Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
As our family prepares to travel this summer, I have been particularly interested in one aspect of the places we will visit. As some of you might guess, my big question is “What’s the fishing like?” England, of course, is where fly-fishing was invented, so the prospects there seem particularly attractive.
However, as we web-surfed some Great Britain fishing information, Beth came across a stunning fact: In Scotland, fishing is prohibited by law on Sundays! Despite what you saw in that wonderful film “A River Runs Through It,” apparently most Scottish Presbyterians feel that casting a line for a few hours on Sunday afternoon is a violation of the Sabbath.
Whether or not you are either Scottish or a fisherman, you probably have a little acquaintance with restrictions on Sunday activity. Some of you remember being forbidden to attend movies on the Lord’s Day. Sports and other games were also out. In my lifetime I can remember a good number of stores being closed on Sunday. Some states still have restrictions on Sunday liquor sales. The day that many take to be the Christian Sabbath was hedged about with rules to keep the day holy. It was all based on the Fourth Commandment.
Over the centuries, Jewish people developed this commandment into a detailed system of rules and ritual designed to insure full compliance. Regulations were developed for what could be done to bring food to the table, for how far you could walk on that day, and for the amount of weight you were allowed to carry without it becoming work. The result was a complicated and burdensome code of conduct which Orthodox Jews still observe.
In our Easter text from Matthew, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary waited until Sunday to visit Jesus’ tomb because on Saturday they were keeping the Sabbath. They wished to do the traditional women’s work of anointing and preparing His body to be buried, but there was no time for it before the Sabbath began on Friday evening. So they went at the first daylight opportunity they had, on Sunday morning. Even caring for the body of their dear departed Master could not take precedence over keeping the seventh day holy.
Christians also accepted the idea of a holy day. That is how we arrived at “blue laws” like Scotland’s Sunday fishing prohibition. The earliest Christians began meeting together on the first day of the week. Eventually it was felt that Sunday had replaced Saturday as the divinely appointed day of rest. So Christians began to develop a concept of Sunday which was every bit as legalistic and rule-guided as the Jewish Sabbath. No commerce, no games, no trips to the beach. Go to church, read your Bible and think about your relationship with God. That was what Sundays were for.
Despite the heaviness of those Sabbath rules, there is something nostalgic and sweet about the idea of a day without the worry and busyness that characterize our lives. We may chafe at the idea of being forbidden to do whatever we wish on Sunday, but the rules that Jews and Christians created for the Sabbath were all based on something fundamental. The Fourth Commandment was given because of a basic human need.
In a Methodist church in Minneapolis, there is a beautiful stained glass window of Jesus ascending. It was given in memory of the Hugh Galbraith Harrison family. A brochure there in the church tells their story.
In 1850 the Harrisons headed for California with hundreds of others hoping to strike it rich in the gold rush. They and several other families in wagons started out together. However, the Harrisons quickly made the decision that they would stop and not travel on Sundays. Every seven days, as they sat and read their Bibles and worshipped on the first day of the week, wagon after wagon would roll by, leaving them in clouds of dust.
Yet something interesting happened. Because of that day of rest each Sunday, the Harrisions and their animals moved more quickly the rest of the week. Their wagon not only caught up to the others, but by the end of the journey the Harrisons were passing slower moving wagons. They were the first to arrive in California![1]
Human beings function best in a cycle of life that includes a day of rest once each seven days. A Sabbath of rest makes us healthier, stronger, and more alert the rest of the week. We were created by God to benefit when we follow His own example of resting one day out of every seven. From that perspective is easier to understand how all those rules and regulations could grow up around the Sabbath. Those who created the rules were trying their best to preserve something vital to our well-being.
Complicated rules for keeping the Sabbath, therefore, are a desperate attempt to maintain that respite from work and worry. Because the rules often become as much of a burden as was the work they try to escape, the attempt seldom succeeds. Very few of us would want to return to long, dull Sunday afternoons when everything is forbidden.
However, almost anyone would welcome the opportunity for a real time of rest. All the evidence shows that Americans work longer hours today than they did a few year ago. Communication technology has made it almost impossible to take a break from the demands of one’s employment. It used to be only physicians who had to be available at a moment’s notice, but cell phones have placed people in every line of work on 24-hour call.
