Despite the efforts of medical science to eradicate disease, and despite impressive successes against such ancient maladies as smallpox and polio, illnesses of some type are always with us, though they may recede to the recesses of our awareness between outbreaks. Now we are in the midst of a COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. The illness appears to have transitioned from animals to human beings as recently as late last year in China. Few could have predicted that the consequences would be global in scope. For the foreseeable future we are all learning to live in a different way.
Many people are worried about what will happen as the economy slows down. Indeed many of us have seen our retirement investments take a severe hit in recent weeks. But I would like to suggest that, rather than worry about how to keep everything moving, perhaps we should recover the biblical principle of sabbath. It is difficult, of course, to expect a society with a religiously mixed population to honour a principle so firmly anchored in Scripture. Yet biblical principles are not just arbitrary; they are intended to enable God’s image to flourish as we live our lives before the face of God.
We all know the fourth commandment: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). Many Christians take this to apply to sunday observance and refrain from anything that approximates work on that day. Yet for God’s people of the old covenant, sabbath was not just a weekly occurrence. The entire society was structured around multiples of seven, spaced out over many years. When the Israelites were leaving Egypt for the land of Canaan, God gave them instructions on how to live in this new land through his servant Moses.
The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Say to the people of Israel, When you come into the land which I give you, the land shall keep a sabbath to the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and 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; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap, and the grapes of your undressed vine you shall not gather; it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. The sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you; for your cattle also and for the beasts that are in your land all its yield shall be for food (Leviticus 25:2-7).
This is not a passage that appears frequently in our lectionaries or in sermons, but it has influenced academia, ministry and other fields whose practitioners take sabbatical years. Our farmers similarly practise crop rotation and allow fields to lie fallow periodically, recognizing that over-cultivating can lead to soil depletion. In recent decades, we have become aware that our physical environment needs to be cared for and that we cannot continue to abuse it without suffering negative consequences. All this is part of what it means to live out the sabbath.
Not living out the sabbath incurred God’s judgement on his people, as we read in several passages. While the Israelites were slowly making their way to the promised land, God warned them of what was to come if they did not obey his statutes, including those mandating sabbath observance: “Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its sabbaths” (Leviticus 26:34). “But the land shall be left by them, and enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them; and they shall make amends for their iniquity, because they spurned my ordinances, and their soul abhorred my statutes” (26:43). When the Babylonians finally came and destroyed Judah centuries later, the country’s punishment was linked directly to the violation of sabbath: “[The king] took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath, to fulfil seventy years” (2 Chronicles 36:20-21).
I would not necessarily argue that the current pandemic is God’s punishment for our not keeping sabbath. Nevertheless, violating God’s standards inevitably brings negative consequences, of which disease may be one. Staying up too late or drinking heavily will have a deleterious effect on one’s health. Keeping the economic engine running at full throttle 24/7 may have harmful side effects on our communities and on ourselves. When Ontario repealed its decades-old Sunday closing laws in the 1990s, residents of the province were not liberated from a supposedly outdated religious practice; they were increasingly atomized into individual units plugged into the market quite separately, making time together more difficult for families and friends to pull off. That this was accomplished by a professedly socialist government is all the more ironic.
Yet it may be that our enforced experience of being home with our loved ones for protracted periods is giving us a taste of sabbath’s meaning and its continued relevance for us. Indeed what if the current pandemic were to change our approach to life? What if we were all to slow down and take stock of where we are and of what God has given us? It must have taken great faith on the part of the Israelites to believe that “the sabbath of the land shall provide food for you.” Similarly, we may have difficulty believing that God will care for us during a time when we cannot visit the stores several times a week and cannot travel very far outside our own immediate communities.
We cannot see where all this will lead and what we will be doing weeks much less months from now. But I suggest that we take the opportunity to nurture our relationships with those closest to us. Break out the board games. Put down your phones and tablets. Cook and dine together. Gather together to pray and cultivate your relationship with God. Go ahead, give it a try.
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