I’ve been wrestling with the concepts of rest and work for some time now.  Previously, I’ve focused on the merely physical side of it.  This time, however, I’ll explore the deeper, theological/philosophical side of it as I understand it.

To begin, the fourth of the ten commandments in Exodus is as follows:

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep 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, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.  For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.  Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (20.8-11).[1]

So one is to rest and do no work on the Sabbath, both for the sake of oneself and for the sake of others. And I think we are all aware of the importance of regular rest as leaders, at least given many of the blog posts and conversations I’ve seen in the past year from everyone.

So this makes me wonder, then, when Jesus heals and does good on the Sabbath:[2] “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out?  Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” (Mt. 12.11-12).  In this material within the Gospels, Jesus is essentially allowing for people to good––but is that work?  Of course, in the minds of Christians he is justified, as he is the same God from whom the original commandment derived its authority.  But I wonder, is there not an extreme?  Don’t we often find ourselves as leaders doing good, and yet exhausted from doing those very good works of healing and reconciliation?

But perhaps the better focus is not on what we are not called to do on our Sabbath (work), but rather on what we arecalled to do (rest).  The former assumes a one-dimensional set of categories, or perhaps a continuum, with one end being restand the other being work, and measured by the absence or presence of laboriousness, respectively:

But maybe only one of those categories remains the same across time periods and cultures.  The Epistle to the Hebrews (the topic of my independent study this semester) views rest as something eternal, effectively as a state or place of God’s favor and blessing, which can only be entered through obedience to the Son (see Heb. 4.6).  And if (earthly) Sabbath rest serves, in the framework provided by Hebrews, as a prefigure or shadow of the heavenly (or most real) reality of rest, then perhaps we need to reorient ourselves.

A Framework to View Rest

What I would like to suggest is the following.  True rest is not the absence of work; rather, it is a space in time in which one receives the blessings of God through self-consciously honoring him over and against all competitors.

In the time that Exodus was written, those competitors may have been fear for future provision––it is not for nothing that the command was to be honored even “in plowing time and in harvest” (Ex. 34.21).  But the rest of God, or the state of blessedness and the time in which God is honored, recognizes that it is God who provides, and trusts in him for provision. Thus, categories of high vs. (relatively) low laboriousness would have been helpful.[3]  And perhaps those categories are helpful today.

In Jesus’ day, the competitor may have been the very command itself, with the sign or “shadow” of the reality being pitted against the reality itself.  Rest was still thought of in terms of laboriousness, with rest being the opposite of exhausting (or even non-exhausting) work.  But in clinging so rigidly to such categories, they overemphasized it at the expense of honoring other facets of their God’s character––healing, serving others, being merciful, etc.  The command is a gift, but to honor the gift above the giver is poor manners with humans and idolatry with God.

So what is the competitor of God today?  Let’s look at how we work.  If I work hard (which most of us do), then is it because I desire more achievements, social capital, money?  Do I desire these because I believe they and they alone can provide for me in an uncertain future?  That they will unfailingly allow me to live my life as I please?  Or do I work towards them, knowing that they can be used for good and be of great help to others directly or indirectly, but that they cannot give anything close to a divine guarantee?  Or perhaps I work endlessly long hours to love and serve others.  In doing so, do I think of myself as their savior, or do I recognize that I am unable to meet every need (nor would it be good to them to do so)?

If we understand the motivations for the ways in which we work, then I believe we can better understand what true rest looks like in our contexts.  I believe that we were built for such rest, that it is part of being human. We are not God, and in trying to be him our humanity will short-circuit. But by resting, I believe that we become more of who we are meant to be, participating in something that is a haunting echo of that eternal rest and shalom offered by God through the Christ.

NOTES

[1] All Scripture quotations taken from the English Standard Version (ESV).

[2] E.g. Matthew 12.1-13; Mark 2.23-3.6; Luke 6.1-11.

[3] It should be noted that a pattern of “low laboriousness” or regular rest for premodern peoples would have still been far more laborious physically than our lives today.