The Passion Week provides vast theological emotions for the people of God. Palm Sunday commences with the entrance of a divine King riding on a donkey. He comes in ancient royal transportation. That royal procession concludes with a Crucified Messiah exalted on a tree.
The Church also celebrates Maundy Thursday as our Messiah’s commandment to love one another just as He loved us. We then proceed to sing of the anguish of that Good Friday as our blessed Lord is humiliated by soldiers and scolded by the unsavory words of the religious leaders of the day. As he walks to the Mount his pain testifies to Paul’s words that he suffered even to the point of death. But hidden in this glaringly distasteful mixture of blood, vinegar, and bruised flesh is the calmness of the day after our Lord’s crucifixion.
After fulfilling the great Davidic promise in Psalm 22, our Lord rests from his labors in the tomb. Whatever may have happened in those days prior to his resurrection, we know that Christ’s work was finished.
The Church calls this day Blessed Sabbath or more commonly Holy Saturday. On this day our Lord reposed (rested) from his accomplishments. Many throughout history also believe that Holy Saturday is a fulfillment of Moses’ words:
God blessed the seventh day. This is the blessed Sabbath. This is the day of rest, on which the only-begotten Son of God rested from all His works . . .(Gen. 2:2)
The Church links this day with the creation account. On day seven Yahweh rested and enjoyed the fruit of his creation. Jesus Christ also rested in the rest given to him by the Father and enjoyed the fruits of the New Creation he began to establish and would be brought to light on the next day.
As Alexander Schmemann observed:
Now Christ, the Son of God through whom all things were created, has come to restore man to communion with God. He thereby completes creation. All things are again as they should be. His mission is consummated. On the Blessed Sabbath He rests from all His works.
Holy Saturday is a day of rest for God’s people; a foretaste of the true Rest that comes in the Risen Christ. The calmness of Holy Saturday makes room for the explosion of Easter Sunday. On this day, we remember that that darkness of the grave and the resting of the Son was only temporary for when a New Creation bursts into the scene the risen Lord of glory cannot contain his joy, and so he gives it to us.<>vzlomannyeзачем нужно наполнение ов статьями
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.
Christians should know how to keep Sabbath. I am not saying this the way that some in our culture would say it. Some people say we need more rest because we are too busy, living crazy, distracted lives. These people suggest we need to do some yoga and find our inner guru stillness. That is not what I am talking about. I am suggesting that we are not doing enough with Sabbath. What we really need is to Sabbath harder. By that, I mean we need to have a better understanding and vision for Sabbath. This means we have more to do, not less.
In the fourth commandment, God commands his people to rest. He says work on six days and then rest on the seventh. This is a command. This is not an option. While it might seem like a command will dampen our joy, the reality is that obedience brings great joy and peace. This command is a wonderful gift so that we have one day out of seven to rest. This Sabbath rest is a gift to us because we are reminded what our rest should be founded on. It should be founded on something that God has done, not something we have done.
In Deuteronomy 5, it says that the Sabbath day is a memorial for what God has done for his people: once they were slaves in Egypt and God brought them out with his mighty hand. God has done this great work and so the people need to rest. In the new covenant, we celebrate and remember God’s work on Sunday, the first day of the week, the day Jesus rose from the dead. Our Sabbath rest is on the first day of the week because our lives are oriented around the Gospel. God has done a great work for us and we are to reflect and remember and celebrate that work. This is something American Christians need to do more.
Eric Liddell and Sabbath
The story of Eric Liddell is a wonderful lesson of how to Sabbath harder. In 1924, Eric was a runner who was going to compete in the 100m event at the Olympics in Paris. However, that year the 100m event was held on a Sunday. So Eric switched events, changing over to the 400m event. Eric refused to run on Sunday because he knew that was against God’s law. He honored God above men. Eric knew of the schedule issue ahead of time so he was able to train for a different event but this new event was still a huge challenge for him. It is crucial to see that while Eric honored God and kept Sabbath, this did not mean that Eric sat back and was passive about it all. Actually, he jumped in and worked harder. He trained for the 400m and he won that race.
