Rest for Everyone (No Really): A Reflection on Deuteronomy 5.12-15 and Mark 2.23-3.6

There was an article in the news the other day referring to life in our current moment as “The Great Exhaustion.” On top of all of the normal concerns of work and home life, we’re all still dealing with the deep fatigue of the 2020 pandemic, the toxic political climate it released, a cost of living crisis, and of course the increasingly undeniable and devastating realities of climate change. And so, we’re all just exhausted. In light of this, it seems to me, talk (and action) about the importance of rest is more important and relevant than ever. And as it happens, today’s assigned readings have a lot to say about this topic.

The first reading, from Deuteronomy 5, talks about the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy as a day of rest:

Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. (Deuteronomy 5.12-15)

This is the second time the Sabbath commandment is explained. And the differences between them are telling. In Exodus it reads:

Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it. (Exodus 20.8-11)

This is the more famous version of the commandment. It introduces it, explains its parameters and that it’s intended for every living thing, and grounds it in creation theology: As God rested on the seventh day so should we rest every seventh day.

But we humans have a seemingly unlimited ability to rationalize our way out of anything. And from the Deuteronomy text we can see — almost comically — what part of it the people were struggling to get: It’s for everybody and everybody means everybody. Everyone — livestock, foreigners, enslaved persons — everyone is entitled to a day of rest. God commands it. Deuteronomy even replaces the rationale for Sabbath rest with a rationale for why it must include slaves: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt…”

But hoarding blessings for ourselves aren’t the only way we tend to ruin a good thing. And today’s Gospel reading shows another example of Sabbath-keeping gone wrong:

One sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?” And he said to them, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.” Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (Mark 2.23-4.6)

Here we have Jesus and his disciples gleaning from the fields (see Leviticus 19.9 for the establishment of gleaning rights in the Old Testament Law) on the Sabbath. But the Pharisees, those great self-appointed protectors of the Law, accuse them of breaking the Sabbath. Jesus rejects their accusation, not because the Sabbath is unimportant to him, but because he insists that the Sabbath was never intended to be a burden. It’s intended to be a blessing. He argues that, just as it was right for David to eat bread reserved for priests when starving, so too is it right to do necessary work for living — eating, letting the animals out, and so on — on the Sabbath. It was meant to be a blessing, not a burden: “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath”.

To prove his point, he then goes into a synagogue and heals a man. It is this act of compassion that, in Mark’s Gospel, sets off the authorities’ plots against Jesus. When given the choice between celebrating this obvious good thing Jesus did and protecting their narrow, legalistic understanding of righteousness, the Pharisees doubled down on their legalism. Again it has to be said that the Pharisees are not unique here. In the Gospels, they stand in for universal human tendencies towards legalism and restriction — that part of us that only wants God to bless those we want blessed, and only in the ways we expect and fit our existing understanding.

The point of this story is that rest is important, but if we set up so many rules around it that we make it seem like work, or we end up saying ‘no’ to things that should be obvious and clear ‘yeses’ (hungry people being able to eat, people being healed, and so on), we’ve missed the point entirely.

So what do these lessons tell us in our Great Exhaustion? First, rest is important, for everyone. Rest is important for workaholic CEOs, entry-level service workers, care-givers, parents, kids, everyone. Real rest. Not programmed-within-an-inch-of-our-lives leisure. But secondly, we can’t get too precious about it or set up so many rules around it that ceases to be restful. A day of rest isn’t to be an idol. It’s to be a blessing.

Wishing us all a restful week.