Pushing Pause: Freedom to Rest

In part five of this series, Major Mat Badger moves to the New Testament and begins to look at the teachings of Jesus, who practised the Sabbath as a way of life. For Jesus, Sabbath wasn’t a command to keep but a way of being that brought life and freedom.

Who doesn’t want deep soul rest and intimacy with God? The Sabbath is a gift to us from the God who loves us and modelled rest for us. When we choose to receive it as a rhythm of life, Sabbath becomes an anchor point for our spiritual formation. And we are completely free to discern the Holy Spirit’s leading when it comes to how we practise Sabbath.

Lord of the Sabbath

Between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, 400 years had passed. Once again something of the initial intention behind Sabbath practice was lost over time. However, it’s not the failure to observe the Sabbath that causes problems this time, but an overly prescriptive set of rules about how to keep Sabbath.

Mark 2:23–24 reads, ‘One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”’

There is no law in the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament) about it being illegal to snack on the Sabbath. God is not anti-snack. However, while the Israelites of the Old Testament understood what constituted rest, given their many years of slavery and captivity, by Jesus’ time some ambiguity had crept in. What exactly constituted work? Is gardening work? Cooking? Walking? When does walking become exercise? Is exercise a form of rest or work? What about reading and learning?

Now, I love the ambiguity here because it gives us the freedom to be our unique selves. What might seem like work to me might be life-giving and a way of encountering God for someone else. This is something we can work out with God through the leading of the Holy Spirit; however, for those living in the time of Jesus, this ambiguity left too much room for accidently breaking the Sabbath— a risk the religious leaders took very seriously.

Don’t fence me in

It’s important to remember that Jesus himself may have been a Pharisee. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of the day—and the group he probably most identified with. When Jesus gets upset with them, his words are harsh, probably because he was speaking to them as one of their own. We also need to remember that the Pharisees’ intentions stemmed from a good place. Their genealogy goes back to Ezra, when Israel returned from captivity in Babylon. For all the right reasons initially, they did what theologians refer to as ‘building a fence’ around the Torah.

A modern-day illustration goes like this: You’re walking along one of New Zealand’s beautiful bush trails and you see a sign pointing to a waterfall. When you arrive, you find that the Department of Conservation has built a fence around it, the idea being to keep you safe and prevent you from accidently tripping and falling in. The same principle applies when the text says don’t ‘work’ but rather ‘rest’ on the Sabbath. The Israelites’ experience in captivity meant that the Pharisees stepped back and added hundreds of sub-clauses to the Law—613 to be exact.

It wasn’t God who did this, and the result was an overly prescribed set of rules called the Mishnah that included everything from what food you could cook to how far you could walk. The New Testament speaks of a ‘Sabbath day’s walk’, which was probably around 500 metres— a judgement call made to determine when a leisurely stroll became work. Over the generations, the original intent of a protective fence was lost and what was supposed to serve the people slowly became something that shackled them instead.

Jesus is pro-Torah but anti-Mishnah. And so, in Mark 2:24 when the Pharisees ask Jesus why his disciples were doing what was unlawful on the Sabbath, they were not breaking the Torah but the Mishnah. Jesus breaks the Mishnah to make a point.

Freedom to rest

We pick up the story in Mark 2:25–26, where Jesus responds with, ‘Have you never read…’ (This is a bit of classy sarcasm from Jesus as he speaks to a bunch of Torah nerds because of course they have read it) … ‘what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions’.

Jesus was making his case based on a citation from the Torah and effectively saying this is why what we did is okay. What he says next is one of Jesus’ most important teachings on the Sabbath. In Mark 2:27 he says, ‘The Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man [one of Jesus’ titles] is Lord [the boss] even of the Sabbath’. Essentially, Jesus was saying that the religious leaders had turned the Sabbath into a soul sucking legalistic rule.

However, here in 2024, we need to hear the first part of this teaching— the Sabbath was made for us. We have the exact opposite problem to the first century Jewish audience. It’s not that we have all these legalistic rules around the Sabbath, our problem is that we don’t have any at all. The society around us has absolutely no expectation around Sabbath observance—we are totally free to practise it or not. I would suggest that in the busyness of life, with its noise, alerts, notifications and many distractions, we need the practice of Sabbath more than ever before.

The Sabbath was designed to bring us a rich and deep well of refreshment. Sabbath is the only spiritual practice commanded in the Ten Commandments, because the implication is that when we practise it, we create unhurried space for other spiritual disciplines— prayer becomes easier and deeper; Bible reading becomes richer and revelatory; fasting eases into worship; and relationships strengthen.

And the presence of the Lord of the Sabbath becomes tangible as we follow his example and find a rhythm of regular rest.