Discourse 28

A wonderful demonstration concerning the mystery of the Sabbath and the first day of the week. Chapter 28. The first day of the week: it is a mystery of the knowledge of truth, that which is not received with flesh and blood, and the ascent from the sacraments. In this world, however, there is no perfect day, nor indeed a true Sabbath. That which God established on the seventh day is a mystery of the cessation of the pure from the course of these lives, because even the grave is corporeal. From it, from this world, six days are completed in the labor of the lives, and the seventh is fulfilled in the grave, and the perfect in the departure from it. For just as the mysteries of the first day of the week are received wonderfully by those who are worthy, and not the day itself received in its corporeality, so also the mysteries of the Sabbath, as in the demonstration, are received by the worthy, and not the true Sabbath itself, which is a perfect life from the renunciations. From everything God has hidden a mystery from us, and not in the dense action of turning in the truths has he decreed for us here. For the true Sabbath, and not the wonderful one, is in the grave, a perfect rest from the weariness of sufferings and from the labor against them. The whole person ceases completely: the body together with the soul.

In six days God established the order of this world, and set up the elements, and gave them a ceaseless motion for the service, and they do not rest from their course before they are dissolved. And from the power of these, the fatherly elements established our body. And they were not given rest from their motions, nor was our body born from them, so that it might be free from labor. And he set for them within the boundary a limit, until they reach their first origins, which is the dissolution from life. Also to Adam he said thus: By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread. Until when? Until you return to the earth from which you were formed, and you shall work the earth, and it shall show you thorns and thistles. For this is a mystery: that the world of labor is this world. As long as one lives. But our Lord changed from that night which you know, the sweat of labor which in the earth shows thorns and thistles, to the sweat of prayer together, and of knowledge in the labor of righteousness. Five thousand years he left him in that toil, because the way of the saints had not yet been revealed, as the Apostle. But he came in his grace at the end of the days, and commanded our freedom, that it should change its sweat for sweat. From all manner of work, he does not command to cease; it is a change that he shows to it.

Therefore, it is not possible for the earth to be at rest. For if it ceased from its motion in this [world], the stars would be hindered, for they have a course to run, which is the rest from this [motion]—the service of the earth's corporeality, that which moves the stars according to its nature. In truth, the stars are pains, for from the seed of corporeality they cause you to know, just as they made known to us the image of Adam and his pains. The earth has no [ability] to cease from moving, for it moves according to its nature. After its nature, it is, and the earth is ours, as the testimony of God to us: the earth from which I was formed. That is the stars. This, then, is the rational [nature]: pains. And if our Lord in everything was a type for us in the mystery of all the distinctions of his governance, for until the ninth hour of the eve he did not cease from service, nor from the type, which is the completion of all the life of the mystery of service. But to the Sabbath he did not receive, except in the grave, where those who say that there is a Sabbath in this world—what rest from pains? But concerning the first day of the week, it is great to speak. Our Sabbath is the day of the grave. Certainly, there our nature rests. Then every day it is necessary for us to uproot the stars from it, as long as this earth endures. Because of the strength of service, and the weakness of the forest.

not for the sake of completion: and even so, if for a brief moment it were to be drawn toward this, the forest would go up and cover its face, and it would burn your seed, and your labor from before would be as if it had never been. Therefore, every day the cessation from this is necessary for its purification. The remainder from this increases the abundance of that.