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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.
The Theology of Work (Part 5): But First We Rest
A thought on idolatry
The other day I was praying, and Jesus exposed some idolatry in me. I'd been dragging myself along, complaining to him about how tired I was when he very gently reminded me that in Matthew's Gospel, he had invited all those who were weary and heavy laden to himself, so that he might give them rest.
He reminded me of his very words: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."
Then he pointed out to me that if the Jesus I've been serving has given me a tough yoke to carry and a heavy burden to bear-- if the Jesus I've come to can only offer more weight for the load-- if there's no rest for the weary in this Jesus-- then it's not the real Jesus.
And if it's not the real Jesus then it's an idol.
We sometimes sing that song in church with the line: "O Lord we cast down our idols." I've never stopped all that much to wonder what that really means; but, like I say, the other day I was praying and Jesus gave me a glimpse of it. Because when I'm bruttally honest, I know that the "Jesus of the tough yoke and heavy burden" is a Jesus of my own making, an idol that needs casting down, so that the real Jesus--the Jesus who is full of grace and mercy and truth, who loved me before I ever loved him, who loves me regardless of what religious good deed I have or haven't yet done for him-- so that he might give me real rest.
Rest
I took the day off Tuesday: played squash with a good friend, ate a peaceful plate of pad Thai in the mall food-court, took a nap, spent some time with my wife, spent the evening blogging, with the kids building Lego at the table. It was very restful, rejuvenating, re-energizing.
But not, I think, Sabbath.
When I started pastoring, my church board very wisely asked me to set aside a day for rest in lieu of Sunday. I heard a report recently that on average pastors are spending about 55 hours a week at work, and 42% work 60 or more hours a week (LifeWay Research). And in ministry roles in the past, I've stood pretty close to the edge of that deep abyss called burn-out and looked down. The vertigo alone was enough to teach me to appreciate the wisdom of taking a day to rest.
So a day like Tuesday was wise, necessary, healthy and really, a gracious gift from God. But I hesitate to talk about it, necessary as it was, in terms of Sabbath.
I was recently at a pastor’s conference where the speaker told us, in no uncertain or gentle terms, that not to take a day off for Sabbath was to be in "dereliction of duty." And it's that sentiment-- Sabbath is a duty we daren't ignore-- that makes me hesitate to talk about my time off Tuesday as a Sabbath day.
That, and the fact that when we interpret the Biblical idea of Sabbath in terms of simply taking a day off so that we can work harder, better, stronger on the six we have left, a number of ungracious things start to happen.
First, we actually, inadvertently put the focus on the 6 days of work rather than the 1 day of rest, since implicit in the idea of "re-charging" is the idea that the charge is necessary so that we can spend it on the work alone.
Then there's the problem of picking and choosing. What is it about the Sabbath day in particular that must be carried over from the Law, when things like making a woman drink bitter water to test her marital fidelity can be discretely swept under the Tabernacle's welcome mat? And what is it about the Sabbath day that must be carried over when the actual rules about the Sabbath can be discretely ignored (e.g. we don't execute Sabbath breakers like the Law says we must); and what is it about the Sabbath Day that can be carried over when the Law's directives about Sabbath years, and the Sabbath Sabbath (i.e. the Jubilee Year) can be left discretely on the shelf of OT esoteria? (I have yet to leave a field fallow or return any property to its former owner).
And then there's the problem of missing how the Sabbath itself is actually part of the bigger "Sabbath" through which God wants to bless the creation. The Law said: Once a week take a day to rest-- to remember and actually participate in the 7-day rhythm pulsing deep down in the heart of creation, a rhythm God himself counted out when he created the world in 6 days and sabbathed on the 7th-- and this day of rest feeds in to the bigger rhythm of the Sabbath year, where the land is given rest-- and these Sabbath years fit in to the bigger rhythm of the Sabbath Sabbath-- the Year of Jubilee--when the creation itself is given rest, and people find themselves truly in harmony with its deepest rhythms, and Shalom obtains. (Read the end of Leviticus and look at how naturally and directly it connects our keeping of the Sabbath to the deep, rich, verdant flourishing of creation.)
My point here is that the Sabbath day is just one part of a bigger, gracious picture of Shalom for the whole Creation, a reality that the Old Testament is trying to speak into existence through the Law, and that the New Testament is pretty insistent has drawn near, already and not yet, in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
So to talk about my day off in terms of keeping my Sabbath-duty before God seems to trivalize the grand, gracious drama of what Sabbath was supposed to be: the metronome whereby we find ourselves keeping time with the rhythms of creation as the mysterious symphony pulses towards its climax in Christ.
So it was wise to take some time off Tuesday.
But it wasn't my Sabbath.
Or, since the Scriptures say unapologetically that this symphony's climax is played in the key of Christ, better to say: Tuesday was no more a Sabbath than Monday, when I worked on next week's sermon, had a mentorship meeting, met with one of our ministry leaders, composed some ministry emails, met with the vice-chair of our church board and finally dragged myself to bed around 11:00 at night.
Because my faith in Christ is my Sabbath rest.
Paul puts this well. In Romans 14:5, while he's talking to a group of Jewish and Gentile Christians trying to figure out how to do life together, he says: "One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike." At least, that's what the NIV says he said. But this has always left me with the impression that our two options are: to keep one day as a day of rest, or keep them all "alike" and work straight through. There I go putting the emphasis on the 6 days of work, again; and there I go missing the grander drama again.
Because it's not exactly what Paul says. Exactly, he says something like: one man "judges" [as sacred?; lit. krino] one day, the other "judges" [as sacred?; lit. krino] them all. Romans 14:5 seems to be saying: either we still keep one day as Sabbath (out of genuine appreciation for the deep-down beauty of the Law and the high-up wisdom of the God who gave it), or we keep them all as Sabbath.
Since the Shalom which the Law's Sabbath rhythms were speaking about has now drawn near to us in Jesus, since the life-in-tune-with-the-Creator-and-in-step-with-his-plan-for-his-Creation that the Sabbath rules were asking us to live is now lived through faith in Jesus, since the people that the Law was trying to create-- a people who show the world how wise and gracious their god really is-- are now being created in and through and around Jesus, since all this, the meaning of Sabbath has now spilled out into all of life.
One or all. Those are the options Paul offers us.
And because Jesus is slowly showing me that my whole life has to be covered over and caught up by his good will for his world; and because he's slowly teaching me that I can be in rhythm with his plan for the creation only when I continually keep time with him, and because I really believe him when he said things like "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath," and "man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man," I'd gladly choose the "all" over the "one."