Sabbath Rest
By Logan Pollock
Readings for March 14, 2024: Preparing for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
The Rabbi Abraham Heschel once wrote about the delight of Sabbath rest: “Six days a week we wrestle with the things of space, but on the seventh day we build a palace in time.” Heschel became famous for rehabilitating the Sabbath for the modern worshiper. He argued that it is not—as we might be tempted to believe—a simple pause between business days, a time for us to catch our breath before putting our hands back to our plows. Rather, the Sabbath is that goal toward which we work. Six days a week we put our affairs in order so that on the seventh day we, along with our families, may rest in the presence of God, and get a taste of that Shalom that we hear so much about.
Sabbath rest grates against so much of what we are led to believe about the world and about ourselves. In our six days of toil we might come to think that it is we who sustain the world, who build it up, keep its pistons turning, keep its fire fresh with coal. We become deists, operating under the assumption that God might have created the world, sure, but he has long since left it to us to keep it spinning. With every email sent, every errand run, every appointment scheduled, we fashion ourselves as little Atlases, each holding up our own world and our own households on our shoulders. On the Sabbath, we must put these things down, and remember with thanksgiving who it all belongs to. On the Sabbath we give thanks that God is both Creator and Sustainer. Sabbath rest is not merely a cessation from work, but rather a commending our work into the hands of He who has given us this work, into the hands of He who all of our work is for. In our Sabbath stillness we watch the world become God’s creation again, and we feel ourselves become God’s children again.
In our readings this morning, we see the tension and challenge that the Sabbath presents us. We see how difficult it is to believe what God has promised for us, how tightly we cling to our own toil, how thoroughly we identify ourselves with the work that we do. But in these readings we also see God’s patience. We see a God who waits to be gracious to us, a God whose promise of entering his rest is still open.
Lent can easily become a season in which we create even more work for ourselves, in which we try to refresh our faith by increasing our toil. Let these readings be reminders that Lent is a season of letting go, that our work is not what gives us our identity, and that we serve a God in whom—as fanciful as it may sound—we are promised true and enduring rest.
