Chapter 4 briefly discusses the cycle of weekly services and prayers of the Orthodox Church with its roots in the Old Testament and New Testament traditions. Whenever the Jews would gather for worship, they read the scriptures and prayed together. The Mosaic command “to remember the Sabbath” was kept by the Jews and continues to be fulfilled in the keeping of the Sunday service of the Lord’s Day – called kyriake in Greek. The Jewish religious authorities had conflicts with Jesus’ observance of the Sabbath is obvious in reading the New Testament. In Holy Orthodoxy, Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath. He never broke any commandments because the true Sabbath isn’t for idleness, indulgence, or indifference toward our neighbors, John Chrysostom teaches.
The Sabbath or Saturday is the day of resurrection for Christians. The Messiah didn’t come first as an earthly ruler like a Caesar or Herod. Christ was renowned for his rabbinical learnedness, healings, divine authority, and many other miraculous events recounted in the Gospels. Most of all, he was regarded as the “king of the Jews” who is known with the plaque over his head “the King of Glory” in Orthodox temples. Christ accomplished much more than what most Jews and scribes expected the Messiah to be and to do for them. Christ taught us to carry our own crosses in self-denial. He also taught us to love both our brothers and sisters in faith as well as our enemies who haven’t held any faith in God.
The Eucharist came to the forefront in Christianity since it was the reality of so many Old Testament prophecies and typologies in the holy scriptures. For example, just as the story of Joseph can be used to teach us God’s providence and control over events in history and our personal lives, to teach us to love those who hate us and persecute us, to teach us to have steadfastness in God’s plans, so Christ also became our servant, he was sold into being captured by the religious scribes, and he suffered as a righteous and innocent man who came to teach us to do the same today. Christ is the Master and Teacher of the Holy Scriptures through his teachings and example of his life. Sabbath means “he rested,” and it refers to Christ who rested after his works were done – his resurrection and ascension into heaven. Christ created the world for all people before the Jewish nation existed. The worship in the synagogue at times conflicted with the openness of Christians to allowing Gentiles into worship without requiring them to adopt certain customs like circumcision or abstinence of foods. The first Apostolic Council met over their growing issue of these Jewish practices and customs and what Gentiles needed to do to gain entrance into worshipping the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The exchange between the Sabbath observation on Saturday for the Sunday observation of the Eucharist and the remembrance of our Lord and Master Jesus Christ fills up the meaning of all the commandments. But also, Ignatius of Antioch writes in his letter to the Magnesians, “It’s outlandish to speak of Jesus Christ and to Judaize. For Christianity did not put its faith in Judaism but Judaism in Christianity.” The Messiah wasn’t about the preservation of a cultural legacy of the Jewish nation – not to make it great with wealth and earthly power, which are in fact enslavements to passions, as John Chrysostom teaches. True rest is a clean conscience and loving everyone without inquiring into their situation. It is joy in poverty of some kind and faith in God’s complete control over all turn of events. It is being able to see with our noetic eyes the so-called punishments and hardships of life as gifts waiting to be opened or a doctor’s medicine, like Lazarus thought to himself in his own sufferings. Christ had to be from the Jewish nation is prophetic and necessary. But the mission of Christ wasn’t an ethnic parade for a single group of people just at isn’t for any of today’s cultural categories. Today to judaize could mean putting anything as an obstacle to faith in Jesus Christ. It might be something seen as necessary for daily life or even needed to be a good Christian. Judaizing could be any cultural practice that would block us from discerning how “the Holy Trinity never stops communicating with us.” Timothy was half-Jewish, and Paul allowed him to be circumcised, but others like Titus, who weren’t Jewish at all, Paul forbade them to be circumcised, depending on how it would help or hinder someone’s faith and growing up in it. In the canons of the Church, “judaizing” meant circumcising Christians and resting on Saturday instead of Sunday to remember Christ and put our faith in Him, and not trusting the old customs to heal us, which Christ has fulfilled in his works on earth. The Eucharist heals us. In some places of the Near East, Saturday and Sunday continued side by side as distinct liturgical services and days of remembrance without replacing each other in meaning or observance. The Church in Constantinople observed Sunday as a day of remembering the departed as well as the remembrance of Christ in the tomb. Ignatius also says that the Sabbath existed at the beginning of creation. In a similar way, at the end of time, we will no longer need the heavenly stars, the sun, the moon to mark our daily existence because Christ will be our Light – Christ is the Cosmos.