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

by A.J. Swoboda

Pay the bills, do the laundry, go to the bank, get your hair cut. Remember, the Sabbath is not a day to catch up.

Clean house. Resting is difficult if you are thinking about cleaning the house on the Sabbath. Keep in mind: if you have too much stuff to take care of on the day of preparation, consider that you may own too much stuff. The Sabbath almost implies simplicity in the things we consume and own. To help, read Nancy Sleeth’s Almost Amish.6

Prepare a big meal for the night before the Sabbath so you have an abundance of leftovers for the Sabbath. This frees you from needing to cook or eat out on the Sabbath day.

Be aware that it is easy to slip into neurotic modes of getting everything done before the Sabbath.

Pharaoh was obsessed with storage facilities. We are too. In the United States alone, we have somewhere north of 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. That works out to be something like 7.3 square feet of space for each one of the 317 million people who live in our nation.9 Like Egypt, we are a nation of storage units. In this economy, our storage units are fuller than ever, and countless stomachs of children and the poor and the disadvantaged remain empty on a global scene. The rich are getting richer. The poor are getting poorer. And the disparity between the two is growing more and more every year. Pharaoh would be proud.

While not all of us have a business that we can shut down one day a week, we all have the power to take a day a week from spending and purchasing. Such a practice, as difficult as it may seem, not only serves those who work in business but also helps to guard our minds and souls against the corrosive dangers of consumer idolatry. Consumerism, in the end, is the devil’s sacrament. And Black Friday is his liturgy. Black Friday is the Good Friday of consumerism—it is the day that we worship the gods of consumerism, greed, and opulence by atoning for the “sins” of simplicity and locality and generosity by self-indulging in uncontrolled, limitless spending. We need a Good Friday economy in which the bottom line is people. Jesus came to create not a kingdom of slaves to consumerism but a kingdom of friends.

This kind of compulsivity has led to a new kind of slavery that Joseph Ratzinger (aka Pope Benedict XVI) calls “a slavery of activity.”36

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?

Soon we will start so craving every God-ordained moment that we cannot use our smartphone.

Turn off the television. Gift your mind and heart space to process what has happened during the week. Have a Netflix-free day. The Psalms invite us to quietly reflect on God’s goodness when we lie on our beds (Ps. 4:4). Binge-watching our favorite show prevents us from following this beautiful instruction. Aim to spend time out of doors. The average teen spends nine hours a day using media for enjoyment.45 This has led to “Nature-Deficit Disorder.”46 We were not made for screens alone. We were made to get outside.

Can you imagine a burger flipper requesting a sabbatical? Ironically, corporate workers at McDonald’s can take a paid sabbatical once they have worked there for ten years.

Sin and evil are real. And not just systems of evil—Satan himself is personal and real. And the devil does not Sabbath.

Many rabbis who reflected on the Jubilee also believed that every fence should be removed from the land to blur the lines of personal ownership.7 It was as though, in the Jubilee, everything returned to God. Animals could roam freely. This land was not our land. It was God’s land.

The sad matter remains: it is largely believed that no one actually kept the Jubilee command in its totality. Certainly, elements of it may have been attempted from time to time, but there is no evidence the Jubilee year ever actually happened. Such a dramatic societal shift would have literally turned the world upside down. So radical, ideal, and different in its scope would it have been that any economy that gave preference to the rich over the poor would have most likely crumbled at its very core if Jubilee were established. And I think God would have been okay with it. What kind of God spends his time propping up systems that push people down? A Jubilee society would have been an alternative society to Egyptian ways of life.

In hesed love, God says to us, “If you want to love and serve me, do it through your neighbor; he needs your help, I don’t.”10

We should expect difficulty to arise for ourselves when we Sabbath. But our Sabbath should not create problems for others. There are horrific historical instances when one’s Sabbath became another’s slavery. For example, a class of gentiles during the Old Testament period, the Shabbos Goyim, were hired to provide rest for Israel. That was not Sabbath—that was slavery. Here is the working principle: it is not a true Sabbath if my rest becomes another’s slavery. In most cases, the rich must take the first step to use their power, resources, and influence to provide Sabbath on others’ behalf. In the end, if the rich do not Sabbath, neither can the poor. A society’s most well off have a disproportionate responsibility to keep Sabbath so that the poor might also. Too often, our systems do not provide people with one whole day completely off. And so the poor are prevented from resting—especially those who have to work seven days a week just to put food on the table. In many cases, the poor literally cannot afford to rest.13

