FOUR

THE REST

Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins, and the religious leaders called that blasphemy. But Jesus goes on to make a claim so outrageous that the leaders don’t have a word for it. Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he’s here to end religion and to replace it with himself.

One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grain fields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” [Remember that “Son of Man” was Jesus’s most common way of referring to himself.]

(Mark 2:23–28)

The law of God directed that you had to rest from your work one day in seven. That was wonderful, of course, but the religious leaders of the day had fenced in this law with a stack of specific regulations. There were thirty-nine types of activity that you could not do on the Sabbath, including reaping grain, which is what the Pharisees accused the disciples of doing. Mark goes on to record a second incident that took place on the Sabbath day:

Another time [Jesus] went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, “Stand up in front of everyone.” Then Jesus asked them, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent. He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

(Mark 3:1–6)

Why does Jesus become angry with the religious leaders? Because the Sabbath is about restoring the diminished. It’s about replenishing the drained. It’s about repairing the broken. To heal the man’s shriveled hand is to do exactly what the Sabbath is all about. Yet because the leaders are so concerned that Sabbath regulations be observed, they don’t want Jesus to heal this man—an incredible example of missing the forest for the trees. Their hearts are as shriveled as the man’s hand. They’re insecure and anxious about the regulations. They’re tribal, judgmental, and self-obsessed instead of caring about the man. Why? Religion.

Religion Versus the Gospel

Jesus shows in these encounters that there are two radically different spiritual paradigms. Imagine two people, both trying to obey the law of God, yet they operate from these two opposing paradigms. Both want to keep the Sabbath day, but in one case the obedience is a burden, an enslavement; while in the other it’s a delight, a gift. How can that be? One paradigm is religion, which—as we observed before—is fundamentally advice. The other is the gospel of Jesus Christ, which begins and ends with news. These are two completely different things.

Most people in the world believe that if there is a God, you relate to God by being good. Most religions are based on that principle, though there are a million different variations on it. Some religions are what you might call nationalistic: You connect to God, they say, by coming into our people group and taking on the markers of society membership. Other religions are spiritualistic: You reach God by working your way through certain transformations of consciousness. Yet other religions are legalistic: There’s a code of conduct, and if you follow it God will look upon you with favor. But they all have the same logic: If I perform, if I obey, I’m accepted. The gospel of Jesus is not only different from that but diametrically opposed to it: I’m fully accepted in Jesus Christ, and therefore I obey.

In the little town of Hopewell, Virginia, where I served as a minister for nine years, some of these distinctions became real to me for the first time. In about 1977, I preached a sermon there on “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and I explained it this way: “I think God is saying, ‘I want you to meet the needs of other people with all of the joy, all of the eagerness, all of the urgency, all of the ingenuity, creativity, and industry with which you meet your own needs. That’s the standard. That’s how I want you to live your life.’” After the service a teenage girl came up and told me that she had just been in the homecoming pageant with her best friend, and she came in last in the pageant, while her friend had won. She said, “Are you trying to tell me that the Bible says I should be as happy for her as I would have been for myself if I had won? I should be just as excited with her as if it had happened to me?”

I said, “You know, that’s a pretty good application of the text. I wish I had put that in the sermon.”

She looked at me and said, “Christianity is ridiculous. Who lives like that?”

We sat down to discuss it further and I reminded her, “Jesus does say, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

She responded, “First of all, then, I want to know exactly who my neighbor is. It can’t be everybody in the world. I could never do that. What number of square blocks around my house does the Bible’s rule cover?” She went on: “And I want to know exactly what you have to do. What are the things I have to do for my neighbor?”

Do you hear the anxiety in her questions? She was not a self-righteous, morally arrogant person. But because she was not awash in the love and acceptance of God through Jesus Christ, for her the purpose of the law was to assure her that God and other people had to see her, and so treat her, as a good person. She didn’t have the emotional security to handle a law that uses broad strokes to paint a life of love and obedience. She wanted to narrow it down, detail it out, button it up, so that she could feel good about herself when she had complied. We are all susceptible to this anxiety—though some have learned to hide it better than she could then.

In religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you’re all right with God. As a result, when you come to the law, what you’re most concerned about is detail. You want to know exactly what you’ve got to do, because you have to push all the right buttons. You won’t gravitate toward seeking out the intent of the law; rather, you’ll tend to write into the law all sorts of details of observance so you can assure yourself that you’re obeying it. But in the life of Christians the law of God—though still binding on them—functions in a completely different way. It shows you the life of love you want to live before the God who has done so much for you. God’s law takes you out of yourself; it shows you how to serve God and others instead of being absorbed with yourself. You study and obey the law of God in order to discover the kind of life you should live in order to please and resemble the one who created and redeemed you, delivering you from the consequences of sin. And you don’t violate it or whittle it down to manageable proportions by adding man-made details to it.

