Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World

by A.J. Swoboda

This cautionary tale illustrates an important lesson: more critical than a gift is how we handle the gift.

The Sabbath is a gift we do not know how to receive. In a world of doing, going, and producing, we have no use for a gift that invites us to stop.

We have come to know Jesus only as the Lord of the harvest, forgetting he is the Lord of the Sabbath as well. Sabbath forgetfulness is driven, so often, in the name of doing stuff for God rather than being with God. We are too busy working for him. This is only made more difficult by the fact that the Western church is increasingly experiencing displacement and marginalization in a post-Christian, secular society. In that, we have all the more bought into the notion that ministering on overdrive will resolve the crisis.

Their first knowledge of God and the world God had made was that rest was not an afterthought—rest was of first importance. Adam and Eve had accomplished nothing to earn this gratuitous day of rest. Sabbath is, in my estimation, the first image of the gospel in the biblical story.

Sabbath reminds us that “our time” was never our time in the first place. All time is God’s time. And the time we have been given is to be used faithfully in worship of him. Orientation is a fascinating word based on the Latin word oriri, meaning “to rise,” as in where the sun rises.

Sabbath is an orientation as well—an all-encompassing turning toward the Creator God that changes everything about our lives. Sabbath is that kind of complete reorientation of our lives toward the hope and redemption of Christ’s work.

God’s entire creative action in making everything signifies not only his sovereignty, lordship, and authority over creation but also his sovereignty over time.

Notice when the first “not good” happens in the Bible. It was not a result of Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Rather, the first “not good” appears before the fall. How is this possible? This first “not good” reveals to us something about humanity’s nature. Namely, God did not create human beings to exist with God alone.

In fact, God’s design for humanity was complete only in relationship with God and others.

In my mind, there can be only one rationale: God desired Adam to have a deep recognition of his own needs. It is one thing to have a need. It is another thing to come to recognize and deeply appreciate that need and be humble enough to have it fulfilled.

All of this means that humans’ need for rest and sleep was not a result of sin or disobedience. Sleep does not come after, but before, the fall.

When we look honestly at our workaholic, boundaryless, frantic lives, we can hear God say, “Not good.”

To Sabbath is to live as God intended.

We almost always assume that the more we do, the more God is doing. But this kind of control, this kind of effort, this neurosis becomes, in the words of Carl Jung, “a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

Often those in ministry burn out because they presume that their own presence and giftedness is the reason the church is thriving.

There are negatives that come with our sedentary lifestyles, particularly among younger people.

This is why no one RSVPs for anything anymore. With mobility and accessibility, the world has grown smaller, and life’s options have proliferated. I often wonder if this is why millennials have such angst, spending time and energy postponing career and relational choices in order to find the “perfect one” or the “perfect career” or even the “perfect church.” We seem almost terrorized by the options of what we can do with our time.

Cultural philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has discussed the two kinds of community people often enter into in this modern world: “peg communities” and “ethical communities.” Peg communities, Bauman writes, are communities forged by disconnected spectators around a mutually loved experience like a rock concert or a sporting match. Their participation is a feeling or a sense around something shared. Ethical communities, in stark contrast, are long-term commitments that are marked by the giving up of rights and service. In short, ethical communities are built on relationships of responsibilities.7 These are relationships formed by commitment, love, covenant, and even familial fidelity. One of the fundamental shifts in our social matrix is that our relationships are increasingly made up of the peg communities rather than ethical communities.

In peg community, I am in so long as it benefits me. In ethical community, however, we willingly give ourselves to a community whether it benefits us or not. Today, in a world where we can find whole communities of people who think like us, share our values, and have common likes, we are trading in our ethical relationships for peg relationships. The result is troubling: We do not really need to love anybody who is different if we do not feel like it. We can cower in the corner with all the people we agree with.

Scripture, it turns out, has nothing to say about the building of peg communities, where we gather because of shared opinions. The church is the church that Christ builds, not our shared interests. And we are called to live in covenant community where we live and die for each other. A peg community is a place we go to feel alive. An ethical community is a place we go to die.

