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

by A.J. Swoboda

He argues that relational strife and unrest take place largely because of overload.6 When we do too much and take on far more than we can handle, we greatly increase the chances of not living peaceably with each other. We are tired, we are unfulfilled, we are frustrated, and we are hopeless.

Do not misunderstand this: sin is not atoned for by a day of rest. Nor is discrimination on the basis of age, disability, race, sex, or marital status a result merely of a lack of Sabbath in our culture. But our unwillingness to rest and find respite in Christ is negatively affecting the way we treat each other. I would strongly argue that the Sabbath commandment is one step forward in undoing systemic evils that our world has been enslaved by since the fall. I know this: I can best serve, love, forgive, embrace, and welcome others when I am at peace in my heart and my own body.

A Sabbath society reflects God’s compassion to all people. Does God care about systems? Without question! Systems affect those God came to redeem. Only an absentee, absentminded God could not care about the systems that affect the people and creation he made. Jesus cares about the systems of our society precisely because Jesus cares about people. The intrinsic worth of each human leads us to understand that God cares about anything and everything that affects human beings. If anything hurts people—even those in society we give little attention to—God cares.

Is the Sabbath about loving God, or is it about loving the neighbor? This is why it has been called “the bridge commandment.” For tradition holds that it is the one command explicitly concerned with loving God and neighbor simultaneously. When one enters the Sabbath, it is as though we are loving God and those around us.

George Forell wisely illustrates hesed in his book Faith Active in Love. 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.”

Walter Brueggemann writes, “Sabbath is the great day of equality when all are equally at rest. Not all are equal in production. Some perform much more effectively than others.”11 On the Sabbath, all get to rest! We are freed to not have to do more, sell more, control more, know more, be involved in more, focus on our appearance more, or score more. The Sabbath changes our relationship to others and breaks us from one-upmanship.

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.

when the ideal is not met, God still enters in and loves us. And it is when we seek to live the ideals of God, to care about the things he cares deeply about, that we meet him. 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, 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.

The research asked what causes one to embrace a sustainable lifestyle. What the research revealed was that there is literally zero connection between formal education on the matter and caring for God’s creation. That is, people did not begin to care for creation because they took a class on it or read a book about it. Rather, the most foundational thing that helped someone care for creation was their experience of actually doing it and being in creation.18 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.

Laura Ruth Yordy once wrote, “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.

Sleeth stresses that this is how we must think about the Sabbath. What often hurts creation the most is not what is there but what is not there.2 By leaving out the Sabbath from our lives, the very earth God has put us up on suffers devastating consequences.

During an appointment with my counselor, Raymond, he taught me how to listen to my body as a way of helping me discern how my spiritual life is going. 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. The body God has made knows what it is doing. The problem remains: we rarely listen to it. My body, Raymond explained, is a kind of prophet in my life, telling me what I most need to hear. Raymond calls this the “sovereignty of the body.” As a theologian, I am reluctant to think of anything as sovereign other than God. Still, I have come to understand his point. Our bodies know what they are doing and remain apt communicators. They tell us what we need to hear when we need to hear it. 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. It is God’s gift to speak truth to us.

The text explicitly states that before human beings are introduced into creation, God is strategically creating a space where human flourishing could be possible. God did not just create people; God created a whole system of air, water, plants, animals, and livestock that made human flourishing possible. Again, imagine if God left light out. Or air. Or trees. Humanity would long be gone.

John Muir once boiled this principle down: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”5 Creation is like a piece of clothing that, if we pull a string, will keep pulling, pulling, and pulling until the entire thing comes undone. This is the principle of all ecology at its core.6 Perhaps my favorite definition of ecology comes from G. Tyler Miller, who says it means everyone and everything is downwind from everyone and everything else.7 That is, nothing is isolated.

Physicists further define this as “quantum entanglement,” the idea that every breath of air we breathe is actually air that has been breathed a million times before us. In fact, the breath of air you last took is most likely filled with atoms and molecules that Chairman Mao or even Jesus Christ himself previously breathed in. The air we breathe is not new. We breathe used air. Even our very breath is dependent on others. We are entangled with everything else in creation.

Likewise, 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.”10 Thus the opposite of rest is not work but restlessness. Humanity has become restless in its consumption, which “leads directly to the neglect of the places we are in and the people we are with.”

A world with no Sabbath is a genetically modified world.

One thing was forgotten in the “progress” of the Industrial Revolution—Sabbath. Like the sparrow during the time of Mao, creation has no space to rest. The world is too loud. That sparrow, along with the rest of creation, is beginning to fall to the ground in exhaustion. No longer a functioning society, we are an overfunctioning society. We do not cease. Therefore, creation gets no rest. Sabbath is a string holding everything together.

But instead of nurturing peace in our hearts and minds, informational overloading has led to a kind of gloominess wherein we no longer experience the world as a mysterious world imbued with God’s mystery. 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. It is a wild world far outside our control. We have not been fulfilled by what control we do have. In fact, this kind of information overload is crushing us and depressing us. In the words of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, “We have found that the men who know the most are the most gloomy.”

