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

by A.J. Swoboda

Sabbath, then, becomes a kind of resistance to that world.

It is never a sign of health or godliness to be well adjusted to a sick society.

Remembering is a godly act—time and again retrieving the truth of God in the present.

The result of our Sabbath amnesia is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.

To keep a Sabbath is to give time and space on our calendar to the grace of God.

The mythical mind would expect that, after heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy place—a holy mountain or a holy spring—whereupon a sanctuary is to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is holiness in time, the Sabbath, which comes first.”32

The intrinsic goodness of creation speaks to an important practice of Sabbath living—the need of humanity to reflect on and delight in the goodness of what God has made.

“Look at creation—look at it all! This is the world God has given to his enemies; imagine the world he will give to his friends.”37

But when we do rest, we experience incredible healing. Like Adam’s intrinsic need for relationship, rest is a need that God built into us.

Sabbath is a scheduled weekly reminder that we are not what we do; rather, we are who we are loved by.

A Sabbath is like breathing. Imagine a life where you breath once every sixty seconds.

A Sabbath day is not merely stopping our work; it is also stopping our thinking and scheming about work.

Sabbath is to be cherished as a delight in itself, not something we use to get elsewhere.

“Anyone who tries to prove God’s existence by demonstrating the need for God makes the same mistake as those who claim that in our modern secularized society God no longer has any function and has thus become superfluous. Both begin from the usefulness of God. . . . God is not useful. God does not serve any purpose, since God is an end in himself. . . . God has often either been reduced to a useful, predictable idol, or is experienced as absent.”50

“This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with cane in hand because of their age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there” (Zech. 8:4–5).

We sell ourselves short by celebrating for celebration’s sake rather than for God’s sake.

Marva Dawn has said that Sabbath is about four things: ceasing, resting, embracing, and feasting.

The pancakes are essential. I read at one point that some Jewish fathers, on the morning of the Sabbath, would give their children a spoon of honey. What a beautiful tradition! The idea was simple: that they would always remember the sweetness of the Sabbath for the rest of their lives. It is similar to the way the earliest Christians took Communion: with milk and honey. This symbolism was to remind them that in Christ they had come to the promised land. That is my hope—that when I am dead and gone and my boy is all grown up, if anyone even whispers the word Sabbath around my son, he will just start drooling. It is a Pavlovian experiment of the highest order.

Rather, work is a reflection of Sabbath-keeping. Work is a benefit of our rest.

Humanity ceases being purpose driven and becomes fear driven.

Peterson eloquently discussed how one day a week he would say no to ministry demands and go on hikes, eat good food, read poetry, and meet with God.

As I read the Gospels, it became clearer and clearer to me that Jesus himself was not selfless. Jesus went into the mountains and prayed to the point that even his disciples could not find him. Jesus ate. Jesus drank. Jesus slept. He took care of himself. And never once was Jesus hurried from place to place, controlled by a busy schedule. Jesus lived a rhythm completely different from anyone around him. The rhythm of his life was, in itself, a prophetic act against the rhythms of the world.

In our 24/7 world, I have never once seen someone accidentally keep a Sabbath. Sabbath is an action of great purpose, one that demands feisty intentionality. It requires us to live in a rhythm that squarely opposes the dangerous pulse and the habits of our world. 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.

The Sabbath, Jacques Ellul contends, “shows that work is not after all so excellent or desirable a thing as people often tell us.”

By experience I have learned that I rarely enter the Sabbath day with a finished to-do list. In fact, there is no such thing as a finished to-do list for a pastor. Ministry is never done. Nor is anyone’s work ever really done on the Sabbath. We rarely rest because the work is done. In fact, it often feels like there is more work at the end of the day. I normally find that I go into my Sabbath with tasks and conversations intentionally set aside for afterward.

For each of us, the Sabbath is such an important rhythm because it dethrones our workaholic tendencies and reminds us that the ultimate work is not that which can go on a to-do list. Rabbi Heschel ponders this very question: “Is it possible for a human being to do all his work in six days? Does not our work always remain incomplete?”25 The Sabbath reminds us that nothing that is worth doing can be fully achieved in one day. Indeed, our work is always incomplete. By the grace of God, Sabbath is not the result of all the work being done.

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-...

