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by
A.J. Swoboda
Started reading
January 29, 2023
Others dismiss it as an idealistic, if not impossible, practice. “Who has time to Sabbath, anyway?” they ask. “I’ll sleep when I die. I mean, if the devil never rests, why should I?” But these hollow notions are based on human reason rather than God’s good word. A Sabbath proves an awkward fit in our fast-paced, work-drunk, production-obsessed world.
Sabbath will be challenging for anyone to live out in our busy, frenetic world. Sabbath goes against the very structure and system of the world we have constructed. Sabbath, then, becomes a kind of resistance to that world.
Relating to our world of death, “going along” is a sign of death. Living fish swim against the stream. Only the dead go with the flow. The Sabbath is subversive, countering so many of the deathly ways we have felt at home in.
The result of our Sabbath amnesia is that we have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked, spiritually malnourished people in history.
A good deal of our own sin, we cannot deny, is largely the result of addition or subtraction to what God has spoken.
So even if we do remember the Sabbath, we often add or subtract from it. On one side, moralists and legalists add precept upon precept to the Sabbath, as the Pharisees and Sadducees did during the times of Christ, a tendency that time and again infuriates Jesus in the Gospels. Others have subtracted from the Sabbath commandment or ignored it altogether as though it did not matter to God or the well-being of creation. Both of these extremes grieve our Creator. Addition and subtraction are simply different ways of forgetting what God has said.
As has been said, time is basically God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. This is why Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel beautifully describes Sabbath as “eternity uttering a day.”27 Sabbath is a moment of eternal glory momentarily breaking into our finite, present world. The emphasis in Scripture is not on the time of creation, as some so easily assume, but on the creation of time itself. The seven-day week is God’s brilliant creation, what one poet calls “the most brilliant creation of the Hebrew spirit.”
As God invites us to Sabbath, we will be tempted to think that Sabbath cannot “work” for us. “I don’t have time to take a whole day to rest,” people have expressed to me for years. Biblically, however, this is not the case. The biblical story tells us that to rest one day a week is to be truly human, and to not rest is to be inhuman. Humans were made to rest. When we say we don’t have time to rest, we cannot find time for something that has already been found. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, with God, an imperative is an indicative.
Thomas Williams offers a compelling description of this in his introduction to Augustine’s book On Free Choice of the Will: “Violating the eternal law is not like doing 40 in a 35-mile-per-hour zone when there is no traffic around; it is more like trying to violate the law of gravity. . . . An apple falling from a tree has no choice about whether to obey the law of gravity . . . [but] human beings can voluntarily wreck their lives by running afoul of the laws that govern their nature. This is indeed a sort of freedom, but it can hardly be the best sort.”40 Williams’s point? We can violate
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Just like Adam and Eve’s need for Sabbath, our need for rest is like gravity. It just is. Our feelings and opinions cannot change it. Humans need rest. Animals need rest. Land needs rest. And without rest, things will cease to exist as they should. Still, we may choose to ignore this need for a while, but gravity always wins. When we look honestly at our workaholic, boundaryless, frantic lives, we can hear God say, “Not good.” Like he saw Adam’s need for a helper, God sees our need for rest. His judgment is his love. Only a malevolent deity could celebrate and enable habits that lead to the
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Sabbath is a scheduled weekly reminder that we are not what we do; rather, we are who we are loved by.
But even if we did vacation well and took great amounts of time off for restorative rest, vacations are a poor substitute for a weekly day of Sabbath rest. I think the devil loves taking that which is of God and giving us cheap knockoffs. When God invents sugar, the devil makes Sweet’N Low. When God makes sex, the devil comes up with adultery. The devil always twists the goodness of God. The Bible is silent on vacations. Why? Because if we kept a weekly Sabbath, we would not need vacations.
While a biblical Sabbath is different from a vacation, it is not just a “day off” either. It is possible for one to not be at work physically but still be at work in one’s heart. Culturally, it is assumed that when we are not at work, we are free to do as we please. But in reality, our jobs and bosses do not really allow us to disengage from work even in our off hours. It is presumed in the modern workplace that we will all continue to work at home. This is exacerbated by the fact that, as we will discuss in a later chapter, we often do not Sabbath because technology invades every part of our
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A biblical Sabbath is a day when we are spatially, and emotionally, not at work. “Days off” are actually, in the words of Eugene Peterson, “bastard Sabbaths.”47 They are days when we are technically at home but really at work.
A “day off” cannot sustain the human soul. Only a Sabbath can. By contrast, Sabbath is a day when our hearts are at rest from striving, doing, producing, and—most important—responding to emails. A Sabbath day is not merely stopping our work; it is also stopping our thinking and scheming about work.