The last time I was in an airport I stopped to use the restroom. In one of the stalls was a salesman holding a lengthy phone conversation, delivering the latest statistics to his home office. I could picture him sitting there, laptop computer balanced on one knee, phone held to his ear, diligently completing two kinds of business at once. His voice on the phone didn’t even pause while he flushed the toilet! Even that most basic sort of five-minute break from work is literally going down the drain.
It is no wonder, then, that so many of us feel ourselves to be in a constant state of exhaustion. We go from working at our jobs to working at home with scarcely any break or differentiation between the two. The rest which is so fundamental to human happiness and well-being eludes us week after week. Real peace and rest is very hard to find.
So I believe many of you here today are in need of rest. It is not just work that wearies us, but all kinds of struggle and trouble. Some of you need rest from the discomforts of chronic illness. Some of you long for a respite from financial worries. Some are weary of constant family conflicts. And a few of you wish for relief and rest from the pain of grief and loss. That is how the two women came to Jesus’ tomb on Easter.
Imagine the horrible tension as the disciples and the women waited through the trial of Jesus, fearing for Him and afraid they themselves might be arrested. Picture how they shuddered with horror as they watched Jesus stumble up the crucifixion hill, where soldiers then laid Him down on the wood and pounded nails through His hands and feet. Then contemplate how they stood to the side for three hours watching Jesus struggle to breathe as He hung on the Cross. Think how they cried and cried when He took the last breath and it was over. It was an ordeal that emotionally traumatized them.
Their Sabbath would have provided no relief the next day. The disciples would have spent those hours in a dark haze of grief. The women in particular would have fretted and wept because the body had to be left uncared for. The burial was not complete. They could not have slept or rested at all well those two nights. There had been no closure, as we say today. So on Sunday the women walked to the cemetery garden exhausted, worn out and not yet recovered from Friday’s horrible events.
Mary Magdalene and the other Mary probably hoped for and expected to find a kind of peace and rest there at the tomb. Jesus would be lying quietly and they would insure that His body was properly anointed and arranged in the cold stillness of the stone compartment. Then they themselves could go home and finally rest.
I believe that our own inability to find rest has led our society to seek it where those women did. Unable to rest in life, we have become fascinated with the idea of rest in death. A constant theme of imagined death confronts us on television and in the movies. But even worse, through abortion and assisted suicide death is embraced in reality as a genuine solution to the hardships of life. With no Sabbath on which to rest in peace, it is as if “Rest in Peace” written on a gravestone has become an attractive possibility.
However, as still and peaceful a place as a cemetery can be, there is no real rest there. The bodies are still, yes. There is an end to all activity, yes. And, yes, nothing disturbs those who reside there in the vaults or beneath the marble and the grass. But it is not rest.
To rest means to recuperate one’s energy to act and move once again. You rest and then get up and go on with life. The Sabbath was one day out of seven. In resting on that day, God’s people were to find spiritual renewal to continue living for another week. The purpose was not a final end to activity, but to regain life so that one’s activities could be resumed with new vigor and joy.
Therefore death is only rest if death is not the end of the story. In a novel I once read I remember a character standing at a graveside and reflecting on whether the woman who had just been buried was now at rest. But he did not believe in any life after death. So he came to the conclusion that she now had no more rest than she had in life. Oblivion, he thought, is not the same as rest. It is only rest if something comes afterward.
Kids partly grasp all this. Little children resist naps and bedtime as if they are death itself. My wife Beth tells how at age 3 she once tried to get out of her nap by dressing up in her cowboy outfit and pretending to her mother that she was not, in fact, Beth at all, but some other person who did not need a nap. It didn’t work. But children have a sense that to lay down and surrender to sleep is to lose something. Their lives are yet so short that they cannot see ahead to the play and fun that will come when they are awake again.
As adults we lie down to sleep more gladly and gratefully. We know that the night is always followed by a new morning of activity and so we gladly give up our labors for a few hours. Our inactivity is not permanent and so it is welcome. It is rest because we know that more life is to follow. Rest is only true rest if we can see a purpose and an end to it.
That is why what happened to those first century women on the Day we are celebrating is absolutely crucial to the Christian idea of Sabbath. Only the fact that they came on the first day of the week and found an empty tomb gives you and I any reason to observe a Sabbath today. Only Easter gives our search for real and complete rest any hope, any foundation in reality.
If the body of Jesus merely remained in the tomb, then neither He nor anyone else ever rested in a grave. If Christ is not risen, then cemeteries are not places of quiet peace, but places of desolate emptiness. Without the hope of rising once again with Jesus, there is no hope of real rest there or anywhere.
