Rest as Resistance

The delight of selflessness in practicing the sabbath

If you aren’t resting, you are a slave to something.

Adele Calhoun

After years in bondage as slaves in Egypt and escaping the grip of Pharaoh, God directs the Israelites to a place of waiting as he gives Moses the ten commandments written in stone that will be instituted as the law of the people. While most of the laws in the ten commandments we can justify as good social codes of conduct for the preservation of a cohesive nation not riddled with adultery, crime and idol worship, the fourth commandment to keep the sabbath day holy stands out as one that looks admittedly less weighty than acts of violence or theft of personal property. Out of the many commands that ‘thou shalt not’, the positive law of preservation that ‘thou shall keep the sabbath day holy’, when confronted, is one I am more susceptible to unfaithfully keeping. Growing up, the significance of the rhythm of weekly sabbath from Saturday evening through Sunday was lost on me, but I complied with the conviction of my parents. Through college, sabbath was lost amidst to-do’s and assignments hastily written before a Monday due date. Sunday became a day of sleeping in after a late night and playing catch-up on neglected self care. Now, as a young adult at the beginning of his working life, the sabbath has seemed like something I can afford to practice once I’ve put in the work to justify it. I think this is the case for most of us, and while reading a book on sabbath rest conjures a romantic image of basking in God’s warm presence for 24 hours a week, my immediate response is “that sounds great- I’ll do it when I have the time”. 

Ruth Haley Barton’s meditations on a normal sabbath routine in Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest felt like an invitation to reconsider the purpose of sabbath and its rightful role in the natural rhythms of my spiritual, communal, work, and personal life. I struggled to open Barton’s book. Before reading, I wrote down 2 questions at the top of the page of notes I keep as a bookmark; What if I don’t do enough to make a sabbath worth having? How hard do I need to work before sabbath is justified as a weekly practice? I entered a book on sabbath feeling unworthy of reading it, that a sabbath practice is a privilege you earn once ‘doing enough’. If this doesn’t reek of works-based righteousness, I don’t know what does. Those two questions, though, I think are exactly what sabbath should prompt us- what exactly are my justifications for not practicing a sabbath that God commands us to keep holy?. When something like a gift of sabbath isn’t just a suggestion but mandated by God’s law as a function of both who He is and how He wants His people to live, our reaction should be to ask why, and more thoughtfully, what is my resistance to the rest God has prepared for us?  The truth is my hesitation to sabbath comes from an over-inflated view of my self importance.  Maybe that’s what an invitation to the sabbath is and should be- the opportunity to question the self importance we build up in six days of our week.

Sabbath is a rhythm God built into his own existence. As those made in the image of God, I believe practicing sabbath is a crucial part of reaffirming our likeness and representing God by embodying what is important to Him. This is part of learning what it means to be made in the imago Dei, that following the rhythm of God’s work and rest gives shape to our own lives that have been shaped by a Creator. I am of the belief that sabbath was not instituted because God was tired after six days of creating the world, but because His rest on the seventh day sets a precedent for how we live as His make. On the seventh day, Barton describes God’s instituting of the sabbath as the creation of Menuha- something “more than withdrawal from labor and exertion, more than freedom from toil, strain, or activity of any kind” (p. 19). What God creates on the seventh day is the deep longing imprinted in all of us for harmony, tranquility, stillness, and peace. Without God exemplifying this for us on the seventh day we would have no concept of rest, stillness, or peace to return to. Where would there be incentive for us to find resolve, to seek a peace we’ve never known? Sabbath is not practiced because God wants us to ‘take a water break’ from life and practice a hobby, but because it is a consistent reorientation towards an experience of the peace and stillness in which God dwells. Without it, I wonder if we would have the drive to seek peace and resolve in our anxious world.

Barton emphasizes the communal nature of sabbath because a communal practice holds us accountable to its rhythm. Because it’s much easier to justify continuing work to its completion or maintaining momentum while it’s there, a sabbath practiced individually is more easily omitted without the encouragement and buy-in of the body. In addition, a practice by a community extends the sweetness of the sabbath by sharing in its delight, by worshiping and proclaiming the peace and countercultural stillness God offers corporately. The importance of sabbath as a communal conviction also ensures that the work of the body is evenly distributed and that sabbath is not just reserved for the privileged or the financially well-off, but for all people. In maintaining the importance of the corporate sabbath we learn to care for people differently, selflessly taking others into consideration as we move into the seventh day together. This sabbath is not only enjoyed by all, it also prompts sacrifice from us to make the corporate delight happen. Just as God created a helper for man in the work of keeping the garden, God also intends the practice of rest to be a movement towards one another, not away.

My personal struggle to give significance to sabbath I believe comes from a misunderstanding of what the nature of the sabbath is. Like for most spiritual disciplines and practices, we cannot understand the true beauty of what God is calling us into without first meditating on the significance of why he is asking us to abide in him. The sabbath is willfully tithing one seventh of our week to God not because the act of sabbath is what we give God in exchange for His provision, but because we experience the provision He has already given us by living in the rhythms God has invited in us to partake. Ordering our life around the sabbath is crucial because it reaffirms that we believe in a God who brought order to chaos at the beginning of creation and conceived peace and stillness in the process. To not give sabbath the respect it is due is to form ourselves as lord of the sabbath. The sabbath does not disappear just because we ignore it- God does not tell us to keep a sabbath day, he commands us to keep the sabbath day. Not only that, to disregard the sabbath is to disregard something that God has ordained as holy. In this way, not practicing the sabbath reveals a deceptive grandiosity where the concern of my over-importance, the logistics, and unappeal, take precedence over God’s holiness. “I know my own and my own know me,” Jesus proclaims in John 10. Where our deception of busyness, grandeur and arrogance keep us in an empty pursuit of works-based righteousness, Jesus’ offer of life abundant is experienced nowhere more sweetly than in the holiness of the sabbath. May we pursue true rest, delight, freedom, and community in or pursuit of aligning ourselves to the divine rhythms we were made for.