Sabbath Rest and Hope
Karl Barth, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Discovering the Joys of the Sabbath
About the author: Nancy J. Duff is the Stephen Colwell Associate Prof. of Christian Ethics, Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary. She taught Christian Ethics at Princeton Seminary for 25 ½ years before retiring in December 2020. She published a book on death and dying titled Making Faithful Decisions at the End of Life (Westminster John Knox, 2018) and recently co-edited a book of Paul Lehmann's essays with Ry O. Siggelkow and Brandon K. Watson, The Revolutionary Gospel: Paul Lehmann and the Direction of Theology Today (Lexington/Fortress, 2022). She has served on the Ethics Committee at Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center for over 25 years and is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
According to Abraham Heschel, “the Sabbath is endowed with a felicity that enraptures the soul. … It is a day that can soothe all sadness away.”1 Karl Barth wrote that on the Sabbath, we can “celebrate, rejoice and be free, to the glory of God.”2 These powerful descriptions of the Sabbath, however, have not always rung true for me. As a child, Sundays with my grandparents in rural East Texas included worship services with long-winded preachers and Sunday afternoons with few distractions while adults took naps. So-called “blue laws” at the time meant theaters and most stores were closed. The few retail stores that were open posted a list of items that could not be purchased on Sunday, and anything of interest to me was on that list. Sunday was a boring day of too much time on my hands and nothing to do. Even Barth says that “Sabbath refreshment … cannot be worth much if all it means is that [we] need not work on Sunday.”3
My childhood experience and Barth’s warning stand in contrast with much of today’s culture. Most retail stores, theaters, and restaurants are open on Sundays. Professional, college, and high school sports are scheduled on Sundays. And many people use Sunday afternoons catching up on work. The “Sabbath is endowed with a felicity that enraptures the soul”? It is a day when we can “celebrate, rejoice and be free”? These words are not true for many of us, but perhaps Christians need to consider the beauty of the Sabbath that was so clear to Heschel and Barth.
The Old Testament scholar, Patrick Miller, says the Sabbath commandment is about what the community does with time.4 Sometimes the Christian church has observed the Sabbath as the last day of the week, the day of rest and peace. Other times, the church has observed the Sabbath as the first day of the week, the day of resurrection and hope for new beginnings. Hence, the Sabbath gives us the bookends of life itself where God has the last word when work is over and the first word as life is renewed. Those bookends are reflected in the two reasons the Bible gives us for observing the Sabbath. Exodus tells us to keep the Sabbath, because God rested on the seventh day; Sabbath points to our need to rest (Ex. 20:8–11). Deuteronomy tells us to observe the Sabbath, because God freed the Israelites from slavery; Sabbath points to freedom from bondage (Dt. 12:15). Sabbath brings peace born of rest and hope born of freedom and then infuses that peace and hope into our weekly lives and into the seasons of our lives. As Barth says, “the aim of the Sabbath commandment is that [humanity] shall give and allow the omnipotent grace of God to have the first and the last word at every point.”5 Unfortunately, many people’s lives are not infused with the peace and hope offered by the Sabbath.
On the one hand, some people enter a time of life empty of anything meaningful to do. This is often true of elderly residents of institutions that take care of the body but kill the soul; where days are scheduled around medication; where meals are offered when others say it is time to eat; and human encounter is replaced by endless hours of television. On the other hand, some people—by choice, necessity, or compulsion—have entered a time of endless work that still does not bring in enough income; or endless responsibilities that time cannot possibly accommodate; or fruitless attempts to fill the time with meaning through constant activity. In both cases, the rhythm of Sabbath rest and peace, of freedom and hope are destroyed. Because we are commanded to keep the Sabbath holy, the church is called to redeem the time for its own members and for those who live around us. We do not have to force our practices and beliefs on others (as Sunday closing laws did) to help redeem the time for those with too much rest imposed on them and for those for whom relentless labor produces its own kind of emptiness.
There are alternative ways to offer institutionalized care for our elders. For instance, there is an “Alzheimer’s village” in Amsterdam where people with dementia are not locked in their rooms with strangers for roommates. They eat according to their own schedules and freely walk about the village that includes a movie theater, a store, and a garden. Cameras monitor their movements, and caretakers, dressed in regular clothes, watch over them. This form of care will not allow people’s lives to fall into a season of meaningless rest, and encourages the church to support new and creative ways to redeem time for the older, more isolated and alone ones. And for those who are overworked, the church needs to confess that it has been complicit in the Protestant work ethic that endorses culture’s expectation of endless work to reach success. The church has not always spoken on behalf of those who labor long hours for poor wages with no time or resources for genuine rest. In our time, the church needs to speak out against the relaxation of child labor laws and inhumane practices such as those in Texas where construction workers can be denied water breaks even in the extreme heat. The Sabbath commandment encourages the church to work to ensure that the rhythms of rest and peace and of freedom and hope are available to all.
The Sabbath can also address death. Neurologist, Oliver Sacks, compared Sabbath rest with his impending death: “I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.” Knowing that our final Sabbath rest is with God does not take away the sting of death. But letting the Sabbath have the last word of peace, when all our work is done, and the first word of hope as we face our own mortality affirms that in Christ neither death nor life nor things present nor things to come can separate us from the love of God who created, redeems, and sustains us throughout our lives (Romans 8:38–39). At the close of each day and at the close of the last day, we say the prayer often invoked in evening services and at graveside:
O Lord, support us all the day long Until the shadows lengthen And the evening comes, And the busy world is hushed, And the fever of life is over, And our work is done. Then, in your mercy, Grant us a safe lodging, And a holy rest, And peace at the last.
We can add “and hope at the beginning,” because we know that our final resting place is not the grave. The only emptiness the Sabbath offers is the empty tomb. That the Sabbath is endowed with “a felicity that enraptures the soul” and is a time “to celebrate, rejoice and be free, to the glory of God” means we move into the rhythm of God’s first and last word, knowing that the Sabbath infuses the peace born of rest and the hope born of resurrection into our weekly lives, into the seasons of our lives, and into the life to come.
Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1951), 20.
Karl Barth, “The Holy Day,” The Doctrine of Creation, Church Dogmatics III.4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 47–72.
Barth, “The Holy Day,” 61.
Patrick D. Miller, The Ten Commandments: Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press), 120.
Barth, “The Holy Day,” 54.