Finding Messiah by Jennifer M. Rosner

Author:Jennifer M. Rosner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity;Judaism;jewish tradition;jewish jesus;jesus and Judaism;messianic jew;Messianic Judaism;Israel;people of Israel;jewish-christian relations;parting of the ways;supersessionism;Judaism and Christianity;Christian discipleship;discipleship; Christian covenant;what does judaisim have to do with Christianity;is Judaism opposed to Christianity;historical Judaism and Christianity;contemporary Judaism and Christianity;Judaism and the church
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2022-02-15T13:10:48+00:00

So what happened? Why is the Jewish Shabbat so distant from mainstream Christian worship and discipleship? While Sunday worship (built upon the foundation of the resurrection) is present in the New Testament, the final split between Judaism’s Shabbat and Christianity’s practice of worshiping on Sunday is embedded within the complexities of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity.8

One window into this development is the Epistle of Barnabas, likely composed just before the Bar Kochba revolt in the early second century and focused on the reality of Judaism and Christianity increasingly becoming two separate and mutually exclusive communities. Barnabas argues that Jews and Christians do not share a common covenant with God, and that the Jewish people’s commitment to Jewish practice (including the Sabbath) reveals their inability to understand the true core of God’s covenant love and lays bare their blind eyes, hard hearts, and evil deceptions.

Barnabas offers commentary on God’s chastisement in Isaiah 1:13 (“New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—I cannot bear your worthless assemblies”), concluding that God is instead calling Christians to “keep the eighth day as a day of gladness, on which also Jesus rose from the dead, and after he had appeared ascended unto heaven.”9 Here it is clear that, by this point in history, Christian worship on Sunday was a deliberate act of dissociation from any connection to the Jewish people and Jewish practice.

Once Constantine became emperor in AD 306, he issued a series of laws that permitted and facilitated Christian Sunday worship. Indeed, Constantine was a major player in the parting of the ways. While his endorsement of Sunday worship was likely due to his own identification with the growing Christian movement (as well as its convenient overlap with the pagan day of sun worship, which also retained significance for Constantine), his actions contributed to the widening rift between the largely Gentile Christian community throughout the Roman Empire and the Jewish people. Here again we see Jewish followers of Jesus positioned as the crumbling bridge of the excluded middle.

What does all of this mean for Christians today? From my perspective, Christians do not have the same relationship with the Jewish Shabbat as Jews do, nor should they feel obligated to observe the Sabbath on the day or in the way Jews do. In fact, the establishment of Sunday as the Christian day of worship has become a mainstay of Christianity in a way that has secured this day as a key time for fellowship, worship, and mutual enrichment.

What I think Christians can learn from a deeper understanding of the Jewish Shabbat is a kind of sabbath ethic, which every single person of faith can benefit from. The contours of the Jewish Shabbat can serve as a challenge about how Christians prioritize their time and resources, and perhaps a nudge to consider taking one day per week as a time of intentional reflection, or personal retreat, or quality family time.

Additionally, understanding the Jewish Shabbat is part of understanding the fabric of Jewish life, essentially helping Christians to understand the religious lifeblood of their covenantal forebears.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.