Relax: why the gift of sabbath has never been more vital.
Every year, nearly all of us go on a holiday, with many of us doing so during August—especially if we have children at school. In fact, according to research by ABTA, over the course of a year, not only do 86% of us in the UK go on holiday, but on average we take over three holidays a year (ranging from short city breaks to longer vacations lasting up to two or three weeks).
But this practice of ‘going on holiday’ has a relatively short history. It was only in 1939 that one week’s holiday a year for workers became a legal requirement. In the 1950s, that changed to two weeks and it’s only since the 1980s that it increased to the more familiar four weeks. Prior to 1939, the idea of taking any extended period of time off work was the preserve of the very wealthy.
Before these legislative changes, it was the church calendar which determined when we took time off work—the word holiday itself derives from holy day. Firstly, there were the 12 days of Christmas, running from 25th December to 6th January. Secondly, there were the various ‘holy days’ during the year, but these were often less a time for rest, and more an opportunity for pilgrimage. But thirdly, and most importantly, there was Sunday.
Within our tradition, the practice of not working one day a week, of course, goes back to the practice of the sabbath. But we would be mistaken to assume that our observance as Christians of Sunday as a day of rest is religiously founded. Whilst the early Christians dedicated the beginning of first day of the week to worship because that was the day of the week Jesus rose from the dead, it only became a day of rest as well because a few centuries later in 321AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine made it so by decree.
It’s worth noting that in our country, it was only in the 1890s that again it was an act of state legislation that granted workers a half-day holiday every Saturday afternoon. It turns out that the idea of ‘the weekend’ that we’re all familiar with is a relatively recent invention.
In the broader context of diminishing numbers in the UK identifying as Christians, some are suggesting that keeping the sabbath is a counter-cultural spiritual practice that Christians would do well to reconsider as we become a smaller minority within society (in 2018 the number of describing themselves as being of no religion rose to 52%, with those identifying as Christians falling further to 38%; British Social Attitudes 2018).
Notable amongst these is the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann. In his writings and YouTube lectures, he draws attention to the fact that, in the Old Testament, the justification for keeping the fifth commandment is different in the two versions of the Ten Commandments given in the Bible.
The first time is in the book of Exodus, when Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God on top of Mt Sinai. There, the fifth commandment reads as follows: ‘Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.’ Exodus 20:8-11.
First of all, remember that the word holy simply means set apart. The holy day, the sabbath, is the day we set apart to be different from all the other days of the week. The way we are to make it different from the others is by not working.
But what is most striking is the reason why we are to refrain from work. It is because God, having made creation over the first six days, rested on the seventh. In Brueggemann’s memorable phrase, ‘God is not a workaholic!’
So, on the first occasion the Ten Commandments are recorded in the Old Testament, the reason for our not working on the seventh day of the week is not so that we might become ever more productive on the other days of the week, as an eager management guru might suggest (and that utilitarian argument is much of what’s behind those in our own time calling for a four day working week). No, the theological foundation is because we are called, as human beings made in the image and likeness of God, to reflect the identity and ways of God into creation. God creates and then rests; we are to do likewise.
But the second time the Ten Commandments are given in Deuteronomy 5, the justification is different: ‘Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.’ Deuteronomy 5:12-15.
On this occasion, the reason given for keeping the sabbath is not the creative and restful character of God. Instead, the theological foundation is rooted in God’s saving activity in Israel’s own history, whilst slaves in Egypt under the yoke of Pharaoh. You’ll recall that the Israelites were commanded to make more and more bricks for the Pharaoh’s vast building projects under increasingly impossible conditions. It was from this system of economic enslavement that the God of Israel freed his people.
In framing the commandment in this way to keep the sabbath, the Scriptures remind God’s people never to enter such economic enslavement again, and if subjugated, to resist it. This was a live issue at the time when the book of Deuteronomy was written. Most scholars think it was drawn together during the time of Exile in the 6th century BC, when the Israelites had been forcibly removed to Babylon and were in servitude to King Nebuchadnezzar. Under such circumstances, keeping the sabbath was an act of economic resistance and a way of preserving your identity as God’s people in a foreign land.
