THE SUFFICIENCY OF SABBATH

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.” —Exodus 20:8–10

Surviving amid slavery and oppression tends to harden people.

They are forced to compete for limited resources and struggle to provide for the basic needs of themselves and their families. After generations of slavery, this was the mindset of the Israelites. They were measured by the number of bricks they produced and conditioned to self-preservation. God wanted them to grow beyond this. He did this first by the provision of manna. Every morning, food was provided to them, with smelly object lessons for those who collected more than they needed. This was an everyday practice of an economy of sufficiency, training them out of the habits of scarcity. “Each morning everyone gathered as much as he needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away” (Exodus 16:21).

But there was a weekly interruption to this daily miracle food.

On the sixth day of the week, God provided double the usual portion, each person or family collecting just as much as they needed for two days and not needing to compete with each other to survive. God would make it explicit in the fourth commandment, but He was already training them in Sabbath keeping as a practice of the economics of grace.

It was a day when nobody could be made to work.

For these newly freed people, Sabbath became a “sanctuary in time . . . a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man.”* Rightly understood and celebrated, the Sabbath was—and is—a practice of spiritual and practical equality, an economics of grace and sufficiency.

* Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 29.