Rest in Peace: Sabbath as Gift & Critical Practice

December 01, 2012

Introduction

I was struck recently by how often I hear (and have participated in) conversations that open like this: ‘How’s it going?’; ‘Oh, fine. Busy, but fine.’ And I was struck by what it seems to mean—or at least how it works when I say ‘Busy, but fine.’ I realised that for me and, I suspect for many others, the two statements aren’t, in fact, in tension or contrast. ‘But’ is the wrong conjunction to use; what we should be saying is ‘Busy therefore fine’. That is to say, being busy is an expression of things going well, a sign that all is normal, an indicator that I mean something, that I am important, that I am in enough demand—perhaps even indispensable enough—to be busy. And there’s something deeply wrong about that, for it buys into values and perspectives that are, I believe, reflective of aspects of our culture deeply antithetical to the gospel of shalom. For us in early 21^st century Australia, rest is an uneasy notion. We find our meaning in our work or our validation in the wealth of our experiences. Time off work becomes an opportunity to accumulate more experiences, to fill up the interstices of our lives with activity—perhaps to avoid the yawning void that lies at the heart of our autonomous selves, filling the silences with ceaseless babble and the darkness with all that glitters. For us, it seems, there’s little rest, and what there is, is uncomfortable, the restless impatience of a temporary cessation of activity awaiting the next big thing. Rest? Hardly. In peace? Not at all. That’s what we’ll do when we die.

Perhaps I’m overstating the case a little. But I do want to think about the lost art of Sabbath—the delight and discipline of ‘resting in peace’. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no legalistic Sabbatarian, demanding that we renounce sport on Sundays, yearning for the good old days when the only things open on long Sunday afternoons were police stations and hospitals—and, of course, church halls. I’m less interested on this occasion in the way economic imperatives have restructured and reclaimed common social time—important as those concerns are. What interests me more is the spiritual discipline of Sabbath and the way it forms us as those who respond to God’s invitation to rest and embrace God’s challenge to critique the values encoded in the patterns of our common life.

So, what’s the problem?

There are, I think, a number of problems exposed by our inability to rest in peace. The first that springs to mind is revealed not just in our uneasy restless downing of tools, but in our readiness to say ‘Busy, but fine’, really meaning ‘Busy, therefore fine; busy, therefore important enough to be busy; busy therefore making a contribution to society-as-economy’. That exposes, I think, the way that in our society-turned-economy, personal validation and worth is found in our work and the status associated with it—the way it defines us and our place in the world. And this, once the province of men, is increasingly becoming the way that all people in our society-turned-economy see themselves and the goal of their existence.[1] Busyness is a sign of that, for if what we do defines who we are and our value and place in our society-turned-economy, then who are we when we rest? Perhaps there’s room for some recuperation so we can do better in our rightful place in our society-turned-economy; certainly there’s room for the consumption of things and experiences that show off our worth and significance (and, coincidentally, keep the wheels of consumption turning). But actual rest? What room is there for rest? Rest in peace, the embrace of shalom, might mean the death of this form of life; it would run the risk of exposing the empty darkness that has replaced its soul.

Our busyness, our reluctance to heed the call to rest in peace, also exposes our desire for domination and control. The ‘autonomous self’[2] reigns supreme in ethics and social policy. Autonomy is now defined (where such passé notions as definitions and clarity of thought or expression are given any air time) as the content-less expression of will, the nihilistic desire that our interests or choices should be the sole determiners of what is ‘right’, and that no constraints be placed upon the vacuum of desire except those absolutely required by others’ rights to exercise their empty wills.[3] In such an implicit view of human existence, the imposition of our wills on an intractable world becomes that which validates our existence. In our work, especially if we have a ‘good’ job, an ‘important’ one (that is, one in which we have influence and control over others, institutions, plans and projects), we exercise control, show our mastery over others and the world, and so prove our value and significance. What happens, then, when we rest? When we down tools and exit the worlds of control that we create? What happens to our self when there’s no project to implement, no plan to work out, no expression of the will that hovers over the darkness of the void in our hearts?