Lord of the Sabbath

In the face of this self-righteous religious preoccupation Jesus says, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” He affirms, even celebrates, the original principle of the Sabbath—the need for rest. Yet he squashes the legalism around its observance. He dismantles the whole religious paradigm. And he does it by pointing to his identity.

Jesus could have claimed divine authority to change the Sabbath, by saying something along the lines of “I’m Lord over the Sabbath.” But he is saying even more.

The word Sabbath means a deep rest, a deep peace. It’s a near synonym for shalom—a state of wholeness and flourishing in every dimension of life. When Jesus says, “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” Jesus means that he is the Sabbath. He is the source of the deep rest we need. He has come to completely change the way we rest. The one-day-a-week rest we take is just a taste of the deep divine rest we need, and Jesus is its source.

When Jesus says, in effect, “As the Lord of the Sabbath, I can give you rest,” what does that mean?

When Jesus calls you to rest, he is calling you to take time off—physical and mental time off from work on a regular basis. But there’s another level of rest, a deeper level. At the end of Genesis chapter 1, the account of God’s creation of the world, God is said to have rested from his work. What does that mean? Does God get tired? No, God doesn’t get tired. So how could he rest? A different reason to rest is to be so satisfied with your work, so utterly satisfied, that you can leave it alone. Only when you can say about your work, “I’m so happy with it, so satisfied—it is finished!” can you walk away. When God finished creating the world, he said, “It is good.” He rested.

The movie Chariots of Fire was based on the true story of two Olympians in the Paris competition of 1924. One of them, Eric Liddell, was a Christian, and he refused to run on the Sabbath. As a result he lost the chance for a gold medal in a race he was favored to win. At one level, taking a day off for rest is what the movie is about. But the movie added another level and contrasted Harold Abrahams with Liddell. Abrahams and Liddell were both trying very hard to win gold medals. But Abrahams was doing it out of a need to prove himself. At one point, speaking of the sprint event in which he was competing, he said, “I’ve got ten seconds to justify my existence.” Liddell, on the other hand, simply wanted to please the God who had already accepted him. That’s why he said to his sister, “God made me fast, and when I run I feel his pleasure.” Harold Abrahams was weary even when he rested, and Eric Liddell was rested even when he was exerting himself. Why? Because there’s a work underneath our work that we really need rest from. It’s the work of self-justification. It’s the work that often leads us to take refuge in religion.

Most of us work and work trying to prove ourselves, to convince God, others, and ourselves that we’re good people. That work is never over unless we rest in the gospel. At the end of his great act of creation the Lord said, “It is finished,” and he could rest. On the cross at the end of his great act of redemption Jesus said, “It is finished”—and we can rest. On the cross Jesus was saying of the work underneath your work—the thing that makes you truly weary, this need to prove yourself because who you are and what you do are never good enough—that it is finished. He has lived the life you should have lived, he has died the death you should have died. If you rely on Jesus’s finished work, you know that God is satisfied with you. You can be satisfied with life.

Physicians will tell you that it is not merely fitful naps that you need, but deep sleep. You can take all the vacations in the world, but if you don’t have the deep rest of the soul, resting in what Jesus did on the cross, you will not truly rest. On the cross Jesus experienced the restlessness of separation from God so that we can have the deep rest of knowing that he loves us and our sins have been forgiven.

“I Am”

Jesus says he is Lord of the Sabbath. His self-awareness is startling. No other human teacher has made anything like the claims he makes. There are plenty who have said, “I’m the divine consciousness.” But they think of the divinity as being in all of us, in the trees and the rocks and the human spirit. Jesus, however, understands that there is a God who is uncreated, beginningless, infinitely transcendent, who made this world, who keeps everything in the universe going, so that all the molecules, all the stars, all the solar systems are being held up by the power of this God. And Jesus says, That’s who I am.

And he says it all the time. Jesus refers to himself throughout the Gospels in a unique manner. He says, “I am the bread of life”; “I am the light of the world”; “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”; “I am the true vine”; “I am the Good Shepherd.” The use of the phrase “I Am” is significant because it is the personal name God uses for himself. It is a name so sacred that Israelites would not even utter it. And Jesus is claiming this name for himself.

Remember when Jesus healed the paralyzed man he said, “Your sins are forgiven.” He was basically claiming that all sins are against him. Since you can only forgive sins against yourself—and sins are offenses against God—he is claiming to be God.

Every prophet, religious teacher, sage—every wise man or woman who has ever lived—has buttressed his or her statements with something like “Thus saith the Lord.” Jesus never says that. All Jesus ever says is “Truly, truly, I say.” Even Jesus’s footnotes and sidebars—everything he says—assume that he is the uncreated, transcendent, eternal Creator of the universe.