We conclude this chapter with the words of Isaiah 58:13, which instructs us to “call the Sabbath a delight.”49 Sabbath is a delight. Not useful. Delightful. Yes, there are innumerable by-products of honoring the Sabbath: we become healthier, happier, and more available to God and others. But we must be cautious—the Sabbath being delightful is different from the Sabbath being useful. Sabbath does not always pay off the way we wish it would. Resting is costly. Nor is Sabbath the day we get to do whatever we want or whatever feels right. Sabbath is to be cherished as a delight in itself, not
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We do not love God because God is useful to us. We love God because God is worthy of being loved. “God is interesting,” writes Gunton, “in and of himself.”51 Or to echo Karl Barth: “God is.”52 Sabbath, likewise, should not be understood in merely useful or pragmatic terms. A Sabbath is done out of obedience to God, not to get something. While there are endless benefits to keeping a Sabbath, we do not do it for the benefits, in the same way that we do not enter a marriage in order to make love. Sex is a benefit of marriage, not the reason for marriage.
Gerald May once lamented how a pragmatic culture often treats the Sabbath: “We know we need to rest, but we can no longer see the value of rest as an end in itself; it is only worthwhile if it helps us to recharge our batteries.”53 Sabbath is something enjoyed for its own sake, inviting us to play. And play is not undertaken to accomplish; it is undertaken for its own sake. Dorothy Sayers once argued that most legalistic Sabbath-keepers had added to “Thou shalt not work” the phrase “Thou shalt not play.”54 God never outlaws Sabbath play.
Rather than rest God’s way, we have replaced Sabbath with a kind of therapeutic individualism that seeks to self-entertain, self-please, self-soothe.
“People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”56 Soong-Chan Rah connects our false desires for blissful happiness with deep individualism and the human creation of a culture that is all about the self and what the individual wants.
But the Sabbath is not a form of indulgent individualism dressed in religious piety. Sabbath is about delighting in God for his sake and the sake of the world.
So close to their human function was work that the biblical author uses the same word for “tend” as “worship.” To care for the garden was to worship the Creator. Eden was a divine domain of work and worship, not a world of sedentary laziness or unproductivity. The created world was to be creatively worked and nurtured. Work is not a mistake or a curse. Yet work becomes our curse when it becomes what we worship. “Labor is not,” writes Abraham Heschel, “only the destiny of man; it is endowed with divine dignity.”
Our work is valuable, and it matters to God. Although work is holy, the human tendency as a result of sin is to exalt work as the central part of the human vocation. But work, or activity, is not our core identity. At the heart of the human vocation is to be with God, not to do anything. It is tempting to think of Sabbath as the intrinsic result of a job well done, but it is not. Sabbath is not a wage for our hard work. Sabbath is not a benefits package. Rather, work is a reflection of Sabbath-keeping. Work is a benefit of our rest.
“Achievement,” once wrote Mary Bell, “is the alcohol of our time.”8 Work is our drug, our numbing agent, escape hatch, and anesthetizing behavior. Achievement makes us feel the semblance of some glow of heightened, idolized identity where we are what we do. In this modern world, we have become addicts to doing, making, producing, and accomplishing.
The fundamental relationship between the man and the woman was one of mutuality. As Peter Lombard long ago observed, we must remember that Eve was taken out of Adam’s side, not from his head nor his feet. Why? Because Adam was never to rule over the woman or be ruled by her. Rather, she came out of his side; she was to be his helper.
“The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.”
This act of Adam naming Eve initiates, I believe, a perversion of God’s desire that Eve would work alongside Adam in loving, mutual harmony to work and care for the garden. In fact, God saw it coming when sin entered the world. When God tells Eve that Adam will “rule over her,” he is simply lamenting what is to come. God is not commanding it. His language is descriptive, not prescriptive. Adam naming Eve, putting her in her place, was neither what God ordained nor desired. It is interesting that he names her for what he sees she is good for—having babies.
Sin turns the world upside down. Just as Adam’s relationship to the woman is perverted, so is his relationship to his work.
After the fall, humanity becomes enslaved to work.14 The very vocation God created to serve the world ceases to be an act of worship to the Creator and becomes about self-fulfillment. Humanity ceases being purpose driven and becomes fear driven.
I think God knew we would be prone to worship our work, which is why God initiated rest and Sabbath before the fall.
We turn good things into ultimate things. This gives us a helpful theological and biblical framework for understanding why we are workaholics. Work is not the problem—it is our replacing God with work that is a problem.
