Sabbath

Sabbath is what our leisure-hungry and work-addicted culture desperately needs. But the very word brings to most minds negation, absence and all the restrictions well-meaning Christians have over the years placed on Sunday. This article will explore the biblical meaning of rest, the theological meaning of sabbath, and sabbath as a life-giving discipline. In the end we will see that we do not keep sabbath so much as sabbath keeps us!

The Ultimate Rest

The negative view of sabbath has some foundation. The Hebrew word shabath means “to stop,” “to desist,” “to cease from doing.” The first formalized reference to sabbath in the Ten Commandments clearly requires desisting from labor one day a week, though it does not legislate six days of labor: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work” (Exodus 20:8-11). As Witold Rybczynski notes, viewing the weekend as a day or two in which one is not required to work and viewing it as a period in which one is required not to work are not the same thing (p. 60). Sabbath, however, is more, but not less, than a twenty-four-hour day of enforced rest. A weekly experience of rest is fundamental to our regaining perspective and entering the rest that is essential to personal, social and creational survival. Of all the Ten Commandments, being negligent of this one has resulted in more deaths than even the prohibition against murder. Heart disease and other stress-related ailments have taken their toll. Especially in the postmodern Western world, we are killing ourselves by neglecting sabbath.

But sabbath rest is more than keeping one day a week. Rest is not merely cessation but appropriation. There is a positive meaning to sabbath that takes us beyond the simple etymology of the word. Israel was commanded to enjoy the day—to enjoy rest! Rest is a state of body, mind and soul that is essential for health, both physical and spiritual. It involves restoring balance, rejuvenating energies, regaining perspective, allowing our emotional energies to recover, being in harmony with our own bodies and, especially, enjoying God. Rest is a multifaceted blessing that includes sleep, dreaming, recreation, vacations, play and leisure. But sabbath is rest in its purest and most complete form, probably because it involves gaining the threefold harmony of God, humankind and creation.

Harmony with God means that we have peace with God, enter God’s own rest and enjoy God. Tragically, some people do not even like God, let alone enjoy God! Harmony with humankind means that our own persons are rejuvenated and given perspective. Unlike leisure, which is concerned primarily with cultivating oneself, sabbath ministers to the self indirectly by recovering our focus on God, renewal being a byproduct. Harmony with creation suggests that God’s desire is not only that people have rest but even animals and the land, every seven years as well as one day a week (Exodus 20:10; Deut. 15:1-12). This threefold harmony can also be expressed in the terms of prayer (God-humankind harmony), play (harmony with oneself) and peacemaking (humankind-creation/social harmony): enjoying God, enjoying ourselves and celebrating creation.

To show how fundamental sabbath is to the life of faith, Scripture describes the creation of Adam and Eve on the sixth day as the penultimate creation, the climax coming the next day, the sabbath. Nothing is closer to God’s mind and heart than the creation of sabbath. Adam woke up from his unconscious sleep not to start his work of caring for God’s world but to experience rest. Adam and Eve’s first vocational experience was to waste time for good and for God. Only if we do the same can we understand why we are to take care of God’s world, build community and pray.

No Trivial Pursuit

There is a theology of leisure in the Bible, but it is secondary to the great and extensive material on sabbath. What we find from Genesis to Revelation is not the cultivation of a perfect balance of work and leisure but of work and sabbath. There are deep theological reasons for this.

Sabbath reveals the heart of God. God rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2), but this was not mere cessation; it was refreshment (Exodus 31:17). God literally put aside the work of creation both to enjoy rest (“It was very good”; Genesis 1:31) and to put creation in its place (it is good but not God). So the people that were first called to bear God’s image on earth—Israel—were given two archetypal images of salvation to proclaim good news to others and to be refreshed in their own faith: the exodus (symbolized in the festival of Passover) and the sabbath (their weekly reminder that God is in charge; Moltmann, p. 287). Both exodus (a dramatic rescue accomplished by the mighty hand of God) and sabbath (a period that implies trusting in God’s provision enough to set aside one’s work) are tangible signs of having faith in a God of grace. The kind of God we actually worship is revealed by whether or not we keep sabbath.