The biblical practice of Sabbath is both a gift of God aimed at human flourishing (and, I might add, that of the non-human world) and a challenging alternative to the endless round of work and consumption that drives our culture. It presents us with a glimpse of God’s great gift of shalom, the peace of creational flourishing, and calls us to stop our ceaseless striving and enter God’s rest.[4] In Sabbath, to coin a phrase, God invites and requires us to ‘rest in peace’ as an anticipation, not of the death of human agency, but of the fullness of life that is and will be ours in the kingdom of our God and Christ—the very antithesis of the deadly rounds of idolatrous workaholic consumerism that drive the wheels of our society-turned-economy.[5] But let’s turn to some texts to see how Sabbath works as a biblical motif before returning to how we should understand—and implement—it as gift and critical practice.[6]

Picnic

Some texts to consider

Both the creation narrative (Gen 2:1–3) and the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:8–11) ground the call to remember the Sabbath in God’s creational work and rest. God’s work reaches its goal and climax in God’s delight in the goodness of a world ordered in time and space, in which human agency reflects and mediates God’s rule of caring order (Gen 1:31). The rest of delight—the shalom of creation—celebrates this as a gift, not the product of our anxious striving. It reminds us that creation is oriented towards an end or goal: it is teleologically ordered toward delight—the enjoying of God’s glory in creation by all God’s creatures—a delight that finds partial expression in Sabbath worship. In a world fractured by human sin, in which fractious and anxious human striving frustrates God’s ordering purposes, Sabbath rest reminds us that this goal, the rest of creation’s shalom, is still God’s delight and desire, the goal towards which the saving actions of God take us and the world. But it is not just a reminder: it is, quite literally, an embodiment of that goal—partial and provisional though it is. It requires that we down tools, cease our striving, and both rest in God’s good gifts and trust in them. And, in so doing, allow other creatures relief from their role in the production of our projects (as most obviously seen in the sabbatical years in which the land is given rest, Lev 25:1–7). Sabbath is an invitation for us and creation to celebrate and rest in the peace of God which passes all understanding.

But that is not the only purpose of Sabbath. It reminds us, not just of God’s creative purposes, but of the nature and goal of God’s saving work in Exodus freedom.[7] In Deuteronomy 5:12–15, observing the Sabbath is a way of remembering the liberating work of God. But again, not just remembering (as if in the Bible memory could be divorced from action), but embodying that freedom. For slaves are also invited and required to rest—and the rest that their masters grant them is explicitly grounded in and in imitation of the action of the Exodus God who sets slaves free. While oppressive human institutions such as slavery may persist in Old Testament law/torah (moderated, yes, but still oppressive human institutions), Sabbath both reminds us that this is not the end-goal of God’s saving plan, and embodies that greater goal in the practices of this new human community. It is, in fact, an opportunity for the people of God to imitate the God of freedom in the ways in which we structure our lives and communities. Sabbath functions as a tacit indictment of all those social structures and human systems that do not mirror God’s shalom. It is a gift to all—including the most vulnerable and those whose unremitting toil drives the wheels of production—and a critical practice in which those systems that keep people enslaved are called to account and reminded that they will pass, that they will have no role in that goal towards which God is taking the creation.

But, you might say, surely that is all a thing of the past, a sign of the old covenant that has been done away with in Christ? Does not Jesus stand against Sabbath and banish it to the shadows of the former things that are passing away (Heb 8:13)? Well, not quite. It seems to me that Jesus’ famous opposition to the Sabbath practices of some of his contemporaries was not an abolishing of this law but its fulfilment (Mt 5:17). True, he acts in ways directly contrary to the limits placed on human ‘work’ in the traditional observance of Sabbath (Mark 2). But he does so, I would suggest, in order to remind us that ‘the Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath’ (Mk 2:27), and that it is a sign of God’s ‘free-making’ work in the world. For when pettifogging details about precisely how far you can or can’t walk on the Sabbath get in the way of the day-to-day lives of the least and the lost, it ceases to be an invitation to delight and becomes an oppressive burden laid upon them. When the delighted freedom of a woman healed from years of oppressive incapacity is seen as a breach of the law (Lk 13:10–17), Sabbath no longer functions as a reminder and embodiment of the character of the God of Exodus and the goal of God’s saving purposes, but becomes yet another token and reminder of the brokenness of creation and the fractiousness of human sin. It is, of course, more than fitting that such a woman, bound in Satan’s system, should be set free on the Sabbath. What else is Sabbath for but to invite us to freedom?

Sabbath as gift and as critical practice

In many ways it is easier for us to see how Sabbath functions as a critical practice than to see it as a gift. Here I would like to turn briefly to the notion of Christian practices as a ‘pedagogy of desire’.[8] James Smith reminds us that the goal of discipleship is not just the informing of people’s heads, but the shaping of hearts, lives, relationships and communities. To really effect change we need to engage people’s imaginations and discipline their desires; but that requires that we engage them as whole human beings, recognising the ways that patterns of life and relationship—including the organising of space and time—shape our thoughts, feelings, actions and character. He sees the worship practices of the church playing a key role in the ‘pedagogy of desire’, in the schooling of our hearts and imaginations so that they line up with the kingdom of God and its values, rather than the idolatrous patterns encoded in the institutions of Western market economies and their structuring of time and space. It seems to me that Sabbath, the embrace of God’s offer of rest in peace, has great potential to challenge and reconfigure our hearts and minds.