No boundaries. No rhythms. No intention. No rest. Every crisis was my crisis. Every complaint was my problem. Everything and everyone came to me. Anxiety was the norm; fear was my god. The long and short of it: I began to burn out. And I knew there was a problem when I started hoping I would burn out.16 Burnout offered a way out of all the insanity. Though I had never thought it possible, I was, in Paul’s words, beginning to “weary in doing good” (Gal. 6:9). The cost was high. I constantly got sick, my marriage was struggling, and my ministry became misery as I went frantically from crisis to
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Wisdom prevailed. I admitted my limits and embraced my finitude. It was one of the first “not goods” in my life where I recognized I had a deep, human, God-created need. In living for everyone else, I had been trying to be omnipotent and omnipresent, neither of which God desired for me to be. 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
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Sabbath never just happens. 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.
This simple act of not working revolutionizes our lives by re-centering our identity on being with God rather than on what we do for the world. Workaholism, in the end, is the result of our sense of self not fully coming into the light of Christ. Workaholism is very different from alcoholism—for the alcoholic there is no slowly reintegrating alcohol into their life after getting clean. They must go cold turkey; there can only be a clean break. Workaholism is different. For a workaholic, the issue becomes learning to live rightly in relationship to work. A workaholic will most likely have to
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I became a workaholic chiefly because I had not allowed the grace of Jesus to reside in the depths of the caverns of my soul. I even used to think the Sabbath was a break from ministry. Now I see Sabbath as ministry. It frees people.
In our culture, in place of a meaningful relationship with Jesus where we are defined by the Father’s love, we will continue to relish our overstuffed, busy lives. Busyness will be our trophy. More often than not, the only way we can truly feel good about our lives is if we are burning out doing it. We want scars to brag about. We have, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we’re running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see least.”23 It seems this cultural mantra has been treated like a command from
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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.
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?
John Murray points out that “Sabbath . . . is not defined in terms of cessation from activity, but cessation from the kind of activity involved in the labours of the other six days.”35 The question is not always what we are doing but what we are ceasing doing.
emergency or something to which a response can wait. Discerning the difference between a legitimate Sabbath emergency and something that can wait is an art form acquired over time. In my work, two parishioners in a relational spat is not an emergency. An elder needing to talk through a finer point of theology is not an emergency. A conversation about a roommate who needs to do the dishes better is not an emergency. I 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,
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While reading it, one is struck by the immediate presence of God. The psalm, writes Norman Wirzba, demonstrates a strong “contrast to our current stressful, exhausting, death-wielding ways.”38 It overflows with thankfulness, praise, a strong declaration of the love and mercy of God, rejoicing with songs and with instruments, looking on God’s works with joy, and trusting in God’s justice.
What defines work? And rest? Our hearts. Are we entering into trust and love and peace and goodness? Are we being thankful? Can we be still? Sabbath invites us into the freedom of God’s love.
No is one of the hardest words for any person to learn—particularly religious people. Often the restrictive and demanding ethos of our world creates a hostile environment where we feel forced to become “yes-people” in our jobs, our relationships, and even at times our churches. Often we feel free to say only yes to please those around us. The devil is most successful, indeed, when he pushes us to feel obliged to be yes-people who have no choice or little ability to say otherwise; he considers his job done when we feel trapped to say only yes to the masses, our closest friends, or even our
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Corrie ten Boom once wrote, “If the devil cannot make us bad, he will make us busy.”3 Be they relational, occupational, or church responsibilities, we are each faced with a thousand daily choices about what we will and will not give our time and energy to. Because we often do not take time to establish boundaries, we constantly catch ourselves defaulting to yes. Think of it this way: every yes takes a little space out of our lives. Soon, after a thousand yeses, we find ourselves exhausted and marginless.
We must have ground in our week that is fallow, free from commitments, free of obligations, a place where life can flourish. A no creates healthy margin in our lives.
we are freed from any kind of messiah complex that maintains that we must do something about everything. If Jesus said no, so can we. If the Spirit said no to Paul, the Spirit will probably say the same to us at some point along the way.
Shalom is holistic and is meant for all of God’s creation. God desires shalom of the body, of the soul, of the spirit, of the mind, of the land. A holistic view of shalom of this kind, however, is often found more in non-Western contexts, writes Gary Badcock. He contends that African Christianity is more likely to see the peace of God in terms of the wholeness of a person, a community, and a nation rather than dichotomized or individualized peace.14 Sadly, Western culture often celebrates shalom even if it comes at the expense of others or creation. We must be careful, however, not to view
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Sabbath is part of the “repairing of the world” God is ushering in. This does not mean that if Sabbath were done by everyone, the world would be left sinless. The Sabbath, writes Robert Ellis, “is not a final leap forward to shalom.” In other words, the Sabbath does not complete the task; it steps and inches toward God’s project of shalom in this world.
