I once looked a humpback whale in the eye. As I sat in the small inflatable dinghy in the Southern Antarctic Ocean, I watched as she gracefully swam towards the boat, her fins flashing white beneath the surface. I held my breath as she swam beneath the zodiac, my heart beating like a caged bird inside my chest. With one flip of her tail, she could overturn us, but as she came up nose first on the other side of the boat, I caught her eye. In that moment I began to wonder who was watching whom. She stayed with us for over 20 minutes, dancing and spinning in the water, spraying us with her breath. It was a holy moment.
I have had many of these “holy moments” in my life. Moments where, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” These moments of delight and awe draw me into contemplation of the One who created it all. When we interact and connect with creation, we can experience one of the ways God calls out to us and invites us into relationship. This should not surprise us. The psalmist writes, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands.”
The creation narrative in Genesis 1 speaks of how God also delights in what God has made. God proclaims “it is good!” upon surveying the created world. In Genesis 2 we read that on the seventh day God finished creation by resting. The Hebrew word for rest is menuha, but it is better translated as “joyous repose,” “tranquility,” or “delight.” On the seventh day God didn’t simply cease activity, but God celebrated and delighted in all that had been created. In return, all creation was free to simply be what God had created it to be.
I propose that Sabbath-keeping has less to do with a checklist of things one may or may not do on a given day, and more about a re-orientation towards God’s life-giving rhythms. Not only is this Sabbath orientation for humans, but it is an invitation for all creation. The command to keep Sabbath is a command to practice menuha, and to let all creation also practice menuha. As Psalm 96 declares, “let the heavens be glad, and the let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it.”
Sabbath was meant primarily as a communal practice that gave shape to the life of the people of God. It was meant as a day to be intentional about being present to God, to others, and to creation. It took the people who first received the Sabbath commandment a long time to re-orient their lives from the the structures of Egypt, where doing Pharoah’s work was the only priority. In the wilderness, they had to rely on a different master, one who fed them daily and taught them how to work and play with each other. Even there, God provided a way for them to work six days and rest on the seventh.
This retraining in the wilderness was God’s way of exchanging Pharoah’s yoke of slavery for God’s yoke of freedom. Jesus carried that vision further by saying, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” In the gospel story that follows this saying, Jesus heals a man on the Sabbath, which shows us how both work and rest fit into the context of God’s rhythms.
The biggest barrier to practicing sabbath delight is distraction. We live in a fast world. Fast food, fast cars, fast forward. It’s hard to learn to stop, to remember that our welfare is not all up to us, that our efforts are not what make the world go round. We surround ourselves with human made structures, we pave over the soft earth with hard surfaces, we drive ourselves past healthy time limits because we forget that we are not the authors of our own lives. Something in us resists dependence on others and on God. So we hoard jars of manna every day, conveniently ignoring the stink of rotting food that builds up in our storehouses.
The ideology of colonialism gave us the notion that the earth is a storehouse to be plundered for our benefit. So the western world became an imperial power, and the two-thirds world became its mine. In the 21st century we are beginning to learn the high cost of earth’s plundering, with a creation that is suffering all kinds of ailments and creatures who are dying at a rate we cannot sustain. Where is sabbath in such a world?
God has created a world and a pattern for living that brings abundance. We can hardly be present to this rhythm, however, if we are constantly on the go. The world is full of beauty and opportunities for delight, but we will miss these gifts, or worse, destroy them, if we do not slow down. More than that, we will miss knowing our place within a creation over which it is God who reigns, not us. Sabbath is a reminder, as biblical scholar Ched Myers writes in his book Sabbath Economics, of gifts and limits: “the grace of receiving that which the creator gives, and the responsibility not to take too much, nor to mistake the gift for a possession.”
In the introduction to Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s famous book The Sabbath, his daughter, Susannah Heschel, wrote that “Sabbath is a metaphor for paradise.” Heschel said that the practice of Sabbath prepares us for the experience of the Messiah’s coming — the ultimate Sabbath. As Christians, we also anticipate a new age. In fact, the heart of scripture points towards a brilliant hope for a renewed and restored creation. As Jesus let go of his life for us, he gave birth to a new creation, right here in the midst of the old. Resurrection is a restoration of menuha, the delight in things as they ought to be. And by embracing Sabbath, God’s rest, we are reoriented to a good world, renewed by Christ, in which we already participate, right here alongside a suffering world still sick with the effects of sin. Sabbath-keeping is the practice of resurrection in a world that suffers; it is the tending to each other and to creation in both hope and celebration.
When we pull out invasive plants, when we clean up litter on the path, when we ride our bike to work, we practice Sabbath.
In our daily lives, when we bring each other meals, when we make space in our lives for co-workers, friends, and our spouses, roommates, or other neighbours, we practise Sabbath.
When we grow a vegetable garden or a good crop in the field, when we feed the birds in winter, we practice Sabbath.
When we look in awe at the starry night sky, and when we take a walk in the woods and celebrate what we have not made, we practise Sabbath.
May God give us rest, and renew us with delight.