Sabbath was not to be an experience of multiple restrictions; Israel was to “call the Sabbath a delight” (Isaiah 58:13). This delight was not eliminated by the coming of Christ but rather was intensified as we wait for full manifestation of Christ and the kingdom, when full rest will be attained. Jesus claimed to be Lord of the sabbath (Mark 2:27-28) and declared that he fulfilled rather than annulled it. Being sabbath’s lord did not mean Jesus could break it at will; rather, it means that the Lord fulfilled sabbath’s meaning and intent. Therefore Jesus healed and gleaned in the fields (as a poor man) on Saturday, the Jewish sabbath. More importantly he embodied sabbath by restoring people to God through forgiveness of sins, healing the sick and bringing unmitigated joy, the first stage of the threefold harmony of God, creation and humankind that will receive its final fulfillment when Christ comes again. In the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21-22) the Lamb is everywhere (we enjoy God in uninterrupted communion), creation is renewed (not only the new heavens but even a new material earth!), and people are released for permanent creativity and exquisite joy. So there is a rich sabbath overtone in the invitation of Jesus: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Sabbath reveals God’s intentions for the world. It is the celebration of creation. Jürgen Moltmann speaks of this as the “feast of creation.” Put differently, sabbath involves the redemption of both space and time, the reharmonizing of God, humankind and creation in both spatial (and material) as well as temporal terms.

Regarding the redemption of space, sabbath brings both the enjoyment and stewardship of creation. This positive delight is witnessed in God’s own word of praise,“It was very good” (Genesis 1:31), and echoed in Adam’s first burst of praise at the creation of Eve, “At last!” (Genesis 2:23 RSV). This celebration of creation is also found in the book of Job, which contains an African safari for the purpose of viewing two really untamable animals (probably the hippopotamus and the crocodile) and a voyage in a weather satellite to show Job that God really enjoys influencing the climate, much of which is not for our benefit or even experienced by human beings. In this profound contemplation God reveals that he enjoys being God! In the light of this Job and the rest of humankind can join God as coworkers and cocreators, “playing God” with God by making things. That is part of the joy of hobbies and crafts. We are recovering sabbath when we are creative, a matter that illuminates the edifying effect of healthy recreation. But it is not only space that gets rejuvenated by sabbath.

First and foremost sabbath is the redemption of time. To the unreflective and the religiously dutiful, sabbath might appear to be a waste of time. Nothing is accomplished, or so it seems. But in reality something indispensable to rest is taking place: time is being recovered as a gift from God rather than a resource to be managed.

The first mention of holiness in the Bible refers to time: “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Genesis 2:3). In contrast, humankind seems preoccupied with making holy places. In his brilliant exposition of sabbath, Abraham Heschel observes that all pantheistic religions are religions of space and sacred places, in contrast to the faith of Israel, which is concerned with the redemption of time (pp. 4-6). The prophets maintained that the day of the Lord was more important than the house of the Lord. Not only religion but also technology have been concerned primarily with the conquest of space. In the process we have forfeited experiencing holiness in time. Heschel says, “There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord” (p. 3). The great cathedrals, he maintains, are cathedrals in time. And sabbath is the holy architecture of time. The meaning of sabbath is precisely this:

Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things in space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world. (Heschel, p. 10)

Surprisingly God’s work in creating the world is presented in Scripture as play. Wisdom describes herself as “the craftsman at [God’s] side. . . . filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence, rejoicing in the whole world and delighting in mankind” (Proverbs 8:30-31). Sabbath and play have much in common.

Sabbath reveals the playfulness of God. Sabbath for humankind is playing heaven. The best way to learn to work is to play at it! Children do this naturally before the dreadful process of growing up drives a wedge between work and play. They play house and so fit themselves for being grownups in their own homes. When we “play” heaven—by cocreating with God, by delighting in creation, by making things fit a heavenly model and by worshiping—we are anticipating the joys of being fully “grown-up” men and women in Christ in heaven (where we truly become children again!). Once again Heschel is eloquent on this subject: “Sabbath is an example of the world to come” (p. 73). He further explains:

Judaism tries to foster the vision of life as a pilgrimage to the seventh day; the longing for the Sabbath all the days of the week which is a form of longing for the eternal Sabbath all the days of our lives. It seeks to displace the coveting of things in space for coveting the things in time, teaching man to covet the seventh day all days of the week. . . . It is as if the command: Do not covet things in space, were correlated with the unspoken word: Do covet things in time. (Heschel, pp. 90-91)

The Jewish answer to the problem of civilization, maintains Heschel, quoting Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, “is not to flee from the realm of space; [it is] to work with things of space, but to be in love with eternity” (p. 117). It turns out that heavenly-minded people are, as C. S. Lewis once said, those who are also of most earthly use (p. 51).