I once encountered a story that illustrated this. There is a legend that says that when the Oregon Trail was brimming with prairie schooners, those who kept a Sabbath arrived in the Oregon territory sooner. The ones who did not keep a Sabbath arrived much later.30 When we entrust our responsibilities to God and rest, God puts his finishing touches on our work.

Our family has summed it up like this: Is the activity in question life giving, or is it life taking?

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 has called us to in order to be free to say no to other prospects.

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.

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.

In his gripping novel Salvation, Sholem Asch describes what he calls his two mothers: the weekday mother, whom he knew on the six days of work, and his other mother, the Sabbath mother. Asch cannot help but identify the effects of the Sabbath on his mother—it was as if she were two different people.

Studies show how the flooding of news actually harms our ability to have real compassion and do something helpful.39 We either end up hearing it all and become gripped with emotion and paralyzed by the weight of it, or we become numb so that we can just cope and carry on with our day-to-day activities.

Author J. R. R. Tolkien was accused of escapism by some of his critics. Tolkien responded in a prophetic tone, “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison walls?”41

Sabbath is good escapism. It offers us a much-needed respite before being sent back to the world where we love God and serve others. There remains a long-standing Jewish tradition that strongly prohibits mourning on the Sabbath.43 While there may be times to cry and mourn on a Sabbath, this prohibition puts into effect an allowance of time to lay down my heavy emotional burdens for a day. The rule is not arbitrary; its purpose is to guard us from carrying the world’s weight on the Sabbath.

Years ago, one researcher discovered something interesting about Sabbath in Jewish communities: mortality rates plummet on the Sabbath. How could it be that fewer people die on the Sabbath? The researcher concluded that even the sick and terminally ill “rallied” for the Sabbath day because it was a chance to be with family and friends.3

People waited a day to die because Sabbath community was so rich and meaningful to them that they did not want to miss it.

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.

A peg community is a place we go to feel alive. An ethical community is a place we go to die. The biblical picture of community—of ethical community—can best be illustrated by the early church community in Acts 2:42–47: They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

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 world where we enter community as long as it is full of people we like, the Sabbath becomes a prophetic act of learning to love even those we deplore and dislike.

Generally, people asked me two main questions. The first was “What do I do on the Sabbath?” Such a question is very American, isn’t it? What do I do? We are addicted to doing. Being is not even a category we are able to entertain. The second was “How do I make time for the Sabbath?” Again, we cannot make time. We are human. God makes time. And the assumption that we can make time is dangerously hurtful to our well-being. I have come to the conclusion that the topic of Sabbath-keeping is so hostile to American Christianity because Americans often worship their time. We think time is ours.

Following these experiences, I reflected a great deal on the hostility of American Christianity toward the Sabbath. In the midst of our Sabbath experiment, I was in a meeting with our church’s financial board. Sitting there, it dawned on me that were I to cheat on my wife, I would lose my job. If I stole from the church, I would be run out of town. If I lied about the church finances, I would be in huge trouble. If I worshiped another god, I’d be removed. There are nine commandments that, if I chose to break, I might lose my ministry over. But if I did not keep a Sabbath day, I would probably get a raise.

That is, our list of acceptable excuses to say no is rather short. For example, if you have children, you quickly find that they are an acceptable trump card.

The great irony of Sabbath-keeping is how hard it is for us to say no to people but how with such ease we say no to being at rest with God.

Essentially, Sabbath community provides for us what we need but ultimately protects us from getting everything we want. When we Sabbath with others—be it in marriage, in family, in friendship, or in community—there must be a give-and-take that puts our narcissistic, “I get everything I want” tendency in its place. It is good when I do not always get what I want on the Sabbath. Jesus is the Lord of the Sabbath; my desires are not.

Nancy Sleeth tells me of growing up in a Jewish home and seeing her father come home on Friday night with a bunch of flowers and a very large smile on his face; he had been looking forward to the Sabbath all week.20

“Three days to look forward to Sabbath,” Mains writes, “three days to reflect back on its wonder.”

Can you imagine a wedding ceremony without any work being put into its preparation? Can you imagine a bride throwing her wedding together the day of? Such an action is unimaginable, as the marriage day is such a sacred day. As it relates to the Sabbath, we should not aim to elope but aim for a wedding. And a wedding requires preparation.