One is invitation. The other is warning.
The Exodus command, with its call to imitation, plays on a hidden irony: we mimic God in order to remember we’re not God. In fact, that is a good definition of Sabbath: imitating God so that we stop trying to be God. We mirror divine behavior only to freshly discover our human limitations. Sabbath-keeping involves a recognition of our own weakness and smallness, that we are made from dust, that we hold our treasure in clay jars, and that without proper care we break.
This is not true of God. He neither sleeps nor slumbers. He runs no risk of breakdown, burnout, exhaustion, injury. God doesn’t need Sabbath or sabbatical. He doesn’t pine for vacation. He doesn’t require a good night’s sleep to clear his head or steady his hand. He doesn’t run ragged and run amok, pushing himself beyond his limits, patching himself together between bursts of striving and binges of workaholism. God is not waiting for the weekend.
God is complete without rest.
But not us. For us, rest is indispensable. Indeed, all things not God, all things made by God—goats and oaks, scarab beetles and pine needles, dragon lizards and dragonflies—need rest.
And maybe especially us. Because, unlike goats and beetles and flies and lizards, we try to outwit and outrun our limits. We think we’re the exception, the one for whom busyness will translate into fruitfulness. We think, because we’ve figured ways to build impossibly tall, lithe buildings and dig immensely deep, broad holes, to spy on babies in the womb, to tease out strands of DNA, to send whole computer files from New York to Nairobi in a split second—we think because our industry and ingenuity seem boundless, we can also figure a way around our God-imposed need for stillness. We can’t. The need is not conjured away by medication, technology, discipline, cleverness, sheer willfulness. It always comes back to take its due.
So God, knowing both our need and our folly, took the lead. He set the example. Like a parent who coaxes a cranky toddler to lie down for an afternoon nap by lying down beside her, God woos us into rest by resting. “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
God commands that we imitate him in order to discover again that we’re not him, and that we need him.
Sabbath is a return to Eden.
That’s Exodus.
Deuteronomy, the other twin, gives a different rationale for keeping Sabbath. “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”
You were once slaves. There was once a day you were denied any choice in this matter. Rest? Work? There was no option. The choice was made for you, day in, day out. The point was reinforced with bullwhips, in case you missed it or were the least inclined to ignore it. The point was, you worked. Period. Rest was for other people. Rest was for Pharaoh. But Pharaoh couldn’t rest if you didn’t work—he had such overlarge ambitions, so many things he wanted to accomplish, so many tall, pointy monuments he wanted to be remembered by—somebody had to do it. That somebody, that nobody, was you. And to make sure you did it, and didn’t ever, ever, ever slack off, he placed taskmasters over you, to smile sinister smiles and clench their forearms into tight braids of muscle whenever you looked even the tiniest bit as if you might sit down a spell.
That’s what life was like before.
God drowned them all. He smote them. He went to extravagant lengths—a full-scale house of horrors, with swarms of gnats, blood-thick waters, hailstones large and hard as fists, and, as a show-stopper, a collapsing wall of sea—just to remove that scourge from among you, to take you away from it and it away from you.
Remember?
Was there something about those days for which you are nostalgic? Is there something back there you miss? Are you lonely tonight, mooning for all those galley masters and pit guards, longing for the sting of their whips and their curses?
Here’s the logic of the Sabbath command in Deuteronomy: Don’t revive what God has removed. Don’t gather and piece back together what God smashed and scattered. Don’t place yourself in a yoke that God broke and tossed off with his own hands. Just as we ought not pull asunder what God has joined, so we ought not to join what God has pulled asunder. If you loathed life under the threats and taunts and beatings of taskmasters, why reprise it?
Because that’s what the refusal to rest amounts to: living as though the taskmasters still hover and glower, ever ready to thrash us for the smallest sign of slowing down. It is to strive and toil as though we have no choice, as if we’ll be punished otherwise.
To refuse Sabbath is in effect to spurn the gift of freedom. It is to resume willingly what we once cried out for God to deliver us from. It is choosing what once we shunned.
Slaves don’t rest. Slaves can’t rest. Slaves, by definition, have no freedom to rest.
Rest, it turns out, is a condition of liberty.
God calls us to live in the freedom that he won for us with his own outstretched arm.
Sabbath is a refusal to go back to Egypt.
That’s Deuteronomy.
There is one very large, very grim obstacle to keeping Sabbath. It is the problem of taskmasters. God drowned the taskmasters, it’s true—dragged the whole Egyptian army to the muddy, weedy sea bottom. Only, some survived: they clung to the flotsam of our guilt and worry and ended up marooned in our heads. It’s actually worse: we helped them survive. We threw them ropes, pulled them ashore, resuscitated the unconscious ones.
Now, there’s a whole noisy, jostling colony of them still with us, and they lapse into old habits the minute we try to rest. They swagger and bark like men in authority—and ought to, since we’re inclined to give way. When I try to step back from my day’s work, the taskmasters in my head rise up, look at me menacingly, advance toward me.
What do you think you’re doing?
Uh, just taking a few minutes to . . . sit down.