True community is not born of our efforts in creating a sense of community—it is the natural outcome from the act of loving other people.

In a 24/7 world, we only Sabbath when we are forced to by circumstance.

How many times, when a person comes to mind, do we go to Facebook or Instagram to get our information rather than pray for them or call them? Smartphones allow us to get information without having to engage in actual relationships.

He suggested that the first place where the by-products of my false worship and idolatry will reveal themselves is in my body—increased blood pressure, headaches, and exhaustion. Raymond taught me how to listen to, and respect, my body’s cry for sleep, good food, and quiet. The body is a good thing to listen to. It knows me best.

Rather than ignoring exhaustion, hunger, pain, and anxiety, we should pay attention to it and ask ourselves what our body is speaking to us. The body speaks clearly.

when humanity participates in the Sabbath, humanity is to “soak it up, be fully present to it and cherish the goodness of the world God has made.”

As Thomas Merton once remarked, “Man’s unhappiness seems to have grown in proportion to his power over the exterior world.”13 That is, the more power we have (or feel like we have) over the world around us, the less happy we become. The world is not ours.

The Sabbath helps us understand that our role in bringing about God’s peace in the world is not to be understood only in what we do; rather, sometimes it is by ceasing our doing that we usher in God’s kingdom and help heal the land.

Because of sin, humanity has increasingly exhibited a short-term, utilitarian relationship with the land, the same way that many of us treat a hotel room. We stay for a short time, make a mess, pack up, and go somewhere else, all the while expecting someone else to clean up after us.

Lol

Treating the land like a hotel room, we rarely suffer the consequences of what we do to the place. In a hotel, there is someone we pay to clean up our messes.

In short, with a discipline, we dress for the character and virtue we want, not the character and virtue we have. Repetition has tremendous value for the formation of our hearts.

Davidman’s book provokes an interesting question: If Martians came to Earth on our day of worship, what would they conclude we worship? Football? Youth sports? The great outdoors? Brunches with friends? Music festivals? Of course, none of this is to suggest that these are bad. By no means. Sports, the outdoors, a good brunch, music—all of these are good in the right context. However, a survey of Sunday’s activities raises the question of whether these pursuits have become dominant and take our ultimate attentions. The difference between the church and the world is that the church worships the Creator God. The world worships anything else.

Sabbath declares that God’s work is not ultimately dependent on ours and that God’s rest is always more effective than human work.

Time and again in the Bible, the language regarding the Sabbath is that we “enter” it. Sabbath is not self-created. Sabbath is not man-made. Sabbath is a day that God has gone in advance to prepare for us. The book of Hebrews stresses, “Make every effort to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11). The lesson Moses learned was that he did not need to worry about when to find rest because God was more concerned with that than he would ever be. God was going ahead and preparing a place of rest for him. Our task, like Moses’s, is to enter what God has already prepared for us.

How easy it is to be deceived into thinking that a full inbox means that I am important.

Silence is hard. It is not uncommon to encounter a highly driven or a highly social person who often becomes depressed on the Sabbath day. When we are silent, our minds have time to examine problems that we have been suppressing all week long. Sabbath allows pain to come to the surface. On the Sabbath day, I am incredibly susceptible to spiritual attacks and realities that on other days may not affect me as much.

Boredom can be fertile ground for the devil’s best work. It is when we feel bored that we are most tempted to look at questionable materials or think about questionable things.

“If you choose to go into exile, then be on the watch for the demon of wandering and of pleasure, since there is an opportunity here for him.”27 Detaching from normalcy opens us up to spiritual susceptibility. Intentional breaks from something—something a Sabbath provides—allows a kind of purification from dark voices that seek to pervade our thinking and our spirits.

There is perhaps no single thing that could better help us recover Jesus’ lordship in our frantic, power-hungry world than to allow him to be Lord of our rest as well as our work.