Having the Time of Our Lives

We have been exploring sabbath as a lifestyle, something that informs and transforms all the facets of everyday life: work, leisure, family life, vacations and even sleep. We have good scriptural warrant for universalizing sabbath in a way that makes it an everyday reality rather than a one-day-a-week affair. The apostle Paul said, “One man considers one day more sacred than another; another considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind” (Romans 14:5). Sabbath is optional, which opens up the possibility of every day being regarded as such: “He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. . . . For none of us lives to himself alone” (Romans 14:6-7).

Sabbath lifestyle. Paul was not original in expressing this idea but was merely expounding the words and deeds of Jesus. In Jesus’ day many had reduced sabbath observance to a task, a work to be performed. The religious people of his day were hedging the day with a myriad of prohibitions either to make it happen or to protect it from impiety. So the day came to be served both for its own sake and for the merit people obtained in doing it just right. In contrast, Jesus viewed sabbath as something given by God for people’s benefit, not bondage: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Jesus regarded himself as Lord even of the sabbath. He enjoyed the day by doing what his Father loves to do on the sabbath: creating and recreating, resting and bringing rest to others.

It is difficult to resist the conclusion, given the number of miracles Jesus worked on the sabbath, that Jesus deliberately chose to do most of his healings on Saturday! He had a point to make: sabbath is not the absence of work but experiencing the joy of God and entering into God’s work. The author of the letter to the Hebrews had this same thought when he called us to “make every effort to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:11), “for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his” (Hebrews 4:10). This author hints that entering sabbath is, ironically, hard work for us because we are so driven to make sabbath a personal performance, a thing we make happen, rather than a delicious relaxation in God. So sabbath becomes the model of salvation.

Mini-sabbaths. Most Christians find that whether or not they have kept a special day, they need a time dedicated to God every day, generally in the morning. Women with small children may find another time of day more profitable, and husbands can care for children during this time to give a “sabbath gift” to their spouse. But it is important to explore the reason for a daily quiet time. Spiritual disciplines are not ways of finding God or of attaining sanctification but of chasing away obstacles that keep us from being continuously found by God. It is a mighty work on our part to make ourselves truly available to God. The farmer cannot make the seeds grow, but he must work hard in cultivating the soil. That is what daily sabbath involves.

There is a further reason. Our society continuously inundates us with messages to buy, to consume and to experience. It is impossible to be unaffected by the ubiquitous appeal of the advertising world to the flesh. That is reason enough to spend time each day in a mini-sabbath. But the purpose is not merely to bank good thoughts before we are besieged by greed, pride, sex and violence in the world out there. The purpose is to shape how we are to live. It seems imperative to me that persons committed to making every day sabbath must learn how to reduce the stimulation they receive from society. They will see fewer movies, watch less television and monitor more carefully what they read. According to the gastronomic world, we are what we eat, and in the realm of the soul, we are what we see and hear. We want to live each hour for God, experiencing God’s presence and pleasure.

I am actually making an unpopular proposal, for adopting a sabbath lifestyle will result in less need for leisure activities and diversions. The world offers work and leisure (without sabbath). The Bible offers work and sabbath (with leisure). Leisure and sabbath are not necessarily the same thing. Sabbath involves the threefold harmony of God, ourselves and creation. Prayer and Bible reading are part of this, but so may be digging a garden, making a model boat, trying a new recipe, visiting the lonely and liberating the oppressed (Isaiah 58:6). For a full experience of sabbath we will contemplate creation, redemption and our complete consummation in heaven. Sabbath is contemplative; it directs us toward God and informs us of the meaning of life. But it also leads to an active lifestyle in line with the Old Testament Jubilee year: the sabbath of sabbaths (Leviticus 25; Luke 4:18-19). Leisure, which is so much less than this, can become a diversion from sabbath and an unsatisfying one at that.

