Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

HOMILETICAL RESOURCES
granted time to tend to the world of human relationships as opposed
to the world of material relationships. We can "resoul." 3
How the modern world needs sabbath! We have polluted air and
water and earth because we deemed ourselves rulers of the earth
when that title belongs only to God. We have not taken the time to
learn that we are one with all created things, and to what pass has that
brought us? Our failure to build rich inner worlds, filled with loving
care and a sense of awe and partnership with each other and with
creation, has brought us to the edge of self-annihilation. We do not
need time "to kill." Rather, we need time to stop and look inward and
out, a moment to pause. At the crossroad which sabbath provides
between week and week, we may see, as God did, what is good in our
creativity so we may maximize it. Our cessation from work can help us
plan sensibly for making our efforts produce life and joy, not death
and destruction. We are the rulers of creation, right down to the very
atoms thereof. But do we truly rule or do our creations now rule us?
When sabbath wanes, as a sign of re-entry into the workdays of the
week, the Jew lights a candle of braided wax and wicks and recalls
how God created light on the first day. The candle is woven and not of
one piece symbolizing how human creativity can be a mix of good and
evil, a source of positive building and horrendous destruction. The
fire we hold in our hand as the week begins challenges us all with the
question of how we will use creation's gifts: to light and warm, or to
burn and destroy, The six workdays teach us that we are capable of
accomplishing anything our creative imaginations will. The seventh
day poses the question, "But should we?"
"You shall not murder."
The fact that Jewish tradition has developed continuously through
different eras and in a great variety of places has meant that it could
refine and redefine its biblical legacy in light of its new experiential
insights. The directions of the prohibitions on murder and thievery,
elemental to the protection of life, property, and communal order,
became richer in meaning as Jewish life progressed. What are simple
enough statements in their biblical locus developed subtle ethical
nuances which tell us something important about the Jewish
tradition's ethos.
Genesis already provides a theological grounding for the prohibition
on murder. It states that such an act should be punished by death
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