Today we meet on Sundays for worship and hearing the Word of God. We’ve lost the sense of what Sabbath meant. We need to recover its meaning. The Shabbat Dinner is a wonderful way to recover the concept of rest and peace with God in our families. Shabbat is the Hebrew word that is translated into English as “Sabbath.” Shabbat Dinner is the recognition and commemoration of the joyful rest of the Sabbath. A typical greeting on the Sabbath in the Jewish community is “Shabbat shalom,” which means “Peace on the Sabbath” or, more figuratively, “May you dwell in complete wholeness on this seventh day, the day of rest.” We are made whole by being in Christ, in whose work we trust and rest. The Shabbat Dinner reminds us of the ancient meaning of the Sabbath. Sabbath rest was a time to escape the chaos and turmoil of a broken, “less than Eden” world. The world God intended for humanity was cursed because of the Fall (Gen.3:17-19). Eden was lost. The Sabbath was a time to remember that God had desired us to be at peace (shalom) with him and with our brothers and sisters. That what God still wants today! Right after God’s covenant with his people was confirmed at Mount Sinai (Ex.24:1-8), God invited Moses, Aaron and his sons, and the elders of Israel to a meal with him at his home on Mount Sinai (Ex.24:9-10). God then gave Moses the tablets of the Law (Ex.24:12-18). God celebrated the fact that he had a family before his family received the Law. In Shabbat Dinner, we want to remember that our home is to be a safe place from the darkness of this world. We want to be reminded of the peace (shalom) God intended for us. Shabbat Dinner is not our chance to earn God’s favor by observing a law. We do not need to convince God to love us. We are the children he already loves. We want to remember the Sabbath, instead of being a slave to the Sabbath. At Shabbat Dinner we have an opportunity to open our homes to Jesus and the Holy Spirit in a special way and receive the kind of peace that only he can bring. Remembering Sabbath therefore helps us look forward to the time when we will all be at God’s table with Jesus as our host, complete in his deliverance from the present world. Sabbath is a brief glimpse of the age yet to come, when we are all alive with Jesus, our older Brother, in the new Eden, the global house of God, for the rest of time (Heb.2:10-12; Rev.19:9). We want to experience what life should be like with God and the rest of our believing family, and therefore be reminded of the future restoration of the world when Jesus returns. Our celebration of the Lord’s Table (communion) not only helps us proclaim “the Lord’s death, until he comes” (1 Cor.11:26); it also gives us a foretaste of the ultimate meal with Jesus, the marriage supper of the lamb (Rev.19:9), which signals that God’s kingdom has come in its full manifestation. In Judaism, the Shabbat Dinner contains elements of ancient Israel’s Passover. The connection was natural, since the sabbath had been instituted after the deliverance from Egypt. The Shabbat Dinner reminded Jews that they had been slaves in Egypt, but also that they had been saved from all the supernatural powers of chaos that sought their destruction. The Sabbath Dinner calls to mind Old Testament passages like these: You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an
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