“The righteous man will flourish like the palm tree,
He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
Planted in the house of the Lord,
They will flourish in the courts of our God.
They will still yield fruit in old age;
They shall be full of sap and very green,
To declare that the Lord is upright;
He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”
Psalm 92:12-15
Human flourishing doesn’t happen by default. We are too distracted and too intrigued. There are just too many aspects of living in the 21st century that keeps us tied to things that ultimately don’t lead to flourishing.
The Problem. As we pursue material and spatial advancement as the ultimate priority, we sacrifice the one element that God sanctified as holy. Abraham Heschel captures the problem by stating,
“Technical civilization is man’s quest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective. Yet to have more does not mean to be more. The power we attain in the world of space terminates abruptly at the borderline of time.”[1]
What happens when our central aims are the material and spatial elements of life, we undercut the purpose of our existence within eternity. Heschel states, “Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thingness is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify as a thing, as a matter of fact.”[2]
Thus, to pursue things within space to neglect time, according to Heschel, leads to blindness to something outside of space, namely, time.
One Solution. That is why we need a healthy rhythm of rest, and we understand rest by understanding God made us for work. Without rest, we will not effectively work. Without work, we will not understand rest. Rest and work are not mutually exclusive but critical to flourishing. About Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, Dorothy Bass states, “Together, these two renderings of the commandment summarize the most fundamental stories and beliefs of the Hebrew Scriptures: creation and exodus, humanity in God’s image and a people liberated from captivity. One emphasizes holiness, the other social justice. Sabbath crystallizes Torah’s portrait of who God is and what human beings are most fully meant to be.”[3] Therefore, at the core of sabbath rest is a move toward God and my neighbor. But, this journey will have challenges both outside me (in the form of distractions) and inside me (in the form of selfish ambition). We need a better vision for biblical rest. We need a better understanding of work.
And so, when we rest biblically, we can work as unto the Lord. When we work as unto the Lord, we can rest biblically. This rhythm keeps us on the path of flourishing, and when we flourish, all the environments around us have the potential to grow into health and beauty. Bass rightly concludes that “To keep Sabbath is to practice receptivity, to open ourselves to the grace of God and to offer in grateful return only ourselves. Within this practice, the Christian community tells the truth: we will never finish all that we want or need or have to do, but God loves us anyway. Pausing for Sabbath rest, we take time to remember also our love for God.”[4]
Thus, a work-rest rhythm rooted in a trust-pause expression leads to a journey toward loving God and my neighbor.
Considerations for this week:
- What has been your experience of rest?
- How would you define rest?
- How do the answers to those two questions inform your “ideal” of rest?
- How might rest guide me toward fulfilling the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor (Matt. 22:36-40)?
[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), 3.
[2] Heschel, 5.
[3] Dorothy C Bass, “Christian Formation in and for Sabbath Rest,” Interpretation 59, no. 1 (January 2005): 29.
[4] Bass, 37.
— May 19, 2022