The hardest law to keep

This is the second in a series of posts exploring a conversation between spirituality and living out some form of sustainable life in our modern world. To start from the beginning, click here.

In the ancient world people were always telling stories about how the world came into being. Dramatic stories about the gods, about how the sky was formed and the sea was birthed, and how human beings came to wander the earth. 

In many ancient creation stories, the gods were in conflict and tension; violence and anger were the heart of creation itself. In both the Enuma Elish and the Atrahasis epic – creation myths from the Ancient Near East – human beings were created as savages, made by the gods to do the works of the gods. Consider this excerpt from the Enuma Elish:

“When Marduk hears the words of the gods,

His heart prompts him to fashion artful works

Opening his mouth, he addresses Ea

To impart the plan he had conceived in hid heart:

“Blood I will mass and cause bones to be.

I will establish a savage, ‘man’ shall be his name

Verily, savage man I will create.

He shall be charged with the service of the gods

That they might be at ease”

Humankind were made to toil in service of the gods. And in service of the representatives of those gods too of course, the established monarchies and elites to whom your duty and labour was bound. 

But in the midst of this kind of world there were a curious group. Their people had been slaves for hundreds of years; forced to work and labour for the service of the empire of Egypt. Little or no rest. Their survival was dependent on their ability to produce as much output as possible for the least time and cost.

But these Hebrew slaves escaped. Or we should say, they were liberated. The way that they told (and continue to tell) the story, was that God intervened, hearing the cry of the oppressed, and acted to free them from their oppression. And these people began to tell very different kinds of creation stories. In one of these creation stories, God created the world in a flow and rhythm of 6 days – and on the 6th day created human beings in the image of God. Not just emperors, kings and pharaohs; all humans beings were created in the image of the divine.

And then on the 7th day God rested. This is not because God needed a break, but because the way these ancient people understood it, rest was embedded into the very heart of creation itself.  Human beings were created on the 6th day and God rested on the 7th day, which means the first full day that human creatures experience is a day of rest. Life is to be lived from rest, outward.

Now if you want to approach this from a modern scientific perspective it might seem like a problematic story: 6 days to make the world – from chaos and nothingness to the complexity of human beings in a week! But that way of reading this creation account is not what the story has in mind. If you’re caught up in that way of reading it – either to ridicule or defend it - you’re missing the point.

But for a group of people who had been enslaved for centuries, this way of seeing God and of creation and of what it means to be human were truly remarkable. As they emerged out of slavery in Egypt and became a nation, they established laws to govern their budding society. And in these laws they instituted days and years of rest. Rest to establish a rhythm to live by. One sabbath day each week. One sabbath year in every seven years. And then every 49 years – 7 x 7 – a year of jubilee; the year of the Lord’s favour. A year in which things that people had produced and consumed and built were to be laid down, and many things which had been accumulated would be shared. And property that had been acquired would be returned.

A rhythm that didn’t just symbolise rest but embodied it. And a people who were supposed to be defined by more than what they produced or consumed. 

In practice, it is fair to say that things got a little muddled over time. The Sabbath slowly became a tool for theological nit-picking, overly exuberant law-keeping and a burden that was hard to bear for most regular people. And the year of Jubilee became an interesting but ultimately unworkable idea. At least that’s what seems to have happened. And perhaps it’s not surprising – it is a pretty controversial concept. Especially if you’re the ones who have accumulated wealth over time; why would you want to give it away after 50 years of hard work? Perhaps this was the hardest of all laws to keep, so much so that there’s no evidence of it being practiced in ancient Israel even once.

Over time, some of the ancient prophets like Isaiah began to use the motif of Jubilee as symbolic of a time to come when things would be put right, when justice would be outworked, when the oppressed would be set free, when the poor would receive “good news”. That this rhythm of rest – and the liberation that accompanies it - would find its way into the world through the work of something divine.

Interestingly enough, hundreds of years later the Jewish prophet Jesus would quote from Isaiah to “proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”. He claimed that this text was being fulfilled in what he came to do and say. And so we are invited to consider that the symbol of Jesus’ life is the symbol of a liberating kind of life that is grounded in rest, that represents Jubilee, and is a reminder that we are not defined by what we produce or consume. We are invited to live from rest, outward, as we participate in the life of the divine.

This is both an invitation and challenge to us in the present day. We might not be enslaved by an ancient empire, but in a strange way we are still subject to the demands, pressures and expectations of production and consumption. Rest is the thing we look forward to in hope rather than live out of. So while it might sound aspirational to live from a place of rest, it is usually much harder in practice. And even more so for those on the margins who have little resources and for whom rest is an unlikely luxury.  

This is partly why spiritual practices can still be formative for us. Practices like prayer and meditation allow us to curate a space in which we are reminded of a different kind of story, a different way of life, a different mode of being. It doesn’t solve the problem, but prayer and meditation can be a form of protest and resistance against the pervasive narrative of production, growth, success, and accumulation that if left un-checked, can become their own system of enslavement. When we allow ourselves to stop, to pause, to reflect, to consider that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves, and that this something bigger is not demanding from us in the way everything and everyone else is, maybe we can find something else hiding just below the surface of things; the seeds of a sustainable kind of life.