Many people say, “Sure, I believe that Jesus is a great teacher, but I can’t believe what they say about him being God.” That creates a problem, because his teaching is based on his identity claim. Do you like his teachings about the Sabbath? They are based on his being Lord of the Sabbath. He is the source of the Sabbath. He is the One who created the world and then rested on the seventh day. Here is how historian N. T. Wright puts it: “How can you live with the terrifying thought that the hurricane has become human, that fire has become flesh, that life itself became life and walked in our midst? Christianity either means that, or it means nothing. It is either the most devastating disclosure of the deepest reality of the world, or it is a sham, a nonsense, a bit of deceitful playacting. Most of us, unable to cope with saying either of those things, condemn ourselves to live in the shallow world in between.”22 He’s right. I believe you’ll see that in the end you can’t simply like anybody who makes claims like those of Jesus. Either he’s a wicked liar or a crazy person and you should have nothing to do with him, or he is who he says he is and your whole life has to revolve around him and you have to throw everything at his feet and say, “Command me.” Or do you live in that misty “world in between” that Wright says no one can live in with integrity? Do you pray to Jesus when you’re in trouble, and otherwise mostly ignore him because you get busy? Either Jesus can’t hear you because he’s not who he says he is—or if he is who he says he is, he must become the still point of your turning world, the center around which your entire life revolves.

The End of Religion

At the end of this Sabbath encounter with the religious leaders Mark records a remarkable sentence that sums up one of the main themes of the New Testament, “Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”

The Herodians were the supporters of Herod, the nastiest of the corrupt kings who ruled Israel, representing the Roman occupying power and its political system. In any country that the Romans conquered, they set up rulers. And wherever the Romans went, they brought along the culture of Greece—Greek philosophy, the Greek approach to sex and the body, the Greek approach to truth. Conquered societies like Israel felt assaulted by these immoral, cosmopolitan, pagan values. In these countries there were cultural resistance movements; and in Israel that was the Pharisees. They put all their emphasis on living by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and putting up big hedges around themselves to prevent contamination by the pagans. See what was going on? The Herodians were moving with the times, while the Pharisees upheld traditional virtues. The Pharisees believed their society was being overwhelmed with pluralism and paganism, and they were calling for a return to traditional moral values. These two groups had been longtime enemies of each other—but now they agree: They have to get rid of Jesus. These two groups were not used to cooperating, but now they do. In fact, the Pharisees, the religious people, take the lead in doing so.

That’s why I say this sentence hints at one of the main themes of the New Testament. The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can’t be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.

The “traditional values” approach to life is moral conformity—the approach taken by the Pharisees. It is that you must lead a very, very good life. The progressive approach, embodied in the Herodians, is self-discovery—you have to decide what is right or wrong for you. And according to the Bible, both of these are ways of being your own savior and lord. Both are hostile to the message of Jesus. And not only that, both lead to self-righteousness. The moralist says, “The good people are in and the bad people are out—and of course we’re the good ones.” The self-discovery person says, “Oh, no, the progressive, open-minded people are in and the judgmental bigots are out—and of course we’re the open-minded ones.” In Western cosmopolitan culture there’s an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness. We progressive urbanites are so much better than people who think they’re better than other people. We disdain those religious, moralistic types who look down on others. Do you see the irony, how the way of self-discovery leads to as much superiority and self-righteousness as religion does?

The gospel does not say, “the good are in and the bad are out,” nor “the open-minded are in and the judgmental are out.” The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out. The gospel says the people who know they’re not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they’re on the right side of the divide are most in danger.

Jesus himself said this to the Pharisees earlier when he told them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mark 2:15–17). When Jesus says he is not coming for the “righteous,” he does not mean that some people don’t need him. The clue to what Jesus does mean is his reference to himself as a physician. You go to a doctor only when you have a health problem that you can’t deal with yourself, when you feel you can’t get better through self-management. What do you want from a doctor? Not just advice—but intervention. You don’t want a doctor to simply say, “Yes, you sure are sick!” You want some medicine or treatment.

Jesus calls people “righteous” who are in the same position spiritually as those who won’t go to a doctor. “Righteous” people believe they can “heal themselves,” make themselves right with God by being good or moral. They don’t feel the need for a soul-physician, someone who intervenes and does what they can’t do themselves. Jesus is teaching that he has come to call sinners: those who know they are morally and spiritually unable to save themselves.

Because the Lord of the Sabbath said, “It is finished,” we can rest from religion—forever.

The renowned British minister Dick Lucas once preached a sermon in which he recounted an imaginary conversation between an early Christian and her neighbor in Rome.

“Ah,” the neighbor says. “I hear you are religious! Great! Religion is a good thing. Where is your temple or holy place?”

“We don’t have a temple,” replies the Christian. “Jesus is our temple.”

“No temple? But where do your priests work and do their rituals?”

“We don’t have priests to mediate the presence of God,” replies the Christian. “Jesus is our priest.”

“No priests? But where do you offer your sacrifices to acquire the favor of your God?”

“We don’t need a sacrifice,” replies the Christian. “Jesus is our sacrifice.”

“What kind of religion is this?” sputters the pagan neighbor.

And the answer is, it’s no kind of religion at all.