Chill
Do you take breaks? Do you get the right amount of rest? Probably, you cheat yourself in these areas. The Hebrew tradition puts to rest the category of a divine commandment. The tradition is both a spiritual and a practical blessing to people.
The formal practice is to put aside work for a whole day, linking it to the story of creation in which God worked, creating for six days, then rested on the seventh day. It is not unusual for modern people to exhaust themselves from Friday through Saturday with work, or with very laborious amusements. People often say they need rest from the weekend. One day I will develop this theme fully, and recommend some corrections because we are not helping our bodies, souls, and spirits by eliminating rest from our lives.
My brief recommendation is that sabbath needs to be woven into our lives through a variety of rhythms. Of course, the idea of a day of rest addresses the rhythm of the week: work six days, rest one. I don’t know anyone who does this well and with careful intention. I think we should do this and more. A siesta could bless the day. A sabbath could bless the week. Retreats once or twice a year would bless us. A vacation could bless the year. (I am working to become regular with meditation—half hour session in the morning and another in the late afternoon. Pray for me; it is not easy. The practice is simple in nature, but difficult in implementation.) All will improve if we find ways to discover the sabbath in various increments within our lives.
The word “sabbath” comes up in Bible a lot. On the Sunday coming (The Eleventh after Pentecost), we hear Scripture lessons for Year C – Proper 16. In them, the observance of the sabbath comes up in the Gospel according to Luke, and in The Book of Isaiah. The Prophet is stressing to the people that if they honor the sabbath and delight in it, good things will come of it, such as fulfillment and security:
If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 58:13-14)
The fourth commandment on the tablets from God, brought from Mount Sinai by Moses contains the injunction to remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11) The Creator rested; we too must rest. When something is holy, it means it is set apart as special, even sacred. The Sabbath was prescribed for human beings as rest. We keep it holy, when we set it apart, and treat it as different from other days. In the practice of ancient Hebrews straight through to Jewish practice today, the sixth day is honored as a day of rest.
Some are flexible about it, and some are strict. The Isaiah passage above warns against trampling the sabbath by filling it with things that advance your own causes. The Jewish sabbath begins with sundown on Friday and goes to nightfall on Saturday. The entrance into the sabbath day, therefore, is the lighting of the two “Shabbat candles,” a meal and a night of sleep. Physical work is avoided the following day. As one might imagine, much interpretation is brought to the matter of what constitutes work that would dishonor the Sabbath. That is where we come to the Gospel account. In this story, the leader of one of the synagogues was deriding Jesus for having cured a woman crippled for eighteen years. The work of curing was, in his estimation a breaking of the commandment. Jesus reminded the leader about the extenuating circumstances that allowed them to care for valuable animals:
But the Lord answered him and said, "You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?" When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing. (Luke 13:15-17)
Jesus has this strong answer for the obvious reason that the leader seems to care more about a fussy interpretation of sabbath tradition than for the wellbeing of a daughter of the village. Jesus might also have suspected that the leader cared more about entrapping him than about the life-changing kindness given to the woman.
Looking at the Isaiah passage and the Luke passage together, we might hold up this wisdom: it is a danger to our souls to ignore a divine gift that would bless us, and a danger to apply a holy practice rigidly in a literal way that erases our kind attention to fellow human beings. In either case, for our soul’s sake, we need to learn to chill.