Sabbath is not honored through shame or guilt. Put simply, shame is work—tedious work to be exact. Shame and rest are mutually exclusive realities.14 If Sabbath becomes about heaping shame on anyone else, then we have failed to practice the rich grace of the Sabbath. If we feel shameful about keeping a Sabbath, we are not understanding it properly. Nor will coercion ever lead to authentic rest. To be clearer, it is guilt that so often motivates us to work eighty hours a week and produce like we work for Pharaoh. Guilt does not motivate us to rest. Life does. As the old saying goes: never teach a man how to build a ship; rather, teach him a love of the sea. We cannot force someone to rest, but we can inspire them to love life as it is supposed to be lived.

Goldingay calls this a “theology of ideal and condescension.”17 Simultaneously, God has ideals that he expects of and desires for us, and God knows we cannot meet them and so he seeks to meet us in the moments that we try to keep his ideals, even imperfectly.

God never intended what he gave to us as a gift to become a tool of shame or guilt. The Sabbath is for us. We are not for the Sabbath. And in that reality we can experience freedom and joy. Remember Paul’s words: “Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day” (Col. 2:16). Do not be judged, friend. Remember, no one has ever, save Jesus, kept a Sabbath perfectly. There is grace. Endless grace. All we have to do is “make every effort” to enter the Sabbath.

My gut tells me that you will not be able to stop. In a decade of Sabbath-keeping, I have never met someone who used to Sabbath. Nor have I met someone who wished they had kept fewer Sabbaths. Once you start, you probably won’t stop. It is profoundly life giving.

The lesson: you cannot love something you do not personally know. The Sabbath cannot be loved as an idea: it must be loved in the doing.

“Human sinfulness, unfortunately, proves highly resistant to cognitive cures.”20 Her point? Sin is not fixed through mere cognitive education. Sabbath is not an education issue; it is an obedience issue.

“God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance,” Paul writes in Romans 2:4. Guilt trips do not lead to repentance. Neither does shame. Or more information. Repentance is the result of God’s sheer grace and mercy alone—nothing else. When you know you are loved even if you never change, then true change is possible.

I once heard that physicists are far more likely than biologists to believe in God. Why? I have a theory—the biologist looks down at really small things while the physicist looks up at big things.

In fact, I think our obsessive, overworked lives are situated in such a way that we do not have to feel the pain of the world. In insulating ourselves so, we do the world a disservice. We do what Douglas John Hall calls “psychic numbing”—we surround ourselves with activity to protect our hearts and minds from having to feel the compassion of Jesus for this world.19

“Then the land,” God says, “will enjoy its Sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths” (Lev. 26:33–34).

The New Testament calls each believer a priest in the royal priesthood of God’s kingdom. I have often wondered whether our priestly function should be a reminder to Christians that we do not own any land. Jesus is Lord of all the earth; we are merely tenants of the land beneath us.

I love that Harvey Cox translates the word Sabbath as “to catch one’s breath.”15

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, just before taking their first steps on the moon, broke out a Bible, read, and took Communion. Is it not powerful that the first human act on the moon was a Communion service?

Ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind. (Job 12:7–10)

What if we do the same with the land? We look at it and appreciate it to the extent that it is visually appealing in an Instagram photo, or we enjoy the smell of the roses, but rarely do we contemplate the forethought that went into the design of both the smallest details and the largest systems, such as how beautiful flowers are pollinators for vegetable gardens and how flowers and herbs often help to keep away pests. It would seem at first that the utilitarian thing to do would be to just plant vegetables, but we find that God is far more inventive than we originally supposed. He gives us that which not only has a practical purpose but also is beautiful in more ways than one. We might see and smell lavender and appreciate it, but we so often miss beauty’s invitation to admire how purposeful, interconnected, and well designed it is, let alone how it reflects the One behind the work of art.

