Everywhere we glance we see people pushing themselves—their bodies, their minds, and their capability for faithfulness and fruitfulness—to the limit. In some ways, society incentivizes this “to the limit” lifestyle: If you should get ahead, it’s the worth to pay.
But in other ways, society demands this lifestyle. People at the underside of our socioeconomic ladder feel this most acutely, yet nobody is immune. No matter the rationale, we’re trapped by our systems of productivity, and we take as much as we will from ourselves, burning the proverbial candle at each ends.
If you’ve ever thought, Enough is enough!—quietly protesting demands your body cannot meet—you actually aren’t alone. I usually wrestle with these feelings, sorting through my values and priorities, wondering if I’m conceding an excellent and whole life to the superficial aspirations of an unrelenting consumer society.
This is why I find myself grateful for the gift of Sabbath. Sabbath is God’s way of claiming, Enough is enough.
Sabbath is an invite to orient our lives around a unique rhythm of practice, one which recognizes the moral limit to what we should always expect our bodies and our lives to provide, and to the profit potential we should always extract from ourselves and others.
Walter Brueggemann reminds us that Sabbath is framed through the stories of each Creation and Exodus. The Scriptures first frame the seventh day as God resting from the work of creation (Gen. 1). Is this because God lacks the capability to proceed? Hardly! Instead, God models for all of creation the concept there may be an ethical limit to the demands of production. God invites people to hitch in his rest as a way of taking enjoyment of creation. The seventh day is an everyday rhythmic reminder of God’s abundance, and it’s an invite to rejoice.
The Scriptures also frame Sabbath as an easy response to God’s liberation of the people from slavery in Egypt (Deut. 5). Against the backdrop of generations of economic exploitation, where God’s people were counted as units of production constructing the storehouses of Pharoah’s wealth, Sabbath is equally God’s invitation to experience freedom and restoration from the consequences of immoral extraction and unjust exploitation.
Sabbath finds its meaning within the generative and liberative power of God. Perhaps for this reason the command of Exodus 20:8 is to “remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy.” The set-apart sacredness of Sabbath is supposed to be a consistent rehearsal of the grand story of God and our invitation to hitch it.
Practicing Sabbath involves patterns of life that enjoyment of God’s abundance and put ourselves within the stream of God’s restoration. Those one-day-in-seven spiritual practices of Sabbath do well to orient us away from the demands of production and to assist foster a lifetime of celebration and restoration.
But there may be more to it than that, because Sabbath is just not only for individuals; Sabbath is for the people.
Sabbath was not designed by God for isolated individuals but as a reset for the community. Beyond the laws governing the weekly day of rest, scriptural Sabbath practice included an everyday rhythm of society-wide redress of economic injustice.
Every seven years, God demanded that debts be forgiven—a way of ensuring the poor weren’t exploited. Even more, God demanded that debts not only be cleaned but, because those debts often got here from personal economic calamity, include lavishing gifts of wealth on former debtors. These gifts were celebrations of abundance (there’s good enough to go around) and simple ways of creating sure the economically vulnerable were restored back to fuller participation within the economic lifetime of this ancient society.
Beyond debts, enslaved people were to be freed, placing a limit on the profit that might be extracted from them. And, finally, land was to be given a yearlong rest: a reminder that God gives good enough in creation, and a season for the land to recoup from its ailing use and the overtaxation accrued over the previous six years. Considering all of the ways a society can reap the benefits of the economic lives of the poor and vulnerable, Sabbath was God’s way of prioritizing freedom and restoration for everybody in society.
I find myself wondering how much of that communal nature of Sabbath works its way into our practice today. Certainly, a few of our leading guides on the character and practice of Sabbath—like Walter Brueggemann, Dorothy Bass, and plenty of others—are wanting to indicate the communal implications of Sabbath and the best way Sabbath critiques and calls the injustice in our society (and within the church) to account.
But unless our Sabbath practice stretches beyond the private and imagines after which dares to enact ways of extending the abundance and restoration of God to probably the most economically vulnerable—and most easily exploited—in our communities, I fear we miss the fullness of God’s intentions for Sabbath.
We stand to learn much from those whose work raises our collective consciousness toward the experience of the poor and the interconnected nature of our lives in a shared society. This is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “single garment of destiny” idea at work. Or Melba Padilla Maggay’s notion that “one person’s deprivation is a sign of the guilt and humiliation of all.” Like the prophet Jeremiah told the people of God in Babylonian exile, human flourishing is a shared responsibility (Jer. 29:7). The suffering of some extends to us all, particularly when that suffering is because of participation in a society that extracts and exploits.
Sabbath is a way for all of the people to please in divine abundance. It is just not simply a No to unjust and unhealthy ways, but a redirection of how, and to what, we are saying Yes.
What would change about our Christian witness and practice if we resolved to carve out a lifestyle on the earth that celebrated God’s abundance and that experienced God’s restoration in a way that centered the experience of those on the economic margins of our society? How could our practice of Sabbath rest foster a type of holy unrest toward the ways people and places are exploited and toward the barriers that keep so many from experiencing God’s abundance of their lives?
Taking Sabbath seriously enough to account for its economic implications for our life and witness as Christians might involve grappling with what it signifies that Jesus is “Lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5). Here evidently Jesus is doing what he does with other OT themes: In coming to not abolish the law but to meet it (Matt. 5:17), Jesus isn’t putting these ancient ideas to rest. Instead, Jesus is inhabiting these ideas in a recent way. Instead of simply enacting a rhythmic practice, Jesus embodies the ethos of Sabbath and ushers in a recent type of kingdom marked by the spirit and aim of Sabbath.
Jesus is making a world where the intentions of Sabbath—a perpetual enjoyment of God’s abundance, ongoing restoration of the exploited, and the inclusion of those on the margins to full participation in community—are characteristics of the best way of lifetime of God’s people on the earth.
We see this fashion of life enacted positively throughout the Book of Acts and elsewhere, as people live out Sabbath ethics in tangible ways. They create common pools of resources so that each one may share of their collective abundance (Acts 2:42–47). They adapt systems and structures to account for the care and flourishing of the poor and economically vulnerable (Acts 6:1–7). They consider how, within the case of Philemon, the fact of Christ causes the enslavement of Onesimus to ring discordant with the dominion ethics Jesus established.
On the opposite hand, Paul has harsh words for the Corinthian church regarding the corruption of the community based on the exclusion of the poor and working-class while the wealthy feast on their abundance (1 Cor. 11:17–22). This community was enacting a version of Sabbath ethics that undermines the brand new all-of-life reality Jesus establishes.
The world Jesus is bringing to bear on the earth is price our wholehearted investment, and the returns are abundant. The economic invitation of Sabbath is an invite to assist fashion a community where everyone, especially probably the most vulnerable, can taste and see that abundance and might experience the restorative work of God.
The invitation of a weekly rest is just not simply to stop and rest ourselves but to inhabit the world with a Sabbath imagination, daring to construct a world where, as Dorothy Bass says, “injustice wouldn’t occur.” Jesus intends for Sabbath to spill out from whatever rhythm of practice we put in place for ourselves, enlivening an ethical lens that helps us say, together with God, Enough is enough.
Adam Gustine is the writer of Becoming a Just Church: Cultivating Communities of God’s Shalom and co-author of Ecosystems of Jubilee: Economic Ethics for the Neighborhood. He works on the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, focused on scholarship in ethics and the promotion of human flourishing and the common good.
