What is the Sabbath Life?
What are we talking about when you say “the Sabbath life”? I’m glad you asked.
In short, I mean: Spiritual formation + living in community on mission (call that “missional living”) = the Sabbath Life.
Or to put it another way: Loving God + loving neighbor = the Sabbath life.
Essentially, they’re the same thing. So let me explain.
Sabbath
When God made everything, he did it in six days. The first three days he simply clears some space. Think of taking your cluttered desk and then just wiping everything to the floor. A blank slate. God separates light from darkness, sky from ocean, water from land.
The next three days God makes stuff to live in these three open spaces that have been created. He makes the sun and moon to inhabit the light and darkness. He makes birds and fish for the sky and the ocean. He makes animals and people for the land.
Everything in its right place. Good and beautiful creation.
And then there’s the climax, the crowning achievement. Not humanity. Sabbath. The end, the goal, of creation is Sabbath.
Jewish rabbi and theologian Abraham Heschel writes, “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.”
The Sabbath may be about rest, but it’s not a rest of exhaustion. Was God tired? Did he need to recharge? Did he need to rejuvenate? It’s a rest of celebration. It’s the culmination and purpose for all the work in the first place. Sabbath is the great “why” of creation. I’d like to think he cracked open a cold beverage, kicked up his feet, and said, “Oh yeah! This is really, really good.”
On the Sabbath we don’t escape and retreat. On the contrary, it’s the day for engaging in life free from all the distractions. It’s the day for drinking deeply in all that gives us life. Six days for work and for hustle. One day for joyous celebration and play. Sabbath is freedom to enjoy all of God’s creation. Sabbath should be the great “why” of our living.
Sabbath is the originally intended finale of the story. We practice a little bit of eschatology with each Sabbath.
Jesus says, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” But the Greek word here is a verb, so the force of what Jesus says is more like “and I will rest you.” Rest, not in the escape from exhaustion (though there is that), rather the greatest purpose of creation.
The stories that immediately follow in Matthew 12 then unpack just what this means and they have to do with the Sabbath. The disciples are picking grain, and the Pharisees catch wind of this and think they’ve got Jesus caught in the act. He and his disciples have broken the rules of the Sabbath. But like a quick-witted lawyer, he appeals to some precedents in the Old Testament, and he drops the mic when he says, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
Boom.
Next scene: Our characters (Jesus, disciples, Pharisees) are now in a synagogue, and the Pharisees go on the offensive: “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” Maybe it’s just me, but I imagine Jesus with a blank, does-not-compute, look on his face in reply. And he takes the disabled man and restores his hand.
And if that wasn’t enough to make the point, he really rubs the Pharisees’ noses in it when the text then says, “He healed all the sick among them.” Not lawful to heal on the Sabbath? Let me show what the Sabbath is for. Not a subtle guy, this Jesus.
The writer of Matthew then ties these stories to a quote from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah that concludes with, “And his name will be the hope of all the world.”
Sabbath is when New Creation breaks out. It’s the vision of the end of the story. Since the very beginning. Sabbath is the great “why” of living.
Spiritual formation
When I was a teenager, I was a youth group junkie. I did everything. If the church was open, I was there. Small groups, mission trips, retreats, service projects, and so much more. From all this, I picked up that having a relationship with Jesus was important, that reading the Bible was important, that God’s mission was important. I also picked up that filling my life with church activities was important, and that later led me to some emotional and spiritual dead ends.
In my mid-20s, during a season of rebuilding my faith after a particularly dark and challenging period, a friend introduced me to the contemplative stream of Christianity. Fixed-hour prayer. Liturgy. Lectio divina. Spiritual direction. Centering prayer. I read Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline for a seminary class. I later discovered the works of Dallas Willard and organizations like Renovare and Apprentice.
When God made the world, God made people in the image of the Almighty. But because of the Fall, because of sin, we are broken images. There’s brokenness within myself, brokenness between myself and those around me, brokenness between myself and God, brokenness between myself and God’s creation. Spiritual disciplines are a way of actively participating in healing that brokenness.
I found a rich peace and calm in the contemplative life that I hadn’t experienced before. I didn’t have to be busy. But I also knew that there has to be more to an interior life than just for its own sake. It needs to be more than Christian-speak for self-help, more than narcissistic navel-gazing. It needs to be more than me and God. It needs community life. It needs a sense of purpose and mission.
Missional living
When my wife and I first started dating, we had both just started seminary. Together we got involved with the church on the north side of Lexington, KY. It was a small neighborhood church. There were a small handful of folks who lived along the streets adjacent to the church.
After three years, we got married and moved into the neighborhood. We shared a community garden. There was a Friday night dinner each week. It was nuts—kids running all around the house as if they were electrons. And people’s lives got changed. Some found their way into the corporate worship Sunday morning after weeks of coming to Friday dinners.
It was in that setting that it started to sink in to me that perhaps “loving my neighbor” meant, literally, my next-door neighbor, the people across the street and all along my street.
I also learned that loving my neighbors requires soaking myself in God’s Word, reading the words of Jesus and the prophets and the psalms like a jazz musician practices scales. You have to learn to improvise when your neighbors two doors down are 3 adults with no jobs and 9 kids. And the best improvisations in “loving your neighbor” require a deeply rooted spirituality. Otherwise, you get really used up really fast.
Living in community on mission needs deep roots because it’s hard, hard work. Being so involved in one another’s lives will bend you and bend you and bend you, and if you’re not careful, it will break you. I know that from experience.
Sabbath, mission, spiritual formation—we can’t live into one of these and not the others. We don’t major in one and minor in the others.
Perhaps we imagine that life itself is a road trip. And if that’s the case, Sabbath is our destination. Mission is our road. Spiritual formation is our vehicle. These are all intertwined. We actively participate in loving our neighbors and loving God, and in that work, God is putting his good world back together again, back to the time of Sabbath.
Once when visiting the Abbey of Gethsemani, I heard a monk use the phrase, “For our healing and the healing of the world.” That phrase has stuck with me ever since, and it represents to me the work of holding together love of God and neighbor.
It represents the work of the Sabbath Life.