It is assumed that the work of evangelism and preaching and doctrine are the things that conservative Christians care deeply about and that issues of justice and activism and politics are the issues with which liberals are concerned. But why should conservatives not do justice? Why should liberals not do evangelism? Justice and evangelism cannot be done without the other. The gospel is hypocritical without the social gospel, and the social gospel hollow without the gospel.

Not only did God create each of the critters, but God created each of them before creating humanity on the day before Sabbath rest. I have written elsewhere that I believe this simple fact should lead to great human humility—as humans, we must remember that God made the dung beetle before he made us.

We cannot get our heads around just how much God loves us, because we are often blind to how much God loves the sparrow.

Lewis, the magnanimous and groundbreaking theologian, had a deep love for animals. Root tells two stories about Lewis. On one occasion, a school administrator at Oxford wished to trap a mouse, to which Lewis pushed back. The mouse, Lewis said, very well may be somebody’s mother. On another occasion, Lewis came upon a fox caught in a thicket. At that very moment, Root recounts, some foxhunters approached. When they asked Lewis whether he had seen a fox, Lewis pointed the opposite direction in an effort to protect the wounded fox.26

In short, the Sabbath is a unique witness to the gospel in the twenty-first century; the Sabbath will play a key role in the church’s evangelism to the world in our day. The very rest that the world is yearning for is something we can offer.

Sabbath-keeping was a circumcision of time.

The words of God to Moses underscore this reality: “You must observe my Sabbaths. This will be a sign between me and you for the generations to come, so you may know that I am the LORD, who makes you holy” (Exod. 31:12–13). The Sabbath was not merely a day. The Sabbath was a sign to everyone—for generations to come—a “perpetual witness of the covenant between God and Israel.”5

Christians, with our belief that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, should be the healthiest people in the world (1 Cor. 6:19–20). But we are time and again given over to forgetting who we are and slipping back to living according to the ways of the world. But the spirit of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego is so important for our time: we eat differently to be a sign to the world.

Sabbath is never linked to fasting in either Jewish or Christian traditions. A fast suggests a demure, sad environment. But joy rules the Sabbath. Sabbath, in the words of one commentator, is “to be a day of consecrated happiness, not of religious gloom.”11

“He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the scratch of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life.”14

What is unquestionable is that keeping a Sabbath will make us different from those around us no matter what time and place we live in. I remember the story of a young woman in our church who began to keep the Sabbath. She described two things about her experience. First, her family had no idea how to respond. Aside from actually changing the way she related to her family on a schedule level, it caused issues in how they coexisted, since the value of time was under a new sort of scrutiny. Second, her Sabbathing raised countless questions. She described how her family was intrigued more than anything. Had she joined a cult? Where had she learned about this? Why was she doing it? Friends, to a world that worships at the altar of hyperactivity, Sabbath raises all kinds of questions. The Sabbath is weird. The Sabbath makes us weird. And we should keep it that way.

You notice when people live by convictions, especially when it costs them.

None of us are born into the world with the character of Jesus Christ. Character comes over time as we follow Christ. Disciplines are a way to “clothe ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.” Disciplines, like worship, can include a variety of actions—prayer, fasting, contemplation, silence, service, reading Scripture. The hope is that by doing them our hearts are changed—that in dressing like Christ, we become like Christ.

A discipline is putting on some attribute of Jesus in hopes that it changes the very makeup of our hearts and minds.

Sandy Koufax, that famed pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, refused to pitch the first game of the World Series because of his Sabbath obligation.

What have we crowded our worship out with? What are those things we are willing to “make time for” by sacrificing something else? Watching football and eating good food and going outdoors are not bad things. These are tremendously good things. However, in making the day of worship all about these good experiences, we crowd out the encounter that once brought Christians together as a body.

“The Sabbath command, with its call to imitation, plays on a hidden irony: we mimic God in order to remember we’re not God. In fact, that is a good definition of Sabbath: imitating God so that we stop trying to be God.”

But Jesus’s rhythms of sleep are unlike anyone else’s. Jesus is always sleeping when everyone else is awake and always seems to be awake when everyone else is sleeping.

The Sabbath simultaneously shows us our irrelevance and our dependence on God. It reminds us of our place in God’s story. Sabbath reminds us that we never were necessary and that this world is, well, not ours.