In our own time, both of these ways of understanding the reasons for keeping the sabbath matter. We can think of them in this way: the first reason from Exodus reflects the vertical nature of our identity being rooted in God. This is what God is like and so we’re to be likewise. The second way, from Deuteronomy, reflects the horizontal aspect of our identity in God, namely that God does not want humanity to be economically enslaved, one group to the other, and has acted in the history of his people to stop this and to thereby hold out the example of how we are all called to live.
But in an era when government legislation has relaxed Sunday trading laws and when employers increasingly offer only zero-hour contracts in the gig economy, where many people do two or three jobs simply to make ends meet, it’s hard to deny that most of us have moved a very long way from keeping any day of the week as a day of rest. One could argue that in a society that has changed as much as ours has over the last 60 years, the idea that the state should legislate for a national day of rest once a week seems an intrusion by the nanny state. Shouldn’t people be free to decide when they do and don’t work?
But as one who frequently pops into the supermarket to do a bit of shopping after the Sunday morning Eucharist—where I occasionally bump into fellow parishioners—I wonder if we’re missing out on something?
I’m reminded of the first weekend I spent in Hungary when I went to work there in my mid-twenties. I was totally caught out by the fact that at 1pm on Saturday afternoon, everything shut—on the dot, all the shops and supermarkets closed. They didn’t re-open until the Monday morning. That’s not to say that nothing was open—the restaurants and cafes, the cinemas and sports centres, they all remained open—but there was a distinct change of rhythm to the weekend. Everything became quieter and much more relaxed.
It took a while to get used to, but in time I came to appreciate it. And on the Monday morning, I really did feel refreshed. At the time, I wasn’t a Christian, so the church-going aspect of it wasn’t a feature for me. The fact that it was a collective act by all the community made a huge difference.
Nowadays in the UK, with our varied working practices, the compromise advice given by some is to nominate one day a week which we are to make our own ‘sabbath’. Depending on our work, that could be as much a Tuesday as a Sunday. But many of us find it’s really very hard to take a proper rest when everybody else is rushing around you, treating it as a regular day.
But, increasingly, this is the situation we now find ourselves in on a Sunday as well. For the foreseeable future, there will be no return to a widely observed day of rest. Quite the contrary, the boundaries between work and rest are only likely to become ever more blurred, especially with the integration of the Internet and smartphones into our everyday lives. This is why many (and not just Christians) are advocating a ‘digital sabbath’, turning off your smartphone and putting it away in a draw so you’re not tempted to check that work email, or go online shopping when you’re meant to be resting.
The challenges this all brings affect many aspects of our lives, not least when we come to take a longer holiday, for example in the summer. If we’re no longer practiced at stopping work on a regular basis during the week, then we’re more likely to struggle when it comes to taking longer stretches of time off work (the periods both before, during and after a long holiday can often be stressful in their own right).
Furthermore, we risk this pattern continuing into retirement. If we haven’t been been good at taking time off work on a frequent, regular basis during the vast majority of our lives, no wonder we struggle to adapt when we retire. Many of us cope with this transition by becoming as busy as we once were when we were working, if not busier.
So why do we struggle with all of this? The first reason, I’d suggest, is that when we rest, we are simply being rather than doing. Sadly, so much of our identity and self-worth as humans ends up being premised on our doing (our achievements etc.) rather than our sheer act of being a creature loved and cherished by God.
Secondly, there is the fear of economic insecurity. Most of us worry about money and having enough both for now and when we’re older. We then organise our lives accordingly, with the many negative consequences of work-related stress arising as a result.
But, along with our Jewish brothers and sisters, who have continued down the ages to observe the sabbath, if we too can relearn the practice of a setting apart one day a week for rest—and, crucially, know why we are doing so—we’d be reminding ourselves, in this trusting act of setting aside time, that our identity and self-worth is rooted not in what we do but in the identity of our creative andrestful God (Exodus 20).
Likewise, the Bible teaches us that God desires not that we become enslaved in a never-ending cycle of anxious production, but that we live lives full of both creativity and rest (Deuteronomy 5).
Ultimately, it is in being creatures made in the image and likeness of Our Lord that our being rests secure. So let’s all take some time out to sit back and rest in Him!