Remembering the Sabbath (On Christian Rest, Part 2)

We closed part one by thinking about the futility of our toil and how it can only deliver expiration and collapse rather than real rest. We came to understand that we must somehow be returned to the Lord’s anointed rest, that seventh day of Creation that consecrated the whole creative work. I would like to propose that the means by which we are led back into that rest, despite our continual tendencies to avoid it, is to attend to the remembrance of the Sabbath as it becomes the Eucharist through its fulfillment in Christ. In this post, we will take a look at the first of the two.

What does it mean to remember the Sabbath?

Let’s consider the words of the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:8-11).

When it comes to Sabbath and rest, Christians suffer from at least two errors, one drawn from a secular notion of restless time and one from a misapprehension of the traditional Jewish observance. The first error comes about with the attempt to baptize the cycle of toil and collapse we talked about in the last post. In this model, Christians pick a day on which they attempt to break the cycle of busyness by imploding into sloth. As it is with worldly notions of ‘rest,’ this view of sabbath means either inactivity or a vain kind of ‘self-care’ that turns us to cater to all the needs and wants we neglected in our weekly rush. It’s a weekly image of the nightly snack and Netflix binge–a retreat into passive consumption as the means to sustain ourselves. 

If Christians are alerted to this, it usually sends them scrambling in the direction of retrieving a tradition of sabbath rest. Along these lines many Christians easily adopt a vague picture of sabbath, an impression drawn from the Pharisees of Jesus’ own time. There they find a people who militantly defended a rigidly-defined Sabbath characterized mostly by what you could not do rather than what you were meant to do. This does not provide the answers and even seems to make the idea of sabbath problematic. In light of these two errors, it may help us to enter this discussion through the lens of a more robust vision of Sabbath, something I once sought to do with someone more knowledgeable than me, and which changed much about how I saw the Bible as a whole. 

Judaism, like Christianity, is a religion of time. There is a logic proceeding from a sense of sacred time and sacred space to define what it means to be a sacred people. The annual calendar has major and minor festivals. There’s also a monthly cycle--the Jewish calendar is a modified lunar calendar, with monthly cycles attuned to the new moon. The weekly cycle in the midst of it is crucial because of shabbat, or Sabbath is at the center of it--sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Shabbat is understood to be a gift, a breath. If you can come together for ten minutes to take a breath and light the candles and reflect, that’s better than ten minutes without that. It’s traditional for families to have a nice quiet dinner together. When observed faithfully, it is a gift of time.

A rabbi friend of mine once graciously took an afternoon to explain to me the concept of Sabbath as it is understood by faithful Jews. She told me that it was one of the great Jewish scholars of the 20th Century, Abraham Heschel, who called Sabbath, or shabbat, a “palace in time.” It is its own entity. It isn’t so much the beginning of time or the end of time. The beginning of the week happens after the ceremony that ends shabbat. It is a culmination, but it is its own entity. When you live your life anticipating it, it becomes a needle around which the wheel turns. Heschel talks about going from the world of creation–you go from creating all week long–and then comes the time to stop and appreciate creation.

In Genesis, on the last day of the Creation-cycle, God rested and took His place in the cosmos that He made. As Biblical scholar John Walton notes, God had made by the power of His Word a Tabernacle in which to dwell. In the rest of the seventh day, God ceased from working and was refreshed. In the words of Genesis 2: “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.” In the historical practice of Sabbath, one spends the whole week working, and then one stops creating. In the space created by that pause, we have room to ask the question of what refreshes us as God was refreshed?

The concept of shabbat is a reflection of cosmic reality, too, and explains the trajectory the cosmos is taking. My rabbi friend remarked that she’d always been taught that if every Jew really lived shabbat from start to finish three times in a row, then the Messianic time would come. This is what it’s ultimately about. The faithful realization of shabbat that would mark cosmic destiny and its direction. Shabbat is a taste of the world to come. Through it we could all live in this taste of the world to come, a repaired world. This world and that world would be one and the same. If we lived it, we would be there.

I’ve wondered at times whether this is why the commandment to remember the Sabbath is the fourth. The three commandments prior to it concern the unique worship of the true God, and the subsequent six have to do with the bearing of this worship on our relations with others. The place of the Sabbath is the meeting place of our love for God and for others. It is, in this way, the place where heaven and earth meet. To remember the Sabbath is to enter a time not our time and a world not our world. It is time and place as they are known with God enthroned and ordered by His consecrating presence. How could this be anything other than the source of meaning and life for all other times and place in which we might find ourselves. It is no surprise that the punishment prescribed for violating the Sabbath is death–how could life without Sabbath be anything but death?

The challenge, though, is that faithfulness to God is not universally practiced. Our experience still yields ample evidence of the brokenness of things and of our relative frailty and incapacity and unwillingness to participate in the healing of the Land. Even in the most joyous times there is a reminder of sadness. My rabbi friend said this is why when there’s a Jewish wedding, and someone steps on a glass, it is supposed to be a symbol of that brokenness. The world is broken even in that moment of joy. But there is a power in this new-formed union, perhaps, to give us hope to continue. The ultimate horizon of this continuing to participate in the healing of the world cultivates in the participant a prescient sense of tikkun olam, the world restored, the state of things after the ultimate restoration that Messiah will bring.
The Sabbath commanded by God provides the opportunity to consciously reflect on the meaningfulness of things, to ask the why that vivifies the how and what. It is humanizing because it calls us up into the reflective power of our souls that very few beings in the cosmos possess. Sabbath calls us into the beginnings of a contemplative life that begins with pausing and paying attention to what is near so that through those things and people we can perceive God enthroned as the one who orders and sustains. In His Sabbath rest, God takes His throne in and over Creation to behold it and Himself from every possible vantage, from every possible time, in all possible worlds all in fullness and perfect simplicity. Sabbath calls us into the likeness we are capable of bearing to His ultimate contemplation. Understood this way, Sabbath is the trailhead to prayer, wisdom, and that much-sought-for state of shalom or peace.