Yesterday we launched more fully into “ordinary time”—this long green season after Pentecost designed to order our lives in the Spirit—and we did so with a commandment: “Observe the sabbath day, and keep it holy” (Deuteronomy 5:12).
Not exactly a compelling launch, I have to say. And I should also note how easily I just ignore that particular commandment, as if it doesn’t really matter. I am also frequently perplexed by its prominence in biblical stories, including the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all use Sabbath observance as an occasion to describe the ministry of Jesus.
In what we heard from the lectionary yesterday (Mark 2:23-3:6), Mark puts the Sabbath right up front in his account of the Gospel, in the second chapter, where the tensions between Jesus and the religious establishment are already running high. Mark’s first chapter includes no fewer than four mentions of Jesus confronting demonic forces.
So there’s a power struggle emerging early on in Mark—not, we should quickly note, between Jesus and Judaism (the legacy of Christian anti-Semitism is always lurking around texts like these). No, the struggle is between the full flourishing of human life, on the one hand, and all the various forces hell-bent on destroying human life on the other.
Mark makes that power struggle explicit by framing it with a healing story—a moment when someone is brought back into thriving on the Sabbath. Mark also declares Jesus “Lord of the Sabbath”— the very essence of divine lordship, in other words, is cultivating abundance and healthy vitality.
But again, why use Sabbath observance to make this point?
The passage from Deuteronomy suggests an answer by relating the law directly to the Exodus from Egypt; the God who liberated God’s people from slavery is the God who commands Sabbath rest.
The Israelites, no longer trapped in a system that determines their worth based solely on what they produce, must now learn how to live as free people—a freedom in which they enjoy inherent value, regardless of what they produce.
One commentator makes this point quite nicely: after God’s people are taken out of slavery, Sabbath rest “takes the slavery out of the people.” And not just the Israelites alone, but all the people and even all other animals—old, young, rich, poor, citizen, foreigner, resident alien, stranger and outsider, oxen, donkeys, every herd of livestock, all of them creatures of the same God for whom the Sabbath was made!
Modern Western people certainly do not think of ourselves as “enslaved.” Yet how many of us nonetheless base our value on productivity? Along with the unemployment rate and the Consumer Price Index, labor productivity is one of the primary factors in judging the health of the U.S. economy.
In today’s economic system—no less than the system of slavery in ancient Egypt—the value of a human life is measured by how much it produces. This system in turn measures the value of Earth based on the material resources we can extract from it.
All of us, and Earth herself, need the Sabbath, and to adopt it as a spiritual discipline with social, economic, and political consequences. Jesus, not merely a teacher of Sabbath discipline but actually “Lord of the Sabbath,” liberates us from any system that would shackle our dignity or denigrate our inherent worth. This matters today, and rather urgently.
In this first week of LGBTQ pride month, I’ve been reflecting on more than forty years of being out as a gay man. Think about what the world was like in the early 1980s; that’s when I came out. Now, more than forty years later, still to this day, whenever I enter a new social situation of any kind, I always assess the risk of being out, and whether it’s worth it. Even where I currently live, supposedly an “LGBT resort town,” it doesn’t always feel safe to be out.
LGBT people need a Sabbath rest from that anxiety, and gay men really need to remember that most of the animosity toward us is actually rooted in misogyny, a deeply embedded cultural distrust and denigration of all things feminine, of women.
Every woman in nearly every part of the world today is very well familiar with this. Every single woman has experienced at least one moment, and likely more, of profound uneasiness and even fear in a public space just for being a woman; more than a few feel unsafe even at home.
Women need a Sabbath rest from that constant monitoring of their surroundings; it’s exhausting.
White gay men then need to remember (which I learned from my Black friends) one of the continuing mechanisms of white supremacy in the modern Western world: feminizing Black men—not only are they not white, they aren’t even manly.
Living not only in an LGBT resort town, but in a region that is 99.9% white, it’s painful to realize that my Black friends would not feel particularly comfortable visiting this lovely shoreline region. To be clear, I’m not actually worried that any of the people I know here would pose a physical threat to people of color. The point, rather, is that we live in a cultural system that trains us, all of us, not to trust those who are different from us.
We all need a Sabbath rest from these racial suspicions and ethnic divisions—they are tearing us apart.
And that’s the politics of the Sabbath we all need to practice. When we do, when we actually try to observe the Sabbath each week, we’re not just trying to follow a rule. We are rehearsing and preparing for the great Sabbath Day still to come.
In Christian traditions this is sometimes called the “Eighth Day,” not the first day of creation, as if we’re starting over with a blank slate, nor only the seventh day of temporary rest, but rather God’s own Sabbath Day, the very purpose for which God made the world to begin with.
That is the Great Day when no one is afraid; that day when everyone feels loved and safe; that day when no one has to be anxious for the future because it is God’s own Sabbath “without end,” as Augustine said many centuries ago.
We start to believe this, and we come to trust in it, and we find that Great Day shaping how we live and reordering our relationships and infusing our civic engagements with prophetic urgency when we practice Sabbath rest on a weekly basis.
That’s why God commanded it. That’s what it means to keep the Sabbath “holy.”
When we do this together, when we help each other practice Sabbath politics, we cultivate our shared hope for that great Eighth Day of Sabbath Joy still to come.