Holy Week’s Neglected Day: Defying Tyranny Through Sabbath

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What do you do when all of your hopes and dreams come crashing down around you, and you know that your life will never be the same? 

The disciples had just watched their hopes for the redemption of Israel succumb to a brutal criminal’s death at the hands of the oppressive Roman Empire. Jesus had been betrayed by the religious leaders who were supposed to declare the power and presence of God. Jesus’s followers had come to Jerusalem that week to celebrate the Passover, but they had held greater hopes: they had finally started to understand that this was the time of the fulfillment of God’s promises… and then Jesus was arrested, tortured, and killed.

So what do you do when all of your hopes and dreams come crashing down around you, and you know that your life will never be the same?

Grief can easily paralyze a person. The shock and denial of deep loss often prevent people from focusing on the simplest of tasks. But for the disciples, the rhythms they had developed over a lifetime brought stability amid the chaos: they observed the Sabbath.

All four gospels report—albeit only briefly—that Jesus was buried quickly because the Sabbath was approaching, and the women came to the tomb only after they had observed the Sabbath. Many Bible commentaries fleetingly remark on this pause, noting only that it indicates the disciples remained faithful Jews.

But it’s not an accident that Jesus’s death occurred on the day of Preparation, the day before the Sabbath. It’s not a coincidence that rest occurred after his great work was finished, before the first day of the week—and the new creation of God—arrived.

The Meaning of Sabbath

Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel describes sabbath as a response to the incessant nature of time, which he portrays as “sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives” (The Sabbath, 1951, p. 5). “The meaning of Sabbath,” Heschel says, “is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world” (p. 10).

Although people often refer to the “six” days of creation, Genesis declares that God finished his work on the seventh day, the day that God rested (Gen. 2:2-3). God’s final act of the initial creation narrative was to create a day of rest. Terence Fretheim notes that in the creation narrative God is not only ordering space out of the chaos, but God is also ordering time. The call to set aside a day for rest “honors the larger creative purposes of God… it acknowledges that God is indeed the Creator and provider of all things” (“Genesis,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 1, 1994, p. 347). While the tyranny of the urgent constantly presses against us, the observance of Sabbath reminds us that God’s larger purposes cannot be thwarted by the ever-present pressure of the now.

More than that, God’s command for all people and animals among the Israelites to observe the sabbath pointed to God’s care for everyone. Whether you were rich or poor, a beast of burden or the driver of the beasts, you were expected to rest. As Junia Pokrifka observes, “The commandment is thus the great equalizer—no one is left out of the rest it offers. As such, the Sabbath rest is a foretaste of the eschatological justice that God will one day accomplish for all God’s people and all creation to enjoy” (Exodus, New Beacon Bible Commentary, 2018, p. 225). Although many references in the Jewish law ground Sabbath observance in the creation narrative, Deut. 5:15 grounds it in the remembrance of God’s deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. The people of God remember what it was like to toil without rest under a harsh taskmaster; Yahweh, however, offers—indeed, requires!—rest and peace for those who serve him. Thus, as Stephen G. Green notes, “Keeping Sabbath as an act of hope is a dream of the ultimate alternative reality” (Deuteronomy, New Beacon Bible Commentary, 2015, p. 86). Those who keep sabbath are reminded week by week that Yahweh has a greater and better plan for them.

Jesus and the Sabbath

But how would the disciples have observed this first sabbath after Jesus’s death? Would they be able to remember that Yahweh had a better plan? Their grief was raw and overpowering—and yet, Sabbath is a time to celebrate, not grieve. Although some people keep busy as a way of coping with (or perhaps avoiding) grief, Sabbath observance required the disciples to rest and reflect. Would the disciples have considered how Jesus had observed Sabbath during the past three years? He had attended synagogue regularly and joined in the services of prayer, Scripture reading, and teaching. When Jesus had read the Scripture in the Nazareth synagogue on the Sabbath, he had chosen the Isaiah scroll for his reading (Luke 4:16-30). By referring to Isaiah 61 and the proclamation of “the year of the Lord’s favor,” Jesus had called to mind the year of Jubilee. Leviticus 25 describes how, after “seven weeks of years” (i.e., 49 years), the year of Jubilee shall be declared. The fiftieth year is holy, a time in which debts are canceled, property is returned, and slaves are released. After reading from the scroll on the Sabbath, Jesus declared that with his presence the Scripture had been fulfilled. It would have been difficult for the disciples, the day after Jesus’s death and the day before the resurrection, to understand that they had been freed from their captivity to sin.  

