The Modern Plague: We are Desperate for Rest

Rest is sacred.It teaches us to look toward our final home. If we neglect to rest, how then shall we reach it?

BETHPAGE, TN (Catholic Online) - Chronically stressed, exhausted, and busy, we moderns still frown on rest as if it were an extravagant luxury rather than the Creator's gift. Schedules are packed with noise and frenetic, meaningless activity, and perpetual competition to see who has the most toys, and who does the most in the least time and with the least amount of sleep. In consequence, we become like the living dead, in bondage to our every whim and wondering why.

God has something to say about stress and busyness, because much of our Western depression, anxiety, exhaustion, worry, debt, greed, and other forms of spiritual and financial slavery result from a habitual, national and individual profaning of the Lord's Day, a day rooted in the Jewish Sabbath. The book of Nehemiah illustrates one shocking consequence of Sabbath neglect.

Nehemiah was burdened to restore the City of God, Jerusalem, to its proper place of glory and honor. That meant rebuilding the city, the temple, and the wall around it. About a hundred years before, the Babylonians had destroyed the city and taken the Jews captive, leaving the temple ransacked and in ruins.

Nehemiah explained that to buy and sell on the Sabbath was to profane it, or to make it ordinary, and warned that the nation had been conquered and the city ruined because of unrepented ancestral profaning of the Sabbath; that, in fact, the Israelites had remained in exile until the land had recovered the Sabbaths missed due to their neglect (2 Chron. 36:21).

The issue was so serious, Nehemiah shut and locked the city gates and threatened to beat anyone attempting to enter and trade on that day, in order to prevent further profaning of the Sabbath and the resulting judgment. Nehemiah taught that people and nations who neglected the Sabbath were conquered by other people and nations.

The prophet Ezekiel also warned about Sabbath neglect, clarifying that it was the peoples' defiling the Sabbath that contributed to a generation's forfeit of the Promised Land (chapter 20). Later, in the book of Hebrews, we learn that the Promised Land was a type of rest prefiguring our final heavenly rest (chapters 3-4).

The word "Sabbath" means "rest," and the Fourth Commandment gave instructions regarding this Sabbath rest (Ex. 20:8-11). Everyone and everything participated: land, man, and beast. The people were commanded to "remember" the Sabbath by resting from their work on that day in order to keep it holy, meaning "different," and because it was a sign of the covenant.

It was the Lord's Sabbath because it was He who first blessed it and set it apart (Ex. 31:16-17) by resting after six creative days. The word "rested" here means to "desist from exertion," while "refreshed" means "to catch one's breath." This divine "rest" was not inactivity, but a satisfaction in what was created and worked, the culmination of which was man.

Its observance was also closely tied to the liberation of Israel from Egypt, so that the people were to remember their redemption each week as they rested (Deut. 5:12). A solemn and irrevocable observance, the Sabbath was so powerful a grace that neglecting it would somehow harm the people, so that it carried with it a strong warning of observance.

Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath (Mk 2:28), interpreted and fulfilled the Sabbath. he explained that it is a gift to man from God that should only be superseded by real need. In doing so He also restored freedom to its observance and protected its integrity.

In addition, "when Christians spoke of the 'Lord's Day', they did so giving to this term the full sense of the Easter proclamation: 'Jesus Christ is Lord.' Thus Christ was given the same title which the Septuagint used to translate what in the revelation of the Old Testament was the unutterable name of God: YHWH" [translated Lord] (Dies Domini, "The Lord's Day", John Paul II).

The Sabbath, the sign of the first Covenant, is the shadow of the new and final Covenant in Jesus Christ, the true Sabbath. The works of creation and redemption are most fully manifested through His death and resurrection, so that "For us, the true Sabbath is the person of our Redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ" (St. Gregory).

"Sunday [then,] fulfills the spiritual truth of the Jewish Sabbath and announces man's eternal rest in God. The Sabbath, which represented the completion of the first creation, has been replaced by Sunday which recalls the new creation inaugurated by the Resurrection of Christ" (CCC 2175, 2190).

A way of worshipping and keeping sacred time with God, Sunday celebrates a week in which we worked, and God worked with us, for God is always at work (Jn. 5:17).It also begins a new week, as the first day. It is a day to direct our attention to what God is doing; it is all God's work, after all. He works, keeps order, and provides now through us as we live our lives now in the Church which is the Body of Christ.

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The recurring Sunday invitation and opportunity to worship, slow down and notice, pay attention to, and assimilate the week's work, God's work, is God's gift to us. It is a celebration in which we orient ourselves and our labor toward His greater work so we can move into the new week with fresh body, spirit and perspective, nourished by the Eucharist and renewed in His rest.

The earth and its restless inhabitants, land, man and beast, desperately need Sunday to recover from a week of industrious activity and as a discipline against the frantic race to accumulate that which cannot nourish or satisfy. The "Sabbath" is a protest against hurry for us. It is a beautiful object lesson of perfect law, perfect order, and perfect method: six days of work carefully planned, scheduled and completed, followed by perfect rest.

Neglecting to honor Sunday as the Lord's Day, is a symptom of far greater spiritual illness. To attend Mass and yet neglect the "rest" of the Lord's Day betrays confusion, impatience for restful growth, and lack of definite method. It mistakes ambition for inspiration, and seeks to substitute wasted human energy for a defined and inspired plan of life, never realizing that slow, careful foundation work is the quickest in the end.

In the race for wealth, men sacrifice time, energy, health, home, happiness, spirit, and heaven--everything money cannot buy, and the very things money can never bring back. Hurry is so often the death blow to grace, calmness, dignity, poise, rest and true freedom. We must not be impatient, chafing at a Sunday's delay, fretting over failure, wearying over results, another victim to the craze for speed. In our hurry to obtain some ambition we bring destruction upon ourselves, our health, and our families.

We must embrace all that the Sunday reality means, for it is a sign and memorial of that creative power that delivers us from sin unto the new creation and is able to make all things good. New Testament redemption is this new creation, involving the entire cosmos (Rom. 8:18-28). It is an eternal Sabbath, a restoration of wholeness, health, wellness, and peace in Christ. Our hope is not simply heaven, it is the final Sabbath rest: the new creation and resurrection which has begun and now is, lived in our communion in Him. Understood and lived in this context, Sunday is the soul of the week.

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The Church, ever consistent and wise, stipulates that true Sunday observance includes rest from labor. Aren't the words "rest from labor" refreshing? What a gift, especially in these anxious, modern days. God has always provided a day to worship, but part of worship has always included the observance of rest. What could possibly be burdensome about a weekly day to relax and worship and do nothing else?

We must make a deliberate effort to return Sunday to its rightful day of rest if we are to benefit from its blessings. Sabbath keepers were said to be blessed. They received an eternal reward (Is. 56). They experienced healing, deliverance, satiation, glory, plenty, greatness and abundant life (Is. 58, Ez. 20). For the Christian, this is what Sunday is, a weekly Easter celebration of Resurrection.

Rest is sacred. Cook, do laundry, and mow the grass on Saturday. Spend your Sunday, after Mass, in the hammock, on the couch, playing catch with the kids. "Do not be afraid to give your time to Christ" (DD, JPII)! Take a nap. Read a book; because "in returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength" (Is. 30:15). This rest reminds us of and teaches us to look toward our final home. If we neglect to rest, how then shall we reach it?

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Sonja Corbitt is a Catholic Scripture teacher, study author and speaker. She is a contributing writer for Catholic Online. Visit her at www.pursuingthesummit.com and www.pursuingthesummit.blogspot.com.

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