Therefore Easter completely changed the idea of Sabbath for Christians. Most obviously it changed the day. At first, Jewish Christians probably observed both the Saturday Sabbath and Sunday, perhaps worshipping on Sunday evening. But it was gradually understood that because Jesus had risen from the dead on Sunday, that day alone had significance for us. Sunday became the Christian holy day and the traditional time of worship for almost all who followed Jesus.
Yet Sunday was not exactly the Christian substitute for a Saturday Sabbath. Christians made a mistake when they attempted to copy Jewish Sabbath regulations and turn Sunday into a carefully prescribed and guarded day of rest. The Fourth Commandment as we read it today mostly looks backward to the story of creation, and God’s own rest on the seventh day. It is a commandment aimed at life in this world, to rest that prepares a person for another week. But Christian worship on Sunday also looks forward. It is a day aimed at life eternal, a day which recalls that Jesus Christ rose from His rest in the grave and that we look forward in Him to rising from our graves as well.
So some of the first Christians came to call Sunday not the seventh day or the first day, but the eighth day, the “eighth day of creation.” By raising Jesus from the dead, God has remade and completed everything begun when He first made the world in seven days. Sunday is not just a different Sabbath, but a new Sabbath, a new beginning for us all.
That is why on this Easter Sunday I would not want anyone to leave here without knowing that a new beginning to your own life is possible. If you find yourself literally restless in the way I have described; if you would dearly love to find a time of peace; if the way you live your life has exhausted you without any hope of real rest, then I ask you to consider the Sabbath peace which you can find in Jesus.
When Jesus died on the Cross He carried all those things which keep us from peace: our fears, our worries, and most especially our guilt. He took it all upon Himself. Then lying down in His tomb, He laid all of it to rest. When you believe in Jesus, then you may believe that all the worst of your life, the worst of you, died with Him when He died. That means that you yourself can rest in the death of Jesus.
But it is real rest. There is a morning of waking. God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, and when you put your faith in Him, you are raised too into a new life. It is a life which begins now, but which goes on and on into eternity. It is a life which changes your grave too into merely a resting place. That life is yours simply by believing and praying something like this, “Lord, I believe that Jesus died on the Cross and rose again to bring me peace. Let me rest in Him and begin living in His life today.”
And when you live in the this new life you get from Jesus, then Sunday rest will have a new significance. Yes, enjoying a day without work will refresh you and make you better able to cope with the rest of the week. It makes sense on a purely practical level. But even more, a Sunday of worship and peaceful, playful activity will remind you that your life is eternal, that you look forward to a Sabbath of peace and joy which will have no end.
As well as England, our family looks forward to traveling to Greece this summer. Beth and I were able to go there once before, eighteen years ago. We remember very well our first day. We arrived in Athens after a horrible plane trip. The flight left late from New York. It was a small plane and many of the passengers were Greek and smoked heavily. Two thirds of the way there, the flight attendant announced that the toilet tanks were full and the toilets were out of order for the rest of the trip. That aroma began to mingle with the smoke. Even the flight attendants lost their professional courtesy and began to be rude and surly with the passengers and each other.
In Athens we rented a car and began to drive out of the city to our first night’s stay in a little town on the coast. We had been awake for over twenty-four hours and just wanted to get there and crash, but we quickly found ourselves snarled in unbelievable traffic circling a roundabout.
We finally got out of the city and turned onto a small highway. It was midday, the sun was very hot and we were now both tired and thirsty. We had only a few miles to go, but my eyes were drooping shut as I steered. So at the first little store I spotted by the side of the road we stopped, pulled out our phrase book and tried to communicate our need by saying Dipso, “I am thirsty.” We expected to get a bottle of pop and be on our way.
But a little Greek woman led us into a shady arbor beside their store and sat us down at a table. She put cool glasses of water on the table before us, a sign of the deepest hospitality in Greece. She then sat down and tried to talk with us, though she spoke no English and we no Greek. We relaxed, unwound and began to feel human again. For the first time we felt welcome in that country. We got up revived and able to go on.
Keeping Sunday as our Lord’s Day is the Christian’s opportunity for a reviving stop on our way through this world. The journey can be very hard, can leave us worn and weary to where we feel that we cannot go on any longer. But by pausing to remember that Christ is risen we may go on, traveling in new strength toward our own rising in Him. Not only Easter, but every Sunday is the “Day of Resurrection.” Let us rest in Him and then rise up in Him, filled with the life He brings us.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj