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

by A.J. Swoboda

It is interesting that as God judges Adam, he says, “[The ground] will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field” (Gen. 3:18). Notice the word plants; the Hebrew word is eseb. The word is used for an annual, any plant that must be planted every single year. An annual dies every year. A perennial, however, is any plant that produces year after year without needing to be replanted. I have long theorized that the food God planted in Eden was exclusively food from perennial plants that came back every year—apples, asparagus, oranges, and pomegranates. Notice that Eden had trees. Trees produce food year after year after year. God’s provision is visible even in the landscape. After their exile from Eden, however, humanity relies on annuals for survival. No longer will Adam and Eve reside in the garden that God himself had planted with all of its perennials; they are now forced to raise their own plants that will die each year. Annuals are the landscape of displacement, of a people not at home. The only way one can eat perennials is by being established in a place.

Work is not the problem—it is our replacing God with work that is a problem.

One day a week, my family turns all the screens off, lights some candles, prays, and invites the God of Sabbath to bring us rest. This practice, which, again, we do far from perfectly, has saved my marriage, my ministry, my faith, and, I might even say, my life.

Sabbath-keeping is not just a small vignette in the Bible. Page after page, story after story, book after book, Sabbath comes to us. This is not a minor motif in the story of the Bible—it is one of the greatest themes of the Bible. Sabbath is not extra credit. It is a commandment, not a suggestion.

As I read Peterson, one question came back to me over and over again: How can I preach salvation by grace when my life is built on an altar of workaholism?

Sabbath rest assumes work. That is, the Bible has a word for Sabbath minus any work: laziness. Likewise, the Bible has a word for work without a Sabbath: slavery. Rest is not truly possible without work, and work is not done appropriately without rest. A balance is required for them to both be what they were created to be.

The weighty sense of qodesh, “holiness,” implies uniqueness from the other weekdays. Sabbath was set apart from the other days—it embodied a different purpose. Six days of work, one day of rest. That was the cadence. Consider any piece of music. Music is never merely an endless stream of notes played at the same tempo; rather, there are pauses, intentional breaks, and a variety of notes. Even the Psalms have a selah—a pause—to the praise of Yahweh. Work without rest is like music with no rhythm, the Psalms minus selah, every song with no refrain.

In Matthew’s Gospel, in fact, we find that Jesus calls himself both the “Lord of the harvest” (Matt. 9:38) and the “Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt. 12:8). Personally, that reminds me that Jesus is Lord over my work and Jesus is Lord over my rest. He is not Lord over just one. Both are realms of his lordship and my discipleship. Jesus is Lord of rest and work.

Mark Buchanan brilliantly touches on this: The rest of God—the rest God gladly gives so that we might discover that part of God we’re missing—is not a reward for finishing. It’s not a bonus for work well done. It’s sheer gift. It is a stop-work order in the midst of work that’s never complete, never polished.

Sabbath is not the break we’re allotted at the tail end of completing all our tasks and chores, the fulfillment of all our obligations. It’s the rest we take smack-dab in the middle of them, without apology, without guilt, and for no better reason than God told us we could.26 If we wait for the work to be completely finished before we can rest, we will never enter rest.

God “finished” his work on the sixth day and then “finished” it on the seventh. How can God finish something on two different days? Heschel calls this the “puzzle” of the text.27 Theologian Nathan Stucky unpacks this seemingly confusing passage: “The text suggests that on the seventh day, creation is both finished and unfinished. . . . Creation remains incomplete or unfinished. God finishes creation on the seventh day, not by way of further creative activity but by way of God’s own rest and the implied invitation to all creation to participate in God’s rest.”

God had finished his work on day six, yet it was not complete until day seven, when he provided creation with

menukhah, the rest of God.

Early on, I experienced something extraordinary and unusual in my Sabbath-keeping. When I skipped a Sabbath, my week would go by in the blink of an eye, and I would be far less productive. It seems counterintuitive: the more days I had to work, the less I accomplished. But when I did Sabbath, it was as though God stretched my time. I once heard that some Jewish mystics believed that when we take a day of rest, as a gift, God literally stretches our time on the six days we do not work. I don’t know exactly how it works, but I can say from experience that it was almost as though God was finishing my work. He was putting the finishing touches on that which I had been doing all week long. It was as though God were multiplying the fish and the loaves of my work. Not only would there be enough—it was like there were leftovers.

