Creation is finished on the sixth day. God’s work is finished on the seventh day, when he rests (Gen 2). That is surprising to us, I think.
God’s work includes his resting, literally his stopping, his sabbath. We want to position work against rest as though they are opposites. They aren’t, though they aren’t the same thing either (God finishes his work by resting from his work). The opposite of rest is the curse.
We see the same thing more clearly when he ‘places’ the man in the garden (2.15) he doesn’t ‘place’ him, he ‘rests’ him. The word is nuakh. He ‘rests’ him in the garden so he can ‘work and keep it.’ Or, literally, serve and guard: the priestly task. Rest and work are not opposites.
Why is this a helpful observation?
Much modern evangelical reflection on rest or on sabbath centres on the wisdom of having a weekend. They don’t put it like that, but stress that you should have a day that is set aside for family time and relaxation and the like. Because it’s usually written by Pastors they suggest that it should be on a Saturday, not because the Jewish Sabbath was but because Sunday is busy with all that ‘work’ of worshipping God and the like.
This can be wise, but it’s not resting. I think we need to be very clear that it’s not. It’s also out of step with the average life of a congregant, middle-classed because it assumes a five-day working week, says little to those who don’t have traditional jobs like mums or the self-employed, and removes the Pastor from the life of the congregation on one of the two days lots of them aren’t at work and so available to see them.
Rest is the appreciation of the setting chaos into order that we’ve done in the other six days of the week, involves gathering with the people of God (Acts 20), and worshipping God. I understand intimately that church can be tiring and so we think it’s not restful (because we’re stuck in the paradigm that rest=relaxation). Especially if you rent your venue like most churches I know do, setting up and setting down is hard work involving an army of volunteers. How can this be restful?
Because God’s work included his rest, so does ours. This isn’t supposed to be an attempt at doublethink where we get our volunteers to work even harder by convincing them what they’re doing is actually resting—and if you use this thinking that way there will be millstones (Matthew 18)—but to say that to rest involves worshipping with the people of God.
This means that your church shouldn’t cancel church. That should be obvious, but it isn’t as obvious as I’d like. It also means that you can’t have a ‘rest’ from church, what you’re doing is removing yourself from the rest of the presence of God in the prayers, the preached word, and the Lord’s Supper.
For clarity, there are situations where the best of a series of bad choices is for someone to withdraw from church for a short period of time, or where their health means they are unable to attend for a longer period of time. I think it’s important that we recognise that these are not good options, just the least bad ones, so that we can appropriately mourn them. We have a tendency to assume something is good because the alternatives are worse: that’s not true. It doesn’t mean we can’t make the bad choice, but it does mean we should reckon with reality. Something has gone wrong if not being in the body of Christ is the best option, even though that wrong may have been done to you or be circumstances that are out of your control.
It also means that we should structure our Sundays around these truths. What are we there for? To encounter God and walk into the rest of stopping. The main things you do—singing, praying, preaching, the Lord’s Supper—are the main things you do. Don’t get distracted from them.
We should consider ways to push back on the frenetic nature of life to help us learn to rest together. This might mean going phone free at your church, as Jake Meador has argued. It certainly means discouraging things which interrupt our communion with Jesus and each other.
Even if we do that though, there’s a more expansive vision available. Maybe we could take a whole day of rest. Maybe we could have people in our homes to eat around our tables, as a day to remember that our family extends beyond the boundaries of blood. Maybe we could deliberately do administrative tasks on Saturdays to allow us to enjoy the work of our hands on Sundays.
You could even consider a sort of second gathered something together in an afternoon or evening that isn’t a repeat of what you did in the morning—a shocking suggestion I know! There’s no rule requiring that, or sense that it needs to be a particular thing. I think there’s a lot of possibilities you could explore, but it would help some of your people rest.
Jesus teaching that the Sabbath is for man (Mark 2) is important to recall here. I am not making laws, but trying to establish principles of wisdom. If someone has to do something that I’ve just said you shouldn’t on a Sunday, then they should. If they have to work then they should without feeling burdened. That’s the point of Jesus’ teaching, the Sabbath is a boon to aid us not a stick to beat us with.
There’s a connected teaching though, which is that the burden rests on the church to do something if there are people who have to work—in various ways—on Sundays. It’s reasonable to assume that no one does work for money on a Sunday unless they have to. So, the church should make it so that they don’t have to. Start businesses to employ people in that have better employment practices than the ones they currently experience. You’ll need them anyway when some professions slowly close to Christians—it looks likely that this will happen slowly in Education and Medicine, some of the rights to conscientiously object have already been removed in some corners of the medical world—it’s much easier to stand on principle if you know that someone else in the church will give you a job.
Because God’s work included resting, you should start a business? Yes, actually. But more importantly you should rest with the people of God.
Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash
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nuakh 