Sabbath Rest

Many of us will have been feeling bewildered over the past week. In a week we have gone from the frenetic pace of modern life and work, to a world in which we are physically isolated and surrounded by quiet. Many of us find ourselves directly confronted with questions about health, wellbeing, work, rest, illness and death in a way that was not the case a week ago.

If your normal work life is anything like mine, you are confronted by a constant stream of meetings, phone calls and emails. Last week’s announcements meant that I had something like what an Oxford undergraduate might describe as a Saturday of 8th week (i.e. end of term) experience: after a period of hectic activity, you look back and ask what had actually been achieved, and what was valuable.

The measures that have been forced upon us by the threat of COVID 19 have made many of us break off from the normal round of productivity and, as we adapt to new technology, make us ask whether activities are necessary. There is an element of forced rest about the current measures: we cannot carry on as we used to. We have been forced to keep (at lest in part) a sabbath rest.

As Christians we often misunderstand the Sabbath. We tend to view it through the prism of our knowledge of a puritanical legalistic sabbatarianism that once dominated British society: a day that was about being miserable because it was felt that God would love us more if we suffered. So we have a tendency to seize on Jesus’ words and actions to justify our sabbath breaking: he did it, so we can too.

Theologically this has led us into a bad place. We buy into a Protestant work ethic in which rest is a waste of time, and that human worth is about productivity. We think that our recreation is unworthy in God’s sight. The crown of creation is not sabbath rest, but an omnipotent humanity that can do whatever it likes with the environment.

Yet what we fail to appreciate is that Jesus’ sabbath breaking was about a Christological claim, and also about the proper use of the sabbath. Jesus comments after healing on the sabbath remind us that it is not meant to be about a puffed up puritanical work to make us religiously distinct. Sabbath is holy because it is a time of healing when the ill are made whole and reincorporated into the community. A challenge for the church is how it can use this time of rest from its normal activities to bring healing, fulness of life and peace.

I pray that you find time for your own healing and that of others in the coming weeks.