To work and toil and strive and never take a moment to stop and enjoy it all is living under the curse rather than God’s promise.

Sabbath is the day that we rest in God’s presence even when our to-do lists are not even close to done. We choose to enter rest even before the work is complete. Why? Sabbath is not a reward for a job well done. Sabbath is the result of a world that is oriented toward a good and generous and loving God.

What constitutes Sabbath rest, and what constitutes work? Jesus, again, offers us clear teaching on this particular question. In Mark 3:4, Jesus asks a question that summarizes the purpose of the Sabbath: “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” Sabbath is, for Jesus, about doing good and not evil, saving life, not killing. Our family has summed it up like this: Is the activity in question life giving, or is it life taking? That is, does it bring us life, rest, hope, wholeness? Or does it drain us, pour us out, stress us, or load us down?

So what are guiding principles for when to help or when not to help? First, we must recognize that “Sabbath emergencies” will happen.

And it is important to recognize that the “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

Through properly understanding our relationship to it, we learn to resist legalistically closing ourselves off from acts of compassionate love toward others needing help.

Sabbath is no hall pass from responsibility or compassion. We will learn to care for people, animals, and crops in a discerning and sensitive way.

The underlying principle is that we are called to be more faithful to Jesus than we are to the rules of the Sabbath. Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath. Thus we act in obedience both by resting and caring for others.

The Sabbath should never be a disengagement from the love of neighbor.

Second, not every disturbance on the Sabbath is a “Sabbath emergency.” Our technological society allows us to be reachable at any and all moments of the day. As a result, we are pressured to be perpetually available.

In our family, one of us will leave our phone on during the Sabbath in...

Discerning the difference between a legitimate Sabbath emergency and something that can wait is an art form acquired over time.

learned long ago that if I am needed to help resolve everyone else’s “emergency,” then I am discipling people to be more dependent on me than on God and even on each other. Thus, if I am compelled to respond to every pressing need, I am creating a context in which my parishioners have an unhealthy relationship of dependence on me.

The longer I have kept a Sabbath, the

more I have found that not answering nonemergency Sabbath issues actually releases people to grow in their dependence on God and on other people in the community. Again, Sabbath is ministry. My Sabbath...

Psalm 92, known as the “Psalm of the Sabbath Day,” is deeply edifying in this regard. The psalm was written to be read on the Sabbath day and was used in public worship as God...

3 Sabbath and Health

Jesus desires that we say yes to following him, and as we do, a primary aspect of discipleship is learning how to say yes and no to the things of this world.

Disciples have boundaries. We are not to say yes to everything. This critical set of skills is often lacking in our day.

The Sabbath is God’s stand against the tyranny of always having to say yes. The Sabbath is God’s gift of a no to us in our obsessive, compulsive patterns of living. The Sabbath is God’s solution to FOMO anxieties.

Corrie ten Boom once wrote, “If the devil cannot make us bad, he will make us busy.”

The root sin of busyness is sloth—that laziness of spirit in which the muscles of intention of discernment and boundary have atrophied. In sloth, we refuse to do “what we are created to do as beings made in the image of God and saved by the Cross of Christ.”5 Sloth of spirit is the inability to say no and have boundaries.

The Sabbath straightens up our spirits and awakens us from the lull of the eternal yes. Therefore, a no is the language of intention.

Except for laziness, a no actually comes from a place of self-knowledge, of self-restraint, of self-awareness. For the Christian, a no should be spoken with the discernment of what God has spoken yes over. We must be sensitive to what God ha...

We must have ground in our week that is fallow, free from commitments, free of obligations, a place where life can flourish. A no...

For Jesus, discipleship was not a life choice one took after checking off everything on one’s to-do list. Jesus was primary. The to-do list was always secondary.

