As we know, every week is divided into seven days: but not all days are treated the same. “Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest” (Exodus 23:12). This obviously echoes the material regarding sabbath-keeping that we looked at in yesterday’s reading on the Ten Words – though not in exactly the same words.

In the Ten Words as we read them yesterday, there’s a reason given for sabbath-keeping: because God created the world in six days and then rested on the sabbath, thereby blessing and consecrating the sabbath day (20:11). When the Ten Words are recapitulated by Moses in Deuteronomy, there is a different reason given for sabbath-keeping: the Israelites must remember what it’s like to be slaves, because that’s what they were in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15) – and as slaves, they would rarely or never get a day free from labor. So now they must ensure that everyone gets the day off on the sabbath. No one in the family is to do any work: and you can’t assign all the work to the slaves and the foreigners, they get the day off, too. Even the farm animals get a day of rest (Exodus 23:12).

And the land gets to rest, too. You can farm the land for six years, but then you have to let it lie fallow for a year (23:10-11). When the harvesters are gathering grain at the end of the sixth year, a certain amount of seed gets spilled on the ground, and those seeds will sprout and produce a volunteer crop in the seventh year. It’s your farm, but you don’t get to harvest whatever grows in the sabbath year. Instead, the poor get to come and glean your field. They’ll miss some of the grain, and the wild animals get to eat that. As a system for making sure that everyone got something to eat, it would not have been 100% efficient; but here within the foundational documents of Israel we see provision being made for the poor and needy to get fed.

We today live in a complex economy, where everything seems to be tied to everything else. It’s hard for us to consider how to take one day each week when we would fully refrain from work. It’s hard for us to consider how we could give up a seventh of our output, to provide food for the poor.

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We are so resistant to the idea of keeping the sabbath, Lord. Give us open hearts, ready to explore how we might follow your word, keeping the sabbath: because you said so, because it would be good for us, and because we need the rest.

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