The famous movie Chariots of Fire records the story well. The character Eric in the movie talks with his sister about being a missionary in China. He explains that he will be a missionary but that God also made him to be a runner. He says the great lines, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” In this way, we see that Eric was not a snooty sabbatarian; he truly wanted to enjoy the good gifts of God in his life. He knew that God had called him to be fast and he wanted to use that gift to honor God.
After he won the 400m, Eric explained how he had won: “The secret of my success over the 400m is that I run the first 200m as fast as I can. Then, for the second 200m, with God’s help, I run faster.”
In this quote, Liddell is not saying that he ran 50% and then God added another 50%. Rather, the whole thing was a gift of God. By God’s grace, Liddell ran the whole thing.
That is the correct vision for Sabbath rest: we need it because that is where we are reminded that we cannot do what is required. We must run and strain for the goal but we cannot get there in our own efforts. We must look to God for our strength in order to run. Paul in Romans 9:16 says it this way: “So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.”
Sabbath as Surrender
Later in his life, Liddell went to China to be a missionary. He followed God’s calling on his life and he worked and served there for several years. He eventually gave his life there dying in 1945 in an internment camp. His last words are recorded to be: “It’s complete surrender.”
Liddell’s last words summarize the Christian life: it is surrendering everything to God. But this surrender does not mean that we remain still and passive and don’t have anything to do. Rather, It is a complete surrender to God’s will for our lives and so this means that we work harder and longer than we ever thought possible. But this comes from God’s strength, not from us.
There are two errors in how we approach Sabbath rest. One error is to think that rest means inaction: I just sit here and do nothing. Some might erroneously encourage us to a still quietness as if our problem is that we are too busy in life. But busyness is not the problem for Christians. The reverse is more often the case: we are too lazy. So Sabbath is not about finding an inner peace or quiet. True Sabbath rest is about action.
The other error is to think that I must do everything. God might save me, but I am the one who has to run the race. So I get out my running shoes and I run. I grit my teeth and I try to run harder and faster: as if God will be more pleased with me, if I can just do more things faster. But this is wrong too. My job is not to do what I think; my job is to do what God says to do.
This means that I must obey God all the way, every day. I must obey the command to glorify God but the reality is that this command is an impossible task for me. So it is only by God’s grace that I can fulfill the task before me.
The answer then is complete surrender. We must give it all up to God. In God’s command to rest on the Sabbath, he is not saying that the other six days are ours to do with as we please. All our days belong to God. He has claimed them all. There is nothing left over for us. In turning to God, we must surrender it all to him. Then God in his grace gives us back six days to serve and obey him.
Sabbath as Launch
In this discussion, it is important to emphasize God’s grace to us. It is all grace. I am not saying that we must do our part and then God adds his part. The truth is that all of it comes from him. God gives us the task to run and we must run our best. And we run only by God’s grace. And then God takes us even farther than we thought possible. And that is by God’s grace also. When it is all done and we reach the end, we will see that we had run because we had surrendered it all to God. He will get the glory because we were merely obeying what he had told us to do.
In Luke 17, Jesus says it this way, “Does [the master] thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not. So likewise you, when you have done all those things which you are commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants. We have done what was our duty to do.’” At the end, when we have run our hardest and in God’s strength we have gone even farther than we thought possible, we will say like Liddell, I didn’t do it. I just surrendered it all to God. I don’t deserve any praise. I was just doing what I was commanded to do.
In this way, we see that the Sabbath is not about us having a chance to rest or for us to get a chance to take a nap, although those things are good gifts from God. The true vision of Sabbath rest is that life is like a pole vault competition. The pole must be placed in a stationary spot, a spot that doesn’t move. This is not to keep the pole from moving, but because the pole is supposed to move. The stationary spot is the point from which something larger can be launched. Sabbath is like that spot for the pole. We set it there in God and in his great work of deliverance, and then He launches us farther than we ever thought possible.
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