You’re taking a few minutes to sit down? How quaint. How charming. You’re taking a few minutes to sit down, as though there’s not a huge, stinking pile of things that you’ve left undone. You are so weak and pathetic. I’m warning you. There are a thousand things to do. There are a million things to worry about. Get off your lazy, sprawling backside and get busy!
This happened just today—even though I should know better. I lay down for no reason other than to lie down. Within a minute, a taskmaster in my head spotted me, strode over, started his tirade. When are you going to clean your office? Have you phoned the mechanic yet to have that rattle in your truck motor looked at? What about the situation with that couple at church—when are you going to attend to that? Do you know how many e-mails you haven’t responded to? Do you think you can just wile away an hour here on the couch when all this hangs over you? You are so smug, so rude, so slothful. What kind of time-frittering, excuse-mongering sad sack of a sluggard are you anyhow, lolling about as if the work’s all done? You should be ashamed of yourself.
Taskmasters despise rest. They create a culture where rest must be stolen, savored on the sly, and of course then it’s not rest: worry over getting caught plunders rest’s restfulness. Even if they never lay a hand on you (hard to do, since they’re imaginary), they mount a ruthless psychological war, a propaganda campaign at once cunning and artless, that defeats you more than whips.
Maybe you, too, have a taskmaster or three living with you. I am learning how to let them drown.
The power of a lie is its half-truth. Lies that are pure lie—outlandish tall tales, the kind of bizarre claims that tabloid copyists generate by the tonnage (hotels discovered on Mars, a girl born with devil horns and spike tail in Toledo, a colony of talking geckos in northern Thailand )—these can be spotted from a great distance, laughed at, discounted, dismissed. Bald-faced lies are just that: bald-faced. They are flat-out obvious. They are a
subcategory of slapstick and lampoon.
But most lies aren’t like this. Most have a veneer of credibility, a certain intuitive rightness about them. We’re inclined to believe them. The lies that do the most damage are never the bald-faced variety. They’re the masked-faced variety. They are the lies so intricately webbed with truth that the two, falsehood and truth, are almost impossible to unravel from each other.
I have a good friend who for most of his life believed everything he touched would fail. This was in spite of the fact that he had accumulating evidence—his marriage, his family, his friendships, his business, his faith—that pointed in exactly the opposite direction. His life in the main has been a series of staggering accomplishments. But when he was young, his father told him over and over—and did it with anger, with disgust—that he couldn’t do anything right. The way he chopped wood was wrong. The manner in which he took out the garbage was disastrous. His schoolwork was appalling. On and on it went, a swarm of faultfinding.
The thing is, some of this was half true. My friend needed to learn to aim past the wood when he chopped it. He needed to seal the garbage bag more tightly before he carried it out so that rinds and crusts and coffee grounds didn’t spill, and to make sure its underside wasn’t dripping its thick, sticky ferment of syrup across the kitchen floor. He could have shored up his work in English, paid more attention to the way commas work, the way verbs conjugate and nouns decline.
But the lie that rooted in these half-truths and flourished was this: you can’t do anything right. And so my friend, believing it, strove and strove—accomplished amazing things with all his striving—and always felt it wasn’t enough.
He’s much better. He’s learned—through a wife who loves him, friends who would take a bullet for him, a church that nourishes him, and a prayer life that has become as important to him as breathing—to spot the lies mixed with the half-truths, learned how to winnow out one from the other.
Here’s why I’m telling you this: taskmasters are masters of half-truth. They couch their harangue in just enough reality that the whole thing has the ring of authenticity. It’s true, in part, what they say: there is no end of things to do. I am a touch on the lazy side and disguise this with busyness. There is a crowd of people disappointed with me, who find me, by turn, indecisive, despotic, timid, rash, evasive, blunt, foolhardy, wise in my own eyes, foot-dragging, impulsive. I do procrastinate overmuch and at the same time make too many snap decisions. Most of my life is unfinished. Many of my efforts are slapdash and slipshod.
It’s true.
So? The lie mixed in here is that, because it’s true, I have no right to rest.
And actually, that’s true too. I have no right to a lot of things: my health, my home, my family, my salvation. May as well add rest to the list.
But thank God that God could care less about our rights. What God cares about, and deeply, is our needs. And it’s this simple: you and I have an inescapable need for rest.
The lie the taskmasters want you to swallow is that you cannot rest until your work’s all done, and done better than you’re currently doing it. But the truth is, the work’s never done, and never done quite right. It’s always more than you can finish and less than you had hoped for.
So what? Get this straight: The rest of God—the rest God gladly gives so that we might discover that part of God we’re missing—is not a reward for finishing. It’s not a bonus for work well done.
It’s sheer gift. It is a stop-work order in the midst of work that’s never complete, never polished. Sabbath is not the break we’re allotted at the tail end of completing all our tasks and chores, the fulfillment of all our obligations. It’s the rest we take smack-dab in the middle of them, without apology, without guilt, and for no better reason than God told us we could.
Moses hated taskmasters. He saw their ways with God’s people— their loutishness and brutishness, their jackboot tactics—and he got mad. Wrath, wild and blazing and holy, rose up in him. He killed one. He smote him, struck him down hard and fast and very dead. As a kind of parting indignity, and in a feeble attempt to cover the crime, he buried the man in the sand.
