Saturday, November 7, 2009

The mask of eternity

These two quotations about the Sabbath are from an article by David P. Goldman about the relationship of music to time and eternity, "Sacred Music, Sacred Time." The article is about how sacred music "can direct the mind’s ear to the border line at which eternity breaks into temporality," not about observance of the Sabbath. What he says, though, about the meaning of the Sabbath to Jews is just as relevant to Christians with my convictions:
.... Because we are mortal, and because all religion responds to mortality, our intimations of the sacred arise from our experience of the tension between the mortal existence of humankind and the eternal life of God. In revealed religion, God’s time stands in contrast to the earthly time of days and years and the corporeal time of pulse and respiration. A creator God who stands outside nature also stands outside time itself. Eternity is incommensurate with natural time. God made the world ex nihilo before time existed and he will bring it to an end.

Eternity breaks into the temporal world through revelation. For Jews, the sanctification of the Sabbath introduces an element of eternity into natural time; for Christians, the eschaton breaks into the natural time of human history through Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection. God’s time, the time of salvation in the coming of the Messiah or the second coming of Christ, stands in contrast to the natural time of ordinary existence. ....

Jews have a different sense of sacred time, for God sanctified the Sabbath, the last day of creation and creation’s goal. Sabbath observance is radically unique to Judaism and is the pivot of Jewish worship. Rather than journey to “the one day of the world of which all individual days of the world are but a part,” the Jews live in the seventh day, which God planted in temporality as a foretaste of the world to come.

.... For Jews, as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, time is merely the mask of eternity...[which] is planted among us in the Sabbath. .... [more]
Sacred Music, Sacred Time | First Things

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