After exploring the great hope that lies in belief in a personal Creator & the dangers of trying to make sense of the cosmos without God, Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to explore what he calls “the enduring significance of the symbolic elements” of the Genesis account of creation.
In Genesis 1, Ratzinger notes that God “speaks” 10 times, recalling for us the Decalogue, the Ten Words or Commandments, in which God enumerates man’s obligation to him as well as to one another. Ratzinger also notes the prominence of the number 7: the number of days in a phase of the moon & thus the number of days in the week; it is the rhythm of the cosmos of which man is a part. We can see that all creation is ordered toward the Sabbath, the day of worship & rest and the sign of the covenant between God & man. He observes, “Creation is… ordered to worship [&] fulfills its purpose and assumes its significance when it is lived, ever new, with a view to worship.” Here he rightly recalls the motto of St. Benedict: Operi Dei nihil praeponatu, - “Put nothing before the service of God.” Worship follows the rhythm of creation, but also gives it its meaning. We find our meaning, too, when we discover & respond to the rhythm.
The Sabbath structure of creation is reflected in the Sabbath ordinances of the Torah. In the gift of the Sabbath, God’s expresses his love for man & renews his covenant with him. Man’s right response to this gift is worship. And true worship takes up God’s entire moral order: the right relation of man with God, with himself, & with one another. Further, in this worship-rest man discovers who he is & the grand destiny to which he is called. The Sabbath rest is not just an empty “doing nothing,” but a being taken up into God’s peace. Man is elevated out the natural world & takes his place as a supernatural being in the divine order. Here, the plan for the cosmos is restored & God’s new creation begins.
Now, every culture has intuitively known the rhythmic connection between creation & worship, but today our technological civilization is in grave danger of losing the rhythm that connects us to both God & others. Modern man finds it difficult to rest, indeed, rejects the idea of such a rest as “unprofitable.” Is it not true that fallen man would work himself virtually to death if not instructed by God to put down his tools, whether plow or keyboard? Isn’t there always one more task to do, one more dollar to make? Indeed, people today – even Christians – largely see the Lord’s Day not as the first day of the new creation in Christ’s Resurrection, but rather the last day of the week, useful for catching up on chores & finish shopping before the work week begins again. This self-centered view of existence has serious implications. In rejecting the Sabbath rest, we reject God &, necessarily, who we are & for what we are destined. We lose ourselves & one another. The cosmic order is ruptured.
Perhaps this is why God told the Israelites that every seventh year would be a Sabbath year when the land would rest & man along with it. The land was taken from the toil & profit of human hands & returned back to God, its rightful owner. Thus, man could receive it back from God again as a gift. In 2 Chronicles 36:21, Ratzinger discovers a key phrase: “The land enjoyed its Sabbaths… seventy years,” a reference to the conquering of Israel by the Babylonians. Why did God permit this to happen, & why this connection to the Sabbath rest? Ratzinger suggests, “The people had rejected God’s rest, its leisure, its worship, its peace, its freedom, and so they into gave the slavery of activity… They had to be snatched from their obstinate attachment to their own work … God had to… free them from the domination of activity (p.32).” They had to give up the idolatry of their own self-sufficiency & learn to trust in the loving God who created all, sustains all, & draws all back to himself. This Operi Dei is not the work of productivity, but liturgia, work on behalf of God before which nothing else may come & wherein we rest in his freedom, rest, & peace. Only in this, Ratzinger concludes, can man find his identity & truly live.
