The Theology of Work (Part 5): But First We Rest

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The ancient rabbis liked to point out that the very first task God gave Adam and Eve to do was to rest.

This checks out when you track the creation account in Genesis closely. God creates the world in six days, topping it all off with his pièce de resistance on the final day: the making of human beings, creatures bearing the stamp of his likeness. Then there was evening, and morning, the sixth day.

If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know that the very next thing that comes is verse 2:1-2, where God rests from all the creation work that he had been doing. In doing so, he sanctifies the Sabbath, making it holy and instituting it as a creation ordinance. From that point on, he invites us rest on the seventh day, too, just like he himself rested on that first Sabbath in the beginning (see Exodus 20:8-11 for more on how our observance of the Sabbath reflects God’s own resting on the seventh day of creation).

So essentially, you have God making humans at the end of the sixth day, and then leading them in sabbath rest at the start of the seventh day. And in pointing out this fascinating sequence, the ancient rabbis were drawing attention to the fact that Adam and Eve started their life as God’s creatures not with work, but with rest.

If you or I were telling the story, this side of Late Stage Capitalism, we’d never put the day of rest on day seven, immediately following the creation of human beings. Adam would have to have earned his rest first, we’d assume. So we'd have created him at the start of the work week, and got a good six days of use out of him. Only then would we have given him the day off,  and that just so he’d be fresh and ready to go for the next six days.

Not so with God. Whatever else we can say about the relationship between work and Sabbath, you can’t unsee it, once it’s been pointed out to you, that in the creation story of Genesis, the very first task God gave Adam and Eve to do—if you can even call it a "task" at all—was to rest. They did not have to prove they deserved it. They hadn’t even done any work yet to rest from. God just started them off with a long luxurious basking in his glory, at peace in his presence, awash in his blessing.

There are at least three interconnected points to make on the heels of this observation. First, it reminds us that our experience of Sabbath is modeled after the Creator’s own example of sabbath. He rested on the seventh day, not because he was tired, but because he was, in essence, “creating” the sabbath for us, blessing it, sanctifying it, and modeling it for his creatures. This is how Exodus 20:8-11 frames the Sabbath. We are called to do it so as to walk in step with the rhythms the Creator himself established when he made the world in six and rested on the seventh day.

The second point flows from this first, that the Creator gave the Sabbath to the Creation as a blessing, a rich and entirely unmerited gift. He is not a slave driver who won’t let his worker-bees punch the clock until they’ve good and earned a break and simply can’t go on without one. Rather: he blessed the seventh day as a day of rest, after he had finished the work of creation which he had been doing and before the man had done any work yet himself, to rest from.

This may be, in part, what Jesus meant when he said that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was meant to be an unmerited gift, a source of joy, delight, peace and nurture. It was not meant as a measure of our usefulness, marking the outer limit of how much we could work before we simply needed a break, a way to keep us in optimal working efficiency and so get the most out of us.

I say that in part because I think that’s often how the Sabbath is billed, this side of Late Stage Capitalism. The resting is needed, we assume, for the sake of the working. Yet this does not seem to be how the Bible views Sabbath. If anything, it reverses the story, suggesting that the Sabbath itself is primary, and the role of the work is simply to enrich our experience of rest when we have it.

But I say it more so because it leads to this third point. The fact that Adam’s very first day on earth was one of sabbath assures us that his worth, as one of God's creatures, is not measured by his productivity or predicated on his usefulness. That is to say: the humans in the Genesis story are of intrinsic value, regardless how much the produce, how much they can get done, how hard they are able to work.

God blessed them with sabbath before they ever answered any of these “how much” questions.

This is a revolutionary thought, I think, in a culture where we tend to have a strictly materialistic, mechanistic view of the world. For us, everything, when you reduce its to its simplest terms, is a machine. Machines, of course, are only made for the sake of the work they can accomplish. They are of value to the extent that they work, and when they don’t they need either to be fixed or replaced. This mechanistic thinking pervades our whole view of human life. We often approach people themselves as though they were nothing more than soft, warm, breath-and-bone machines, of value so long as they are useful, and useful only to the extent that they are productive.

To the extent that this really is how we think about human life—even if subconsciously—the Bible’s suggestion that sabbath rest was God’s unmerited gift to us completely turns our mechanistic view of life on its head, insisting that a human being is profoundly more than just a glorified machine.

The gift of Sabbath tells us that we are of worth to God for no other reason than that he created us. It tells us, further, that we were not made so that God could wring the most out of us, his cogs in the machinery of nature; rather we were made so that we could enjoy the restful peace of his presence, his blessed sons and daughters.

For a theology of work to be truly biblical, it will need to wrestle profoundly with the Bible’s teaching about Sabbath and its implications. Sabbath reorients us to work, and by reorienting us to work, it reorients us to all of life, allowing us to make “who we are” as God’s creature the sole measure of “what we do” in our work, rather than letting “what we do"—and how much of it, and how well—define who we really are.

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