Lectio
“Observe how great and what that is at which God the Only-begotten marvels. Gold, riches, principalities, are in His sight as the shadow or the flower that fadeth; in the sight of God none of these things is wonderful, as though it were great or precious, but faith only; this He wonders at, and pays honour to, this He esteems acceptable to Himself.”
— Pseudo-Origen, Hom. in Div. 5 (quoted in Thomas Aquinas, Catena Aurea on Matthew 8:10)
Meditatio
Sabbath is an act of faith, of trusting that God’s love and goodness are not contingent on our seeking or striving, and on trusting that, when we stop all other things to worship Him alone — not because we stop all other things to worship Him alone, but because, in doing so, we are saying that we trust Him — that this, in fact, pleases Him. We see this kind of faith in Matthew’s telling of the centurion who asks Jesus to heal his servant, not as an expression of Sabbath as such, but as the kind of absolute trust in God that Sabbath asks of us when we fully submit to it as an essential facet of our weekly rhythm.
When the centurion approaches Christ, he does not ask Him to come to his home. He does not ask Him to touch his servant — to lay His hands on him — in order to heal him. Instead, he utters the simple, faith-filled words: “Only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.” He has already let go of every condition he might have set on how his servant’s healing should arrive — and in that letting go, he receives what no authority of his own, no number of soldiers under his command, could ever produce.
This is what God wonders at. Not gold. Not riches. Not principalities — the things the world spends itself acquiring, all of them, in the Father’s sight, no more than a shadow or a flower already fading. Faith alone is what He esteems acceptable to Himself: not as one more thing we do to earn His notice, but as the simple cessation of our own grasping, the place where our striving stops and His sufficiency is finally allowed to be enough. It is the same amazement that moved Christ to say of the centurion, “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.”
Sabbath asks the same faithful letting go — but stretched across the whole body of Christ, kept on a fixed day, held in common. It is not one technique among many for achieving a peaceful, prayerful disposition — or for achieving anything, for that matter. It is the place the Church has been given, in time, as a gift, where the centurion’s “only speak the word” becomes the practice of an entire community, week after week, learning together not to grasp at what cannot heal us. The rest Sabbath gives is not the rest of having finished our work. It is the rest of having stopped trying to heal ourselves — and finding, through faith, that we already have been healed, our souls given over to the rest that only Christ offers.
Oratio
Worthy Of Believing
faith has healed
my wounded soul
but not faith
the One in whom
my faith rests
who gives me rest
when I am weary
who lights my way
through the darkness
not my faith
for faith alone
cannot heal
gives no rest
provides no light
but Christ alone
who loves me
does all this
and more
not because I believe
but because He
is worthy of believing
Contemplatio
What would it look like to simply receive Sabbath rest this week, rather than try to achieve it?
Related Scripture
“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
— Matthew 11:28-30 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Outmatched By Love: The Grace We Can Neither Earn Nor Repay, which traces the same trust at the heart of this post — that grace, like the centurion’s healing, is received rather than earned, and even our capacity to ask for it is already a gift.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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