, it was an especially meritorious act to leave money in your will to build a public bridge that did not charge a toll across a river. Building a toll free bridge was a priestly act, uniting two sides of the river as a priest unites worlds in the liturgical sacrifice and preaching. (Without a bridge, people might have to travel several miles—hours—out of their way to find a place to cross the river. A toll bridge, built by someone who wanted to make a profit on their construction investment, limited river crossing to the well-to-do; a toll free bridge was an image of Christ’s sacrifice freely available to all.)

Moses built a bridge between God and Israel. Israel, the priestly people commissioned at Mt. Sinai, built a bridge between God and the world. The Word-made-flesh, who spoke to Moses at the bush, built the ultimate bridge that brought together everything he was not with everything that he is. The Church, the Body of the Word-made-flesh, continues that ministry of bridge building.