There was, of course, a word for creation care and environmental living in biblical societies: life. Scripture does not speak about “environmentalism” as we do, because to live as a person in the ancient world was to live an environmentally friendly life.

A Christian cares for the things God cares for. I call this “borrowed compassion.” The original compassion is not ours. It is God’s compassion. We care because God cares.

Compassion is feeling the pain of God in our guts and being moved to actually do something about it. 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.

The word of God was to shape Israel’s conception of how the Sabbath was an act of obedience and also how such obedience was a blessing to the land. As long as God’s people faithfully kept the Sabbath principle that God had established—including resting one day a week—the land would be fruitful and inhabitable. In the same chapter, however, God warns them that if they ignore the Sabbath, he will “scatter” them and their land will be “laid waste.” “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 land would flourish if the Israelites kept the Sabbath. But the land would reject them if they refused to.

When the Israelites were exiled, the land finally got what it needed: Sabbath rest. The land “enjoyed” its newfound lease on life because it kept a Sabbath. The land ceased. It got the break God so desired it to have. The implication, of course, is that the Israelites did not give the land a Sabbath when they occupied it. They stole from the land. And they stole from the land by not taking any breaks. Because they never ceased, the land could never cease. Thus, because of their workaholism, Israel was sent into exile.

A healthy relationship needs both intimacy and difference, an attribute of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, who are all fully God but remain distinct, unique persons.

Be still. Let God do some work. Our culture says that healing can only come by doing. Scripture tells a different story. The world is healed by our stopping. The Sabbath reverses this notion and invites us to see the process of healing through silence and nonaction. Just by being, we allow God to heal us and the land. 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.

Cities are growing. And they are growing fast. A contemporary city is generally defined as a population center of twenty-five thousand or more people. And settlements fitting this qualification are added by the week.7 Today, three-quarters of the world lives in metropolitan centers.8 In fact, the single largest move of people in human history is taking place as I write this: rural Chinese are migrating to major cities almost exclusively for the purpose of employment. In seemingly every corner of the world, urbanization is swelling with little sign of slowing down. In the West, the vast majority of people increasingly locate their home and workplace in urban centers, working, living, and playing in the city.

Moreover, engagement with the land actually becomes a creative way to preach the love of Christ to those in the city. A friend who attends our church and does inner-city ministry in Portland learned this same lesson. Serving inner-city youth in their high-school settings, he found it challenging to help them encounter the message of Jesus. Then it dawned on him—these kids have never seen the raw beauty of the land or the stars of heaven; they live in the city. So he experimented with something. He took inner-city kids camping in the rugged Oregon landscape. What he discovered was mind-blowing: kids got God. Turns out, when you show inner-city kids the sheer beauty of God’s creation, they start asking really big questions about themselves, the universe, and eventually God. It is kind of like how God takes Abraham outside to explain his promises to him (Gen. 14).

Doing some homework revealed that the previous owners had flipped the house for great profit.11 You do not flip something you plan on living in. And yet, truth be told, for generations humanity has been flipping creation. Real work has been postponed. Decade after decade, for this or that excuse, we have abdicated real responsibility and real care for the integrity of the earth, leaving our children and grandchildren with the tasks that we have put off. In trading stewardship and husbandry of the land for quick profit, we have come to a crossroads. The consequences of our irresponsibility are upon us. Things are starting to fall apart. How could we have done this? Could it be that we have assumed we would never have to live in that place again, that we could just move on to another space? If the people who flipped our house had been forced to live on the property for the next three decades, they would have made different choices in caring for it. We might think of it like this: 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.

Do we not need time to breathe in what is made by God? If we do not take time to really see creation, we buzz past it at speeds we never wanted. I love that Harvey Cox translates the word Sabbath as “to catch one’s breath.”

Soon after returning, Irwin became an evangelical minister. He described his walk on the moon: “I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before.”16 Because we have no space in our lives, we often do not even see the land anymore.

The land even teaches us of the wisdom and goodness of God. God sustains the land by his love. Theologically speaking, we must not believe that God created this beautiful expanse only to step back and watch it spin into chaotic oblivion, as deists would have us believe. Christian orthodoxy argues that God continues to be the ongoing creator and sustainer of all the land. God is the initial creator, but God does not stop creating. Rather, God continues to make creation and hold it together, which we call creatio continua. This idea is depicted in the book of Hebrews: Jesus “holds everything together” (Heb. 1:3 GW). One may even consider the physical ramifications of this—it is literally the love of Christ that holds the land together. We see in Scripture that God loves the land and cares for it. God is not portrayed as some absentee landlord. God makes his creation to display his beauty and then continues to regenerate the land over and over again.