Dust to dust for you.
For that, Moses ended up in exile for forty years, grazing sheep on scrub brush and sere grass. The exile was necessitated by circumstances— he was a fugitive from Egypt—but more than that, it was God’s idea. Moses’s ploy, it turns out, was ill-conceived. It just made Pharaoh nastier and left the people he was trying to help neither free nor grateful.
It was no way to kill a taskmaster.
In some ways, the whole point of the Exodus was Sabbath. Let my people go, became God’s rallying cry, that they might worship me. At the heart of liberty—of being let go—is worship. But at the heart of worship is rest—a stopping from all work, all worry, all scheming, all fleeing—to stand amazed and thankful before God and his work. There can be no real worship without true rest.
Pharaoh, his army, his taskmasters—all stand in the way of both freedom and worship. They are enemies of both, and so enemies of rest. Pharaoh might grant these things—freedom, worship, rest— conditionally or capriciously, in a spree of bigheartedness or a faint spell of repentance. But he’s fickle, quick to snatch the gift back, double up the workload.
And he and his crew are not easily removed. There’s no lasting fruit from Moses’s angry burst of violence. The taskmasters are down one, but their resolve is only multiplied.
Only God can rid us of taskmasters.
Our part is to trust.
To trust.
Ah, how plain and clear that is. How simple, even.
And how hard.
There’s a fascinating exchange in John’s Gospel between Jesus and the Jews during the Feast of Tabernacles. Jesus, back in Galilee, has a barbed exchange with his own brothers, who try to jeer him into making an appearance at the feast. They want him to pull out all the stops, dazzle the crowd with his wonder-working antics. It’s the devil’s temptations all over again: Throw yourself from this temple, turn these stones into bread. . . . Jesus rebuffs them. But after they leave, he slips into Jerusalem anyhow, stealthy, perhaps disguised, and there mingles with the pressing, searching crowds. There’s an atmosphere of heightened anticipation and speculation about his whereabouts, his identity. Who is he? Where is he?
Halfway through the feast, Jesus goes public. He stands up in the temple courts, not to perform miracles, as his brothers advised, but to teach. The crowd is at once captivated and wary, astonished by him, suspicious of him. Is he heaven-sent or hell-bent? Jesus accuses them of trying to kill him, and they answer back, “You are demon-possessed. . . . Who is trying to kill you?” (John 7:20).
Jesus responds to this with an answer that appears to be tossed in from another conversation entirely. Jesus did this often—answered people in a way that sent the discussion at hand careening in a whole new direction. He was master of the non sequitur, genius of the cryptic retort. So it is here:
Jesus said to them, “I did one miracle, and you are all astonished. Yet because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a child on the Sabbath. Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing the whole man on the Sabbath?” (John 7:21–23, emphasis mine)
The miracle Jesus mentions is likely when he healed, either at this feast or at an earlier one, an invalid at the pool in Bethesda. It’s recorded in John 5. The man had been lame thirty-eight years, growing hard with despair and raw with self-pity. Jesus sought him out, asked him if he wanted to be healed (to which he got no straight reply), and ordered the man to pick up his mat and walk. The man did and promptly got in trouble with the Jewish establishment for carrying his mat, a breach of Sabbath regulations.
I’ll return to this exchange in a later chapter, when we look at the connection between Sabbath and healing. But here I want to tease out a surprisin
g, perhaps quirky, connection between circumcision, healing, and Sabbath. Clearly Jesus’s plain meaning is that just as circumcision is a sign of unique belonging to God, of covenant relation, and is therefore most fittingly practiced on the Sabbath, so healing is a sign of God’s intimate presence and blessing and thus is best done on the Sabbath. Healing on the Sabbath is just as desirable as circumcision on the Sabbath, since both announce that God is our God and he is for us and not against us.
But I want to look at something other than Jesus’s plain meaning. Circumcision, like Sabbath, is also about trust. To be circumcised is to be wounded in a place of intimacy and vulnerability. It is to permit, even invite, an act of violence—a sharp knife, a painful cut, a bloody removal—in that part of a man he otherwise most guards and hides. It is also the part he most intimately joins with a woman. Circumcision is being scarred in a place of deep identity, where a man understands himself to be a man. It is being wounded at the only source where a man can create life. Many parts of a man’s anatomy are useful: with his mind he imagines, with his hands he devises, with his feet he deploys. A man can create many things, but only in this one place can he create life. It is here the knife is applied.
The scar, the wound, sets this man apart: it says that here, even here, especially here, he is a marked man. He is one who belongs to God.
That is trust. To allow a hand to wield a knife in this place, to cut such a vulnerable, valuable, intimate part of the man, and for no reason other than that God has chosen this means and this place to mark him—that is supreme trust.
That trust is the hallmark of circumcision comes out in an obscure passage in the book of Joshua. Joshua has led the Israelites across the Jordan and pitched camp on the plains of Jericho. The news that the armies of God are nearby, preparing for attack, has reached the kings of Canaan. The people in the surrounding towns and villages are terrified.
The Rest of God Page 10