Open 24 Hours

When we rest, we are forced to recognise that the world goes on without us—and doesn’t even notice our absence. When we rest, we are forced to realise that our value and significance lie somewhere other than in our work, and consist in something other than our productive or institutional ‘significance,’ or that of our job. Who we are when we rest—really rest, not just fill up empty time with things or experiences—cannot consist in what we achieve, for we’re not achieving anything (or at least, not in any meaningful sense other than, perhaps, glorifying the God of grace). It challenges those false values, but it does so implicitly, deep down in the fibre of our beings, not at the surface level of our thoughts. The discipline of regular Sabbath implicitly redirects our lives and desires away from the anxious striving to give our lives meaning. It also strips away illusions of autonomy. For we are not imposing our wills on the world, but receiving from God his good gifts through it. It requires that we turn our gaze to the empty places where our souls used to be—and perhaps to find there the echoing whisper of a word that speaks a better word, one in which who we are and what we count for is given to us by the Other who made us and all things, and who invites us to down wills and find ourselves in the invitation to rest.

For Sabbath is not just a critical practice, one that exposes the heart of darkness that lies hidden at the centre of our society-turned-economy and the selves controlled by it; it is a gift. True: it’s a dangerous and disruptive gift; but a gift nonetheless. For some people its ‘giftedness’ is more obvious. For those who are not beneficiaries of the workings of our society-turned-economy, those who are trapped by menial and poorly paid employment in an endless struggle to survive, Sabbath would be a great gift—especially if it came with economic structures that meant they could afford to rest. But it’s also a gift to us. For it reminds us that our value is found in God our creator and the worth that now inheres in us as creatures of the sovereign God (Ps 8). It reminds us that our significance is located in Christ, into whose image we are being refashioned and into whose rest we are invited (Heb 4). It’s a gift that reminds us of our real beginning and our true end, and in the meantime of the gracious provision of the God who sustains all things. For in Sabbath we rely, not on what we produce, but on what comes to us as a gift. And so we are reminded that we are not lords of all we survey; that the world belongs to and is run by the one true and living God on whom we depend—and on whom we can depend. And is that not a gift?

What might that look like? Here I think it is important to distinguish between Sabbath as a spiritual discipline and Sabbath as a law. As a law, a rigid imposition of human restrictions, it is a burden and a task—paradoxically, rest becomes a work of the law.[9] So I am not suggesting that we draw up rules about exactly what we can and can’t do and when precisely we can and can’t do it. One reason is because one person’s work is another person’s rest. For me, cooking is generally recreation. It’s an opportunity to turn from books and students and speaking and writing to create something tangible, something in which (I hope!) I and others can delight—a way of celebrating God’s good gifts in creation and human community. For my wife Alison, cooking is work, something she needs to produce and which brings her little pleasure in the doing of it. For her gardening is recreation, an opportunity to get her hands dirty and feel the goodness of God’s earth and elicit from it by her labour and sweat its bounteous potential. For me it’s just plain hard work. So when we take Sabbath, you’ll often find me in the kitchen and her in the garden, enjoying God’s gift of rest. For rest, after all, is not the mere doing of nothing. It is the turning from work—and the ways it can, if unchallenged, malform our lives and desires—and embracing God’s alternative of shalom. The forms that rest takes depends on not only who we are and what gives us delight (cooking or gardening or whatever), but also the shape of our work: for no matter how much I enjoy my work (and as a lecturer in Old Testament and Christian thought that’s a lot), it is still my work; and in Sabbath I am invited to turn from it and all that’s associated with it (even the pleasures of reading theology) to delight in rest.