Part of sabbath living is to see that we get a good night’s sleep every night, as far as it is possible. Most people in North America are constantly tired—and no wonder, given the frantic work and leisure schedule. God literally refreshes his beloved daily in sleep (Psalm 4:8; Psalm 127:1-2). Refreshed in sleep and renewed by our exposure to the life-giving power of Scripture and prayer, we can face the demands of work.

Sunday sabbath. Having considered the universalization of sabbath in a lifestyle, we must now address the question of sabbath as one day a week.The emergence of the Jewish sabbath in the context of societies that did not have a seven-day week is a fascinating study in itself. The further emergence of the Christian Sunday in relation to the Jewish sabbath is a complicated matter. Obviously early Jewish Christians celebrated both the sabbath (sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) and the Lord’s Supper on Resurrection Day (Sunday) before returning to work on Sunday. In time, sabbath observance diminished, normally without having the Christian Sunday take on all the characteristics of Jewish sabbath (Rybczynski, p. 66). But the Christianization of the Roman Empire had its effect on Sunday. Formal law relating to Sunday observance was first enacted in 321 by Emperor Constantine, who forbade people to work on “the venerable day of the Sun.” But it was not until the twelfth century that the term Christian sabbath was used, marking as it does the grafting of the sabbath tradition, especially in its negative restrictions, on to the Lord’s Day (Rybczynski, pp. 70-71). Needless to say, in North America the Lord’s Day is almost gone, though some businesses still observe a weekly holiday on Sunday.

Some form of weekly or regular sabbath is not an optional extra for the New Testament Christian. It is fundamental to spiritual health and even to emotional health, as some medical studies have shown. But keeping one day as a special day of reflection on the meaning of the other six is increasingly difficult in a secularized society that now exploits Sunday as the ultimate day for shopping and leisure activities. For pastors Sunday is a workday, and I recommend that they keep a Jewish sabbath: Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. Each person will find a pattern that fits, at least for a while. Different occupational experiences and changes in family responsibilities will cause us to adjust our pattern from time to time. A friend of mine spends every Thursday in the lounge of a nearby first-class hotel reading his Bible and Christian classics. Personally I find two complete days every two or three weeks are most suitable for me. I take these days away from the telephone and the workplace and spend them any way I wish. Sometimes I walk or watch a sunset. Sometimes I like to build something.

Often these special-day sabbaths are splendid opportunities to follow one of the many spiritual disciplines that have enriched the spirituality of the church over the centuries: Bible meditation, confession, waiting prayer, intercession for others. An excellent guide for this is Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. A whole book of the Bible can be read at one sitting, or a single verse can become the subject of meditation for several hours. Time can be spent reflecting on parables or waiting for new ones to come through God’s creation. Sabbath is also an ideal time for the journey inward, exploring what Thoreau called “the Atlantic and Pacific of one’s own being alone.” Very active people need to stop long enough to let their soul catch up to their body. An old Arab saying is that a person’s soul can travel as fast as a camel. If that is true, then some of us need to stop still for a long time to get connected. Religion, in the true meaning of the word, is that which binds together, so making us whole. When we create space and time to be real with God, important questions often surface, questions that can lead to more connectedness.

I have, until now, been exploring an individual use of sabbath as a special day. I have done so deliberately because I am convinced that one can only afford to be in Christian community if one has learned how to be alone with God. Otherwise we tend to feed parasitically on the corporate life of the church. But now I must offer a word about sabbath in regard to the church. I have come to believe that worship in the context of fellowship is the most important thing we do in the gathered life of the church. If sabbath is being liberated from the tyranny of performance to rediscover our identities through love, then worship is an obvious way to keep the sabbath. We do not worship for what we get out of it. That would bring our utilitarian work ethic into worship. Ironically, praise “works” precisely because it lifts us above our compulsion to make everything useful. It is mere enjoyment of God, nothing more, nothing less. All our worship on earth is like a grand rehearsal, worth doing for its own sake, but intended to prepare for a grander occasion. Sabbath days help us to “play heaven.” May we not also view sabbath as a way of “playing” with God, celebrating the mutual delight God and we his covenant partners have in each other and the work we do together?