Nobody ever accused Jesus of being a yes-man. Jesus, Tony Horsfall writes, “would never allow himself to be ‘bullied’ into doing anything.”6 Likewise, the Spirit of Jesus says no. Acts 16 records the instance of Paul approaching Bithynia, a region in modern-day Turkey where the gospel had yet to be proclaimed. The harvest was plentiful. Yet Paul’s missionary venture was soon disrupted: “When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to” (Acts 16:7). Imagine Paul’s consternation, even anger. Souls hung in the balance. The door of ministry was wide open. And as he was about to go in, the Spirit said no. Not this time. Not here. Not now.

Being a Sabbath-keeper is basically the art of letting people down at a rate they can handle. There are times we cannot meet the needs of others. There are times we trust God to help others through others. Not every need represents God’s will for our lives.

When we keep a Sabbath, our entire existence begins to experience ripple effects of rest. We sleep better. We are more awake to the people we are with. We have more energy. We pay closer attention to being people of gratitude. In other words, we enter into peace. In a way, the Sabbath has a kind of healing effect within our lives. Imagine what it would be like if the norm of our lives was that we got the rest we needed. Imagine that. But that is rarely the case, as Henri Nouwen once suggested: “We aren’t rest-filled people who occasionally become restless. We are restless people who sometimes find rest.” The status quo of our lives is that we live in a Sabbath deficit.

Creation was made to be at shalom, “peace.” Eden was created in a state of shalom as a world free of war, murder, cancer, and strife. In that place, the land, the critters, the plants, and the humans existed at peace with God and each other. Cornelius Plantinga offers a helpful definition: “The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights.”12 That shalom, however, was destroyed by human sinfulness and dominance over creation.

world under the rule of the “prince of the world” is marred by death, destruction, and chaos.

While we must come to see that a weekly Sabbath has a personal benefit to us as individuals, we must also see that the Sabbath helps to usher in that same peace that was shattered by the dark power of sin. In short, Sabbath is a glimmer of Eden’s shalom in our world marred by chaos.

We must be careful, however, not to view shalom in merely personal, individualistic terms. The implications of shalom are far wider. That is, the peace of God is not just for our bodies, souls, and spirits alone. God desires shalom for everyone and everything. Randy Woodley, a theologian specializing in contextualizing the gospel among First Nations people, reminds us that shalom should be personal and systemic.15 Shalom is for the individual and for the whole world.

so quickly forget the Sabbath’s healing power. It is not uncommon in pastoral ministry to talk to people about their exhaustion. When the topic arises, I love using it as an opportunity to discuss the biblical invitation to rest. Often a person will ask for prayer to get rest. Quite frankly, I often feel tempted to refuse to pray for them. The fact that one is exhausted when overworking eighty hours a week and never keeping a Sabbath is not a prayer issue; it is an obedience issue. We should not pray for God to do what we are supposed to do. The problem remains that we are not entering into the thing, Sabbath, that very well could begin to repair our lives. Similarly, Joel Salatin, a Christian pig farmer, writes that when people ask for prayer to be made healthy but do not live in a healthy way and eat healthy food, God will not acquiesce to our petitions. In short, “we’re ingesting things that are an abomination to our bodies . . . and then requesting prayer for the ailments that result.”18 God is not likely to answer in prayer what you are unwilling to repent of.

Sometimes the pursuit of God is an exhausting enterprise. Which is why recovery often requires much more than a prayer for rest. We pray for healing rest without being willing to allow God’s disruption of our overworked schedules. But can that really work? Who expects to lose weight without changing their diet? Or desires to run a marathon without training? Praying for rest without going through the effort of learning how to Sabbath is as difficult a prayer to answer as any. Could God do it? Yes. But I suspect that we do not need to pray about our exhaustion—we need to learn how to rest. We need to act on taking a Sabbath.

A significant body of research suggests that even thinking about work is a stressful, anxiety-inducing activity.24 The problem is that when we think about work, it becomes work in and of itself.25 When we keep a Sabbath, it reorients the way that we think. Instead of thinking in terms of production, the day becomes about presence. Sabbath is not just ceasing from work, but ceasing to think about work.