Furthermore, the realities of time don’t allow us to impose one common day of inaction on all. Some people have to work on Sabbath (whichever day you see that as being): health and transport workers, military personnel and police officers, pastors and other leaders in church organisations, just to name the obvious. Clearly they cannot enjoy rest when others might take Sabbath; but equally, they need opportunity to enjoy it. Furthermore, there are times when the demands of life displace the possibility of rest; but when that happens, as happen it will, I think it makes sense to store away that rest for another day, to ‘pay back’ the missing rest. So it seems to me fairly obvious that both the timing and the content of Sabbath need to vary from person to person, family to family, context to context. But equally, it does need a slab of time (a day, dare I say?), in which we are forced to realise that the world goes on without us, that the God who made all things is still at work, and that we benefit from that work, receiving the good gifts of our creator in the quietness of our rest. And some of that time needs to be in common with others in our networks of relationship, both because rest is something gifted to us as communities, not isolated individuals, but also because the delight and celebration of God’s goodness so central to Sabbath requires sharing that with others and allowing it to shape the structures of our lives-in-relationship.[10] Sometimes Sabbath might be an occasion for retreating from others and delighting in God. Generally, however, it is the occasion for sharing that delight and experiencing it in and with others in relationships of shalom.

Sabbath is, then, invitation to a peace which stands against the unruly anxieties and abusive power of a world ordered away from God. It is a call to embrace and celebrate God’s purpose of shalom and see it reflected in the patterns of our lives and the shapes of our hearts. It is a challenge to recognise and turn from deadening busyness, restless anxiety and fruitless striving, and embrace a life of trust and delight and receiving and giving that goes beyond an economy of exchange and welcomes the economy of God. Sabbath, a gift of life, is an opportunity for us to rest in peace.

[1] See the insightful comments in Katelyn Beaty’s review of Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/october-web-only/end-of-men-hanna-rosin-review.html (accessed 1/11/2012)

[2] Or for those who adopt a more ‘post-modern’ psychology, the conflicting autonomies of the competing desires that war within us and on the surface of which we impose the fiction of a ‘self’ in order to fabricate some illusion of stability in the chaos of our own sub/consciousness.

[3] For insightful—if dense and often overly combative—reflections on this see David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); and Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[4] Shalom is a rich and complex notion which plays an important role in biblical thought. Nicholas Wolterstorff describes it well: ‘Shalom is the human being dwelling at peace in all his or her relationships: with God, with self, with fellows, with nature.... But the peace which is shalom is not merely the absence of hostility, not merely being in right relationship. Shalom at its highest is enjoyment in one's relationships… To dwell in shalom is to enjoy living before God, to enjoy living in one's physical surroundings, to enjoy living with one's fellows, to enjoy living with oneself.’ (Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp69-70).

[5] For useful reflections on these themes, see Norman Wirzba, Living the Sabbath (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006), esp. Part 1.

[6] The following discussion draws on Patrick D. Miller, The Ten Commandments (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), pp117-66; see also Andrew Sloane, At Home in a Strange Land: Using the Old Testament in Christian Ethics (Peabody/Grand Rapids: Hendrickson/Baker, 2008), pp174-78

[7] Exodus is, of course, a key event in Israel’s history and plays a crucial role in our understanding of God and God’s people. In the exodus God acts in sovereign, gracious freedom to set Israel free from bondage and invite them to reflect God’s own character and the nature of God’s action in their lives and relationships.

[8] James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009). See also his ‘Educating the Imagination: Christian education as a pedagogy of desire’, Case Magazine, Vol. 31, 2012, pp9-14. You can listen to James Smith’s 2012 New College Lectures on this subject by downloading the audio files from the New College website (www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/sydney/new-college-lectures-1).

[9] Lest I be misunderstood, let me note that, under Moses, the law (including, of course, the Sabbath) was a good gift of God aimed at shaping the life of a community created by God’s grace, expressing the freedom God gave them. This is a far cry from the pharisaism of Jesus’ day, and an even further cry from the pharisaic Sabbatarianism of some Christian communities.

[10] Space prohibits reflecting on the larger patterns of Sabbath time found in OT law such as Sabbatical years and the year of Jubilee. They do, however, raise interesting questions about the ways we think about time and the larger cycles of life, as well as economic systems and structures and their environmental impact (for the latter see, for instance, Christopher J H Wright, Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (Leicester: IVP, 2004), pp198-210). Retirement, for instance, seems to be seen by some as the goal of working life, the occasion for recreation and pleasure unfettered by encumbrances such as work (restricted only by the exigencies of age and dwindling retirement income). That, it seems to me, is an odd application of notions of Sabbath and Jubilee (if, in fact, anything other than the unreflective adoption of cultural norms lies behind its embrace by most Christians). Indeed, it runs against the grain of a theology of Sabbath, for such a retirement is not an occasion for trusting in God’s provision and redistributing resources to needy others (say, by investing time and energy in charitable, missional or other projects without having to worry about earning an income), but an opportunity to expend what we have accumulated on the consumption of things or experiences. But further reflection on those matters must await another occasion.