In the deepest sense we do not keep sabbath; the sabbath keeps us. On our own we are not capable of sustaining our orientation toward God and our heavenly direction. That leaves us with a biblical paradox: we must labor to enter that rest (Hebrews 4:11). Sabbath keeps us focused on the heart of God, the intentions of God for the world, the playfulness of God. Sabbath keeps us heaven-bound. Moltmann says,

The celebration of the sabbath leads to an intensified capacity for perceiving the loveliness of everything—food, clothing, the body, the soul—because existence itself is glorious. Questions about the possibility of “producing” something, or about utility, are forgotten in the face of the beauty of all created things, which have their meaning simply in their very selves. (p. 286)

Undoubtedly we would do a better job of looking after the earth if we spent the time of our lives playing heaven, at least one day a week.

Ultimate sabbath. In reality Sunday for the Christian is not simply the Jewish sabbath moved a day later. As Moltmann points out, Sunday is the messianic extension of Israel’s sabbath and a witness to the new creation brought by Christ. It seems pointless to debate whether sabbath should be kept on Saturday or Sunday when the New Testament points to a greater experience than simply “keeping the sabbath.” Sabbath cannot be contained in the practice of “keeping one day.” Therefore a curious phrase appears in the second century in the Epistle of Barnabas: “the eighth day.” In this primitive Christian document, Barnabas looks forward to an ultimate fulfillment of sabbath when the Son of Man comes. Speaking for God, Barnabas says,

The present sabbaths are not acceptable to me, but that which I have made, in which I will give rest to all things and make the beginning of an eighth day, that is the beginning of another world. Wherefore we also celebrate with gladness (on Sunday and the rest of the week) the eighth day in which Jesus also rose from the dead and was made manifest and ascended into Heaven. (Barn. 15:8-9)

So it is with good reason that the Russian theologian Nikolai Berdyaev spoke of the event of Easter as the eighth day of creation. What was created at the beginning, all that we are and have and all the days of the week, enter at Easter into the beginning of the glorification of everything, a glorification in which the gulf between toil and rest is closed.

Because the eighth day has begun, we live simultaneously both in this world and for the coming world. The transfiguration of everything has begun. So the purpose of keeping one day a week, keeping one hour a day and living every day sabbatically is to make ourselves available for God to redeem all the time and space of our lives. All seven days are holy because the eighth day is dawning.

» See also: Fellowship

» See also: Health

» See also: Hobbies and Crafts

» See also: Leisure

» See also: Play

» See also: Pleasure

» See also: Rest

» See also: Spiritual Disciplines

» See also: Time

» See also: Vacations

» See also: Worship

References and Resources

S. Bocchiochi, From Sabbath to Sunday: A Historical Investigation of the Rise of Sunday Observance in Earliest Christianity (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1977); M. J. Dawn, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989); T. Edwards, Sabbath Time (New York: Seabury, 1982); Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982); A. D. Goldberg, “The Sabbath as Dialectic: Implications for Mental Health,” Journal of Religion and Health 25, no. 3 (Fall 1986) 237-44; A. Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s and the Sabbath (New York: Harper & Row, 1950); C. S. Lewis, Christian Behaviour (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943); J. Moltmann, God in Creation, trans. M. Kohl (London: SCM, 1985); E. O’Connor, Eighth Day of Creation: Gifts and Creativity (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1971); E. Peterson, “The Pastor’s Sabbath” Leadership 6, no. 2 (Spring 1985) 52-58; H. Rahner, Man at Play (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972); W. Rybczynski, Waiting for the Weekend (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991); W. Rordorf, Sunday: The History of the Day of Rest and Worship in the Earliest Centuries of the Christian Church (London: SCM, 1968); R. P. Stevens, Disciplines of the Hungry Heart (Wheaton, Ill.: Harold Shaw, 1993).

—R. Paul Stevens