It was evening, it was morning, it was the eighth day. All was bright and new in a garden cradling a rich man’s tomb. Spices floated on the air. A gardener met a woman wandering and called her name. The first humans’ first scene replaying on the sixth of April, the year of our Lord thirty-three.
John is at pains in his gospel for you to see that Jesus’ resurrection is a recapitulation of Eden’s garden. The tomb is in the middle of the garden, both where the ark was in the temple and where the trees were in the garden (which is the same thing, of course), Mary is only called the woman until the ‘gardener’ names her. There’s more, including some of the imagery John pulls in from the Song of Songs, but he wants us to see that this a do-over. It’s better than that, as it usually is in scripture, the glorified fulfilment of a type is elevated over the original; the God who walks in the garden, and the man who marries the woman are one and the same.
That makes Jesus’ resurrection the first day of a new creation week, or perhaps better the ‘eighth’ day of the creation week, the one after the sabbath as all is made anew.
Reading in this light helps us reflect on work, rest, and the Sabbath day of stopping.
Jesus offers us rest, saying that his burden and yoke are kind and light (Matthew 11.28-30). He is gentle and invites all who are wearied from their labours to come and rest in him.
We live in a frenetic moment, in burnout culture, in a time when getting rest from the wearying impulses we’re bombarded with is almost impossible. Few of us would desire to be a medieval peasant, our advances in healthcare would be a good reason to not desire that life, but we might also imagine it as backbreaking labour. Inevitably life on the land is physically hard graft, but they worked less hours on average than most westerners do today. Partly that’s averaging across a year when your working day is driven by how much light there is, partly that’s that certain periods of the agrarian cycle would be particularly intense and others much less so. Partly that’s the sheer number of feast days the church instituted leading to many days without work. The example isn’t that meaningful except to help us recognise that while life is comparatively easy compared to our forebears in a myriad of ways, we also rest less.
Then we thought it would be a good idea to pack all of our labour into a pocket-sized device we could carry with us everywhere. Since that didn’t seem like making life hard enough we then stuffed that same device with an array of ways of steal our attention. Black glass bricks of Babel, perhaps?
We struggle to rest. Even if we mean that in the generic sense of relaxation rather than the technical Christian sense of gathering with the people of God to worship him and enjoy the fruits of our labours across the other six days of the week, then we struggle to enter into it. Yet, Jesus tells us he comes to bring rest to weary souls.
That’s true salvifically in the most wonderful way; it’s true in our dynamic experience of his refreshing by the Spirit. It’s also true in the rich fullness of a Christian pattern of life that include Sunday worship with the gathered church, delight in feasting with friends, and practices of meaningful disconnection with the maddening treadmill that life has become.
The eighth day of the week is the one we encounter on a Sunday, an imperfect slice of a perfect new creation. Since biblical perfection is primarily maturity, perhaps I should call it an immature slice of the mature new creation, fruit for the healing of the nations is growing on this sapling.
The mature rest comes on the ‘day’ of the Lord (Zephaniah 1). We are, perhaps, in the evening before the morning of that eighth day. While that day is a day of terror to those who do not know the one the Bible calls Isaac’s Fear (Genesis 31), it is a day of joy to his friends. The Old Testament pattern of starting to count a day at the night time before it blooms in day is a pattern that teaches us that mourning comes before rejoicing and that death comes before resurrection. He baked the story into the sky for us if we have eyes to see. Death and resurrection are required for the immature to mature, the creation will—to some extent—die and rise with us as we die and rise in Christ. We’re taught that every day, the Bible associates sleep with death symbolically (1 Thessalonians 4), and we pass into a new day by sleeping at night time.
It is interesting that when challenged on the Sabbath about healing, Jesus proclaims that he, just like his Father, is working (John 5.17). Itself a remarkable claim worthy of careful reflection; to make a simple comment, perhaps we should assume that the day of stopping is less the end of creation and more a restful pause on the way to the new creation of the eighth day of the week.
For us as Christians, this does help us develop a theology of Sabbath and Sundays and gathered worship as rest. It also helps us rest. The knowledge that all of our resting is imperfect and immature in a world that itself clamours for rest both explains our inability to shrug off the weariness so prevalent in all around us—we hang in the Between—as well as explaining our need to learn to rest as we fit ourselves for the age to come.
Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash
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