What Easter Has To Do With Sabbath

Some years ago I ran a marathon. I was not prepared for the emotion of seeing the finish line. I learned that day that you run those 26 miles so that you can run the final 0.2. It’s still hard to describe the elation, relief, and the host of superlative emotions when you see the finish line. There’s something to both the practice of Sabbath and the season of Eastertide in this image of the finish line.

After the months of training, the weekly regiment, all the miles in the shoes, every weekend long run, the sore knees, and hours of immobile muscles below the waist—just when you think you can’t take another step forward, a mile past when you couldn’t go another mile, there it is. Without warning, there’s the finish line. The street’s lined with people you didn’t notice before that moment. Each of these strangers is reaching out for a high five, shouting, “You’re there! You can do it!” (Somehow, incredibly, I’d timed Sigur Ros’s “Hoppipolla” on my playlist at this moment.) And you cross the finish line with the biggest endorphin rush.

What does the practice of Sabbath have to do with the season of Easter? And what do either of them have to do with the finish line of a marathon? Let’s take a minute to tease these out just a little.

Easter, Genesis 1, and Shalom

Our grounding for what Sabbath means and doesn’t mean starts with Genesis 1. Here we see God as the architect of the cosmos. And the grand conclusion is Sabbath. Sabbath is when everything is put in its right place. Sabbath isn’t a what. It’s not a day off. It’s a when. It’s when all is in God’s order. This status of God’s good order we can call shalom, which often we understand as “peace.” Shalom is when everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be.

And then we see Sabbath making a significant place in the Ten Commandments. These slaves who had known nothing but brick-making, who knew nothing but to value themselves on their productivity, were offered an alternative. We are made for Sabbath—the time when everything is where it’s supposed to be. This is what Jesus means when he says, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath.” Sabbath is entering God’s shalom where everything is where it’s supposed to be.

Genesis 1 describes a rhythm of “six plus one”—six days of work, one day of Sabbath. Sabbath isn’t just a day to fit into your calendar whenever it’s convenient, and it’s not a day for rejuvenation. God didn’t take a Sabbath because God was tired and needed to refuel. Sabbath is not something we take at our discretion. It is a gift we receive from God every seven days. This is the order of our humanity, and to refuse it, delay it, or neglect, is to refuse our humanity. We ignore Sabbath at our own peril. It’s the rhythm of Sabbath that gives our work purpose.

And so the great story of God reaches an epic climax in the death and resurrection of Jesus. With Easter, we find the world being put back in its right order again.

Easter, Sabbath, and Jubilee

Next, let’s consider Jesus’ very first public sermon, as Luke tells the story. He takes the scroll of Isaiah, and stands and reads,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
     for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
     that the blind will see,
     that the oppressed will be set free,
     and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.”

And then he sits down and proclaims, “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!” A mic drop moment? Perhaps. That Luke begins the ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and then the subsequent story of the Church with this vignette is significant to how Luke wants us to understand this entire story.

What does “the time of the Lord’s favor” mean? What’s important about this? This is Isaiah 61, and a literal translation of this phrase is “the year of the Lord.” And this takes us into the world of Leviticus 25, the year of jubilee. In this passage of Leviticus, we find that the six-plus-one rhythm is bigger than the days of the week. This six-plus-one rhythm is about restoring all of creation. There are to be six years of working the land and then one year of resting the land. Then there are to be six of these followed by “the year of the Lord,” or jubilee. This was a yearlong party where debts were forgiven. Once a generation, everything went back to what it was supposed to be.

A new day. A fresh start. A clean slate. New creation Easter morning. And here Jesus’ very first sermon is proclaiming his life and ministry will usher in the most epic jubilee ever—a sabbath of sabbaths.

Sabbath and New Creation

When the risen Jesus says, “Look! I’m making everything new!” He’s using Genesis 1 creation language. The work of making things, of putting all things in their perfect place, has begun again.

In his book Surprised by Hope, N.T. Wright says, “Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.”

Easter is so much bigger than egg hunts, new clothes, and church productions. At Easter, God cleans up the mess that Sin and Death have made of the world. Every evil and injustice is rendered toothless. Everything sad and scary in the world is undone. That’s the hope we defiantly declare every Eastertide season and every Sabbath day. God’s order wins the day.

Each and every week that we receive and celebrate Sabbath, we rehearse a mini-Easter. We celebrate Resurrection, new creation, and God putting everything exactly where it belongs. We participate in restoring God’s good shalom in the world. Every Eastertide season can remind us of the big picture of God’s work of making the world good and beautiful.

This is why the practice of weekly Sabbath is better than taking a day off to crash and recover. A Sabbath practice plunges us into the counter-story that God is making everything new, putting everything right. And this is a very welcome reminder of the ecstatic joy of God, like that of crossing the finish line of marathon. This is very good news indeed.