A recent email exchange put me in mind of the importance of taking rest from work, and of how this rest can be a powerful political statement. In my experience this is a particular challenge for academics, who have anything but a 9 to 5 job.
I try to tease out the political implications of sabbath rest in the following extract from Thinking Through Creation…
“He Rested on the Seventh Day”
No treatment of the meaning of humanity in Genesis 1 and 2 would be complete without a consideration of the seventh day:
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Gen. 2:1–3)
The least we can say is that the inclusion of the seventh day in the account of creation presents a world in which not all days are alike. There is a rhythm of work and rest. Here in Genesis 1, it is a one-time rhythm, but later in the Bible also a weekly rhythm of six days of work and one of rest. In both cases, there is a texture and a grain to time, which means that history is not, as both Arnold J. Toynbee and Henry Ford are reported to have quipped, “just one damn thing after another.” Reality is fashioned by a God with a character, and as we saw in the previous chapter, it bears marks of his character all the way down. For a naturalism that follows the Baconian-Cartesian division of fact from value, time is just a uniform and undifferentiated extension into the past and the future, or (for Einstein) a tissue of space-time with no qualitative differentiation. In either case, it is not rhythmed (one is almost tempted to say: it is not musical), as is the temporality of work and Sabbath rest. Later in the Bible, the Sabbath principle is extended to God’s people:
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. (Ex. 20:8–10)
Importantly, and in a way that is often overlooked, the principle of Sabbath is not just for human beings in God’s creation but for the creation itself. In Leviticus 25 we see the Sabbath extended in two ways: to the land and to the social order. First, the land in which God’s people dwell is to have its own Sabbath rest:
When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the Lord. For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits, but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the Lord. (Lev. 25:2–4)
The Sabbath principle instituted in Leviticus 25 and elsewhere has far-reaching implications for the health and flourishing of society, and it can form part of a powerful and practical Christian response to current problems of world inequality, debt, and resource management, and a positive vision for a healthy and flourishing society. Michael Schluter, founder of the U.K. “keep Sunday Special” campaign and director of the Jubilee Centre think tank, lists the following social benefits:
The statements of the Sabbath law in Exodus and Deuteronomy point to three specific relational concerns. In Exodus 20:11–15, the focus is first on keeping the seventh day as “a Sabbath to the Lord your God”, that is, as a day set aside for society to give priority to its relationship with God. Secondly, the Exodus text emphasizes a shared day off in the family or household, with reference back to God’s rest at the end of his work of creation. Thirdly, in Deuteronomy 5:15, the reference is back to the years of slavery in Egypt, suggesting a focus on the welfare of low-income employees who are those most at risk in a seven-day work culture.[1]
The provision of a shared day off in a pluralist society protects families and the poor from exploitation, and provides citizens of all faiths and none with a shared social rhythm. In addition to the Sabbath for the land, Leviticus 25 also institutes a social principle of fifty-year jubilee, or a Sabbath of Sabbaths:
You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field.
In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. And if you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. You shall pay your neighbor according to the number of years after the jubilee, and he shall sell to you according to the number of years for crops. If the years are many, you shall increase the price, and if the years are few, you shall reduce the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. (Lev. 25:8–16)
Once again, this jubilee principle provides a critique of, and positive alternative to, the norms of contemporary global capitalism, as Schluter explains:
In the Old Testament, the Jubilee laws required that all rural property was returned to its original family owners every fiftieth year, free of charge. This ensured long-term rootedness for every extended family in a particular place, strengthened loyalty to God and contributed to family solidarity. . . . An important by-product of the Jubilee land laws was to ensure a measure of equity in the distribution and ownership of property which ensured a broad distribution of political power. In contrast, Capitalism regards land and property as assets without relational significance. The effects of ignoring the role of land in family identity and solidarity can be seen historically in the enclosure movement where low-income families were dispossessed of their traditional land rights by powerful local landowners, resulting in mass migration to the cities.[2]
The Sabbath, then, is a rhythm not just for the human week but for the land and for society as well.
But what does it mean for human beings to “rest” one day a week? When Jesus says, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28), he is not inviting his listeners to put up their feet and order a gin and tonic. Not least because, if that were what he was saying, the next verses would make no sense at all: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” When God rests on the seventh day, he does not do nothing (or the universe would cease to be). What he rests from is the creating work that he had engaged in on the previous six days, and the principle carries over to human rest as well: the Sabbath day is a day with a different rhythm from the other six days of the week.
But the aim of Sabbath is not simply that there should be a day of sport and television-watching (though they can both, of course, have their place on a Sabbath day), but that God’s people should treat the Sabbath day as “holy,” set apart for God. This means, minimally, that if the other days of the week are occupied with using God’s gifts and relying on his grace, this one day should herald a particularly focused moment of seeing past the gifts to the Giver and past the creation to the Creator: the rest is a resting in God, not merely a resting from work. A life without Sabbath rest looks only at the result and never at the source, only at the effect and never at the cause. It is like the misdirected gaze in the Confucian proverb that, when it sees a finger pointing at the moon, stares intently at the finger.
[1] Michael Schluter, “Case Studies,” in The Jubilee Manifesto: A Framework, Agenda and Strategy for Christian Social Reform, ed. Michael Schluter and John Ashcroft (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 2005), 311.
[2] Michael Schluter, “Is Capitalism Morally Bankrupt? Five Moral Flaws and Their Social Consequences,” available at http://www.jubilee-centre.org/.