Instead of being drawn to God by the beauty of the land, we walk by it unthinkingly. I have come to call this “beauty exhaustion”—having experienced something beautiful long enough that you begin to forget how beautiful it is.

we move too quickly. Our minds and hearts are not given the chance to catch up to the warp speed at which our bodies are going; we fail to see the sacredness of God and the land. God’s presence cannot be fully enjoyed if we are constantly checking the time or running to our next appointment. Enjoyment of beauty should not be rushed.

the young Jewish student said something to Ron that stuck with him. He said, “I don’t want to be like these white Christians here. They sing about the love of Jesus and the joy of heaven, but they don’t care about justice in South Africa. If I become a Christian, will I have to give up the struggle?”9 Indeed, the work of justice was part of what Jesus asked this young man to do. After Ron affirmed to him the call of God to fight for the freedom of those suffering under apartheid, James came to faith in Christ.

I am not convinced that one can believe in the gospel and not do justice in the world. Any attempt to translate our otherworldliness into irresponsibility is catastrophic. Jesus wants heaven to come to earth. God’s justice matters. I take the words of Jesus literally. And by reading them literally, I literally am compelled to do them. Love the poor. Pray for the enemy. Face all my addictions. Forgive. Speak truth. Be sexually pure. Repent. Embody generosity. And care for the animals well. I have no permission to select which words of Jesus I must obey and which to drop by the wayside. I am bound to all of Jesus’s words. The gospel—the good news that Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected to save humanity from its sins—very well better change the ethical structures of our lives.

God deeply cares for each of these critters. The critters are “good.” But even more than that, God opts to establish a personal relationship with the critters he has made. This relationship is illustrated by a number of biblical texts. For example, in the story of Noah’s ark, we find that two of every creature came into the ark just before the flood, as God had desired. However, there is one thing missing from the story—Noah himself never went out and gathered the critters. Rather, the critters came on their own (Gen. 7:8–9). Noah’s task was to make space for them in the boat, not go out and get them all. This raises a question: How did the animals know to come into the ark? The story seems to suggest that God himself went and spoke to the animals, calling them to advance to Noah and the ark. The implication of this is that God has a unique way of communicating with the critters he has made.

The story continues today as the church has uncritically assimilated its life and sense of time into the life of the world. We learn about sexuality from our culture. We learn our leadership techniques from corporations. And we live according to the time of the world.

This is undoubtedly why rabbis during the time of Jesus exerted such great energy trying to determine what was rest and what was work. The Sabbath was not merely a day off each week when one ceased work. The Sabbath was a sign to the world that those who practiced it were, in fact, the people of God set apart from the rest of the world.

But people’s schedules and budgets often reveal their doctrines more than anything they might say. One Jewish scholar goes so far as to say that if Jews do not keep the Sabbath, they run the risk of going extinct.

Christian Sabbath-keeping is a calendared sign, a confession that Christ is Lord and we are not.

In this contrast community, people are empowered by the Holy Spirit to be not a fortress against the world, but a force in the world. This environment of grace makes room for all kinds of people who are desperately seeking rest. The church is a place to learn how to rest. It is not the place we go to burn out.

This interplay between Sabbath observance and loving one’s enemies is beautiful and painful at the same time. To Sabbath was to love your enemies, because it gave your enemies a day off from you. It was to give your worst nightmare a day off. What effect could this practice have on our relationships today? Imagine taking a break from the roommate battle over dishes that has been waging for weeks. Imagine putting down your arms one day a week with a boss who disrespects you. Imagine putting aside an argument over finances with your spouse for a day in order to enter into the rich provision of God.

Isaiah speaks woe over those who have no such space: “Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land” (Isa. 5:8). The lesson signifies something very clear: margin is good. And Sabbath provides it. Sabbath creates margin, space, openings, room for the foreigners among us who themselves need to be blessed by Sabbath rest.

The Sabbath is not another flavor of individualism. It is a return to the communal roots of our faith, where we make room for the other. Again, in a tired society, keeping the Sabbath is a unique way to create space for others who are trapped by exhaustion.

God sees no Democrats or Republicans, Calvinists or Arminians, Baptists or Pentecostals. God sees children whom he redeemed with the death and resurrection of Christ. He sees people who have at times hurt each other but who have also chosen to forgive one another and who continue to worship together. He sees people who would never spend time together in the world of the enemy but who now spend time together because of the work of grace.

That is what a discipline is—it is something we do consistently that changes our hearts and minds over time. This is reflected in Paul’s admonition to “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 13:14). What does it mean to put on Jesus Christ? The gist of what Paul commands is closely related to me dressing like a professor in order to become a professor. 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.

Sabbath is a discipline we put on. When we practice the Sabbath, it may feel a bit like we are putting on someone else’s clothing. And indeed we are. Sabbath is foreign clothing—nay, heavenly clothing—and it may not fit for a while. But the hope is that, in doing it over a long period of time, it brings about real and substantive changes to our hearts, minds, and attitudes. 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.