Reflections on Sabbath

Mention Sabbath in the typical North American evangelical Christian subculture, and you are likely to hear either that Sabbath is a rules-based legal observance that Christians no longer need to (should?) observe, or else that Sabbath is good advice to take a day off each week to maintain work-life balance and be more efficient overall. I think both of these ideas totally miss the point of Sabbath as it appears in the Bible.

The Sabbath system set out in the Old Testament goes well beyond one day of rest each week. It extends to a year of rest for the land one year out of seven, and to the Jubilee system every seven sabbatical years. When you compare the two lists of commandments in Exodus 20 to that in Deuteronomy 5, you see that the Sabbath command changes its focus. In Exodus it looks back to creation and to God's action of resting on the seventh day. In Deuteronomy it looks instead to the oppression in Egypt and God's salvation from that oppression. Consequently, Sabbath is concerned both about our relationship to God, to our fellow man, and to the larger creation. We rest, our servants rest, our animals rest, and even the land rests.

When we look in particular at the creation narrative in Genesis 1, we can see some interesting features of Sabbath. We tend to read the narrative, as presented, from God's perspective: God works and then He rests. But humans are created at the very end of the sixth day of creation. From the human perspective, the first thing that humans experience is rest, not work. The picture is even further amplified when we notice the repeated pattern of "there was evening, there was morning, a day".

Unlike our tendency to think of the day beginning in the morning, when we get up and get to work, the Biblical mindset sees the day beginning in the evening, when we stop working and prepare to rest. The day begins with us resting — actually totally asleep and unaware of the world &mdash while God works. In the morning we awake not to a world that is waiting for our intervention, but to a world in which God has already been at work — a work that we are invited to join Him in, but a work that is already well in progress.

The big thing about these Sabbath rhythms is the way they point to the fact that our survival is based upon God's faithfulness, not on our own resourcefulness. Every night we must stop our work and trust God to keep us through the night. Once a week we must stop our work and trust God to keep us even though we see much work that could be done. Once every seven years we must not plant, give the land a rest, and trust God to provide for our needs. And once every seven sabbatical years, we must set aside our acquisitive instincts and return the land we've acquired to those whose ancestral inheritance it is.

Sabbath subverts our tendency to rely upon ourselves. Sabbath subverts our tendency to trust in wealth and material goods. And most importantly, Sabbath subverts our tendency to oppress our fellowman for our own gain. Of all the spiritual disciplines, one could argue that Sabbath is the one most urgently needed in our modern North American society &mdash yet regretably the most ignored.

Ultimately, Sabbath forces us to focus our attention, reliance, and affection on God. I think that the New Testament fulfillment of Sabbath lies not in the abolishment of Sabbath observance, but rather in the admonition to pray without ceasing.

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A lack of posts

Yes, I know that it has been a long time since my last post. My writing hasn't been going all that well the last little while. Most of my (unproductive) energy has been going into trying to rework a narrative of my spiritual journey for a context quite different from that in which it was originally created. It just hasn't felt right, and I'm afraid of it sounding unduly "preachy".

I think perhaps I just have the wrong genre for the task at hand.

I did read a very inspiring post by Joy Morris quoting Gregory of Nyssa. I was reminded that many times when we first encounter God, there are many other things present in God's general direction that we tend to associate with God. But as we get closer to God, we often pass those other things and find them falling behind — something we can easily perceive as God's distance rather than the approaching nearness that is reality. Perhaps as we approach God every more closely, so many false associations will have to be released that it seems we have entered pure darkness.

I'm just convinced that God intends to reveal as much of Himself to us as we can stand, and if that means stripping away a lot of comforting associations that are actually not God Himself, then so be it.

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