In remembering their fallen teacher, the disciples may have reflected on the time that Jesus declared, “The Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). He had been defending them when he said this; they were plucking heads of grain to eat because they were hungry. Yet the other religious leaders had no compassion on their hunger.

The disciples likely remembered other ways that Jesus had offended the Jewish leaders. Perhaps the disciples chuckled as they remembered the apoplectic expression on the synagogue ruler’s face when Jesus healed the woman with the crooked spine on the Sabbath (Luke 13:10-17). There were so many good stories to share as they remembered Jesus’s healing activities on the Sabbath: he had cast out demons (Mark 1:21-28), caused the lame to walk (John 5:1-18), strengthened a withered hand (Matt. 12:9-14), cured dropsy (Luke 14:1-6), and healed the blind (John 9:1-41). For Jesus, the Sabbath was a perfect day to celebrate God’s power over Satan’s strongholds.

Finding Hints of the Resurrection in the Sabbath

Maintaining Sabbath after Jesus’s death provided structure for the disciples when everything else was in shambles. They grieved not only for the loss of their revered teacher and friend, but they also grieved over the loss of their dream of a restored Israel. How long, O Lord, would the Romans crush the hopes of the Jews? The disciples had become convinced that Jesus was God’s messiah. But if the Romans could quell even that hope, then how would God ever deal with the forces of evil that seemed too strong to repulse? The broken, destructive world seemed to go on and on while Israel languished and the disciples sank into their sorrow.

Heschel describes the hope, however, that Sabbath can bring in the midst of pain: “Even when the soul is seared, even when no prayer can come out of our tightened throats, the clean, silent rest of the Sabbath leads us to a realm of endless peace, or to the beginning of an awareness of what eternity means” (p. 101).

For the disciples, attuning to the Sabbath could reveal the hints of eternity that lay ahead. Jesus had declared while dying, “It is finished” (John 19:30). The work that God had sent Jesus to accomplish was complete. Then came the Sabbath. The disciples meditating on the meaning of Sabbath might have remembered that when God finished the work of creation, God rested (Gen. 2:2). So too on this Sabbath, the Sabbath after Jesus died, God observed his own call to rest and waited to resurrect Jesus until Sabbath was done. Then on the first day of the week—the symbolic beginning of all of God’s creative acts—God’s greatest act of creation would take place: new creation!

By pausing in the middle of Roman rule and punishment, the disciples had the opportunity to remember that their Creator and Provider had promised a greater reality beyond what they were currently experiencing. God had shown them a foretaste of the Kingdom in Jesus’s healing acts of mercy on so many previous sabbaths. And so Sabbath defies the tyranny of the urgent by pointing to the life beyond: “For the Sabbath is the counterpoint of living; the melody sustained throughout all agitations and vicissitudes which menace our conscience; our awareness of God’s presence in the world” (Heschel, p. 89).

Too often during Holy Week we jump from Good Friday to Easter Sunday with little thought to the Sabbath that the disciples faithfully observed as they tried to process what had happened to their Messiah. But the pause that God wove into Holy Week is intentional. To observe Sabbath in the midst of chaos is an act of rebellion against the chaos itself. By tarrying to reflect on the God who brought order to the chaos, life out of nothingness, freedom for the enslaved, and healing to the wounded, we declare that there is still One who is greater than the chaos. Then the resurrection proves us right.

Dr. Suzanne Nicholson is Professor of New Testament at Asbury University in Wilmore, Kentucky. She is a Deacon in the United Methodist Church and serves as Assistant Lead Editor of Firebrand.