Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

And when we Sabbath, we tap into God’s rhythm for human flourishing.

The Ten Commandments are just the beginning of the Torah. All in all there are 613 commandments.

They get a bad rap as rules, but in reality they’re more like a manifesto for how Israel was to live as the people of God.

Really, there are two Torahs.1

The first is from Mount Sinai, and it’s what we read in Exodus and Leviticus.

Four decades later, the first generation is all gone, and a new generation is ready to step into the land. The future is a bright white canvas. They are right on the cusp of something amazing. That’s when Deuteronomy was written.

It can be translated “the second law” or “the second Torah.” It’s essentially a sermon.

And so we get two versions of the Ten Commandments. One in Exodus 20, and then a second in Deuteronomy 5. They are almost identical. Almost. They start exactly the same, “Observe the sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you.

At Mount Sinai, it’s “for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” So at Sinai, the Sabbath command is rooted in the story of creation. We rest because God rests.

Deuteronomy it ends like this: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched

arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observ...

Because Israel was prone to amnesia. We all are. It’s easy to forget the past. And so the Sabbath is a memorial. At Sinai it looks back to Eden, but in Deuteronomy it looks back to Egypt. And Egypt is somewhere you never want to go back to.

In Egypt the Hebrews were slaves.

Rest isn’t an option for a slave. Rest is a by-product of freedom. No freedom, no rest.

Language about endless work and restlessness is strung all through the Exodus story.

Now, I’m not anti-American. I have no problem saying I’m a capitalist, not a Marxist. But seriously, it’s getting ridiculous out there.

Americans are working more than ever before. One study I read recently said that from 1973 to 1990 the average workweek went up from 41 hours to 47 hours. And that’s not too bad, but over the same time period the amount of time spent on rest went down 37 percent!

We need to relearn how to power down, unplug, disconnect, take a break, and be in one place at one time. We forget that we’re not a machine. We can’t work 24/7.

Since 1950 the per capita income of Americans has tripled. The average size of an American home has gone up by almost a thousand square feet, from about 1,300 to 2,300. But the average size of the family has been cut in half — from 4.32 to 2.58.

But in spite of all this exponential growth, we’re as unhappy as ever. In fact, we’re worse. We spend about 250 billion dollars a year on prescription drugs. Antidepressants are the second most popular prescription in the US, after cholesterol medication. One in 10 people are on antidepressants at any given time. More like 1 in 4 over a lifetime.15 Mental illness is exploding.

Abraham Heschel was spot-on when he said, “There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.”17 So,

to sum up . . . We work more than ever before, we have more than ever before, and we’re miserable. It’s Egypt all over again.

Sabbath is a way to say ENOUGH! Enough work. Work is a good thing, but it’s not the thing. There’s more to life than production. There’s pleasure. Sabbath is a way to break our addiction to accomplishment. One day a week we cease all work — not just the work we get paid for. We rest even from the thought of labor.

stuff isn’t all bad — we don’t want to slip into dualism here. God created the world, and he called it very good.

That’s what idolatry is — the human quest to take the divine and reduce it to a commodity — something made out of wood or stone, something you can buy and sell, something you can own or have (and, as a result, lose). Idolatry is when we look to the creation for something we can only get from the Creator.

For Jesus, the Sabbath was a day to get in trouble. He was a bit of a rabble-rouser. A gadfly. The Son of Man had a mischievous side. You don’t get crucified for being a people pleaser.

So, where it’s unclear, ask the follow-up question, Is this life-giving? If it feels like rest for you, and if it feels like worship, then go for it.

this kind of freedom and space and elasticity drives Pharisees crazy. Pharisees are rule people.

the Pharisees’ basic philosophy was this: if Torah-breaking got us into this mess, then it stands to reason that Torah-keeping will get us out of it. So they were OCD about the Torah.

the Pharisees took the commandment “Remember the Sabbath day,” and they built a fence around it. They added on dozens and dozens of rules. They broke down “work” into thirty-nine categories.

By the time of Jesus there was the written law of the Torah, with its 613 commandments. Plus, on top of that was the oral law called the Mishnah, and there were an extra 1,500 rules in it. 1,500!

When the Pharisees ask why the disciples are doing something that is “unlawful,” they don’t mean the disciples are breaking the Torah; they would never do that. They are breaking the Mishnah. But to Jesus, the Mishnah was just rules on top of rules — some good, some not-so-good, but all made up by men, not from God.

But keep in mind that the Sabbath predates the Law by thousands of years. It’s more of a rhythm in creation than a rule in a book. The reality is the Sabbath is un-American, inconvenient, and we want an excuse to write it off.

shabat is a verb in Genesis 2. Rest is something you do. It’s a skill you hone.

First-century Jews needed to hear the second part of Jesus teaching: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” They had it backward. The Sabbath isn’t a cold, arbitrary rule we have to obey. It’s a life-giving art form that we get to practice.

Then he said, “Stretch out your hand.” The guy stretched it out, and “his hand was completely restored.” This was a flagrant, in-your-face, stick-it-to-the-man act of defiance. Which is why “the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.” Seriously, religious people are insane.

Jesus was known far and wide as a healer. Healing is a tangible expression of the in-breaking kingdom of God. But did you know that almost all of Jesus’ healings take place on the Sabbath? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Why? Because the Sabbath is a day for healing.

We get tired in body and in soul. We need more than a twenty-four-hour armistice from work; we need an encounter with Jesus’ healing power.

All of which brings me to this book. This book has essentially been about work and rest and how they are central to our humanness.

The dominant view of the future, at least in the West, is that Jesus is going to come back, judge the world, and take us all away to heaven to live happily ever after. This is essentially a theology of evacuation. The sentiment is, Let’s get out of here and go somewhere else. If this is true, if this is the hope of Jesus, then it raises the question, What’s the point of work? Much less rest?

That horrific phrase “It’s all gonna burn” comes from a misreading of a letter written by Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples. I would argue it’s borderline heretical. Bare minimum, it’s a warping of what Peter actually said.

in context Peter is retelling the story of the flood, and in the paragraph right before this one he uses the exact same language. He says that in the flood, the earth was “destroyed” by water. But we all know that story. The earth wasn’t destroyed in the sense of wiped out or ceasing to exist; it was destroyed in that the slate was wiped clean. It was a global restart. That’s why Peter goes on to say the earth and all the work done in it will be “laid bare.” In Greek it’s the word heurisko, which means “exposed” or “seen for what it really is” or “discovered.” Usually the word is translated “found.”

“They will reign.” So it’s not just a city . . . It’s a Garden city. This is what’s waiting for us. Not an eternal vacation in the sky, but an eternity of working and resting in this world completely remade from top to bottom by the Creator, ruling over the earth, side by side with Jesus himself, forever. This is the hope of Jesus.

The essence of following Jesus is using our work to cooperate with heaven’s invasion of Earth.

God is looking for people he can rule the world with. Right now, we are becoming those kinds of people.

the digital age. Learning how to live over the earth and not get crushed under its weight or fall prey to its seduction. And I would argue that we’re not just learning the skills of character, but we’re learning the skills of the craft.

New Testament scholar N. T. Wright said it this way: “What you do in the present — by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself — will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”13