Work for the Sake of Rest
One
God rested on the seventh day, not the first.
When Genesis says that God rested on the seventh day, after He completed the work of creation, that’s supposed to be a model for how we keep the third commandment.
Notice that it doesn’t say that God rested up on the first day so that He could more effectively work the next six days. No, He did His work so He could delight in the result of it. And that’s what he wants us to do.
He wants us to work so we can rest. He wants us to work so that we can delight in the goodness of things.
The point is that work is for the sake of rest, not vice versa. And our Sunday should reflect that priority.
But for a lot of us, it doesn’t.
Two
Work is good but it should be subordinated to rest.
Work is one of God’s great gifts to the human person. It’s the ability to share in God’s power of creation. It’s a way of making the world a better place, a way of supporting your family by serving others, and a way of bringing this earth more into conformity with the kingdom of God
Saints like Jose Maria Escriva have done a lot to show how our work is one of the primary ways in which we become holy and fulfill our vocations.
But work is still secondary. It’s still not the main thing.
Work is for the sake of joy, appreciation, a delight in what God has done – including what He’s done through us.
Rest is the goal of everything. Work is good, but it’s transitory and secondary.
So if we put work first and rest secondly, then we’re getting our priorities mixed up. And ultimately we’re preparing for the wrong eternity.
Three
Sabbath rest as the goal
The Letter to the Hebrews describes Heaven itself as a kind of sabbath rest. It is the permanent state of joy and appreciation for the goodness of God and what He has done. And, most importantly, in Heaven, just about all our jobs will be obsolete.
We won’t need lawyers in heaven, or medical doctors, or financial planners. No emergency responders, or politicians, or social workers, or titans of industry.
We also won’t need jobs like mine, teaching people about God or encouraging them to pray. Everyone will know God intimately, which is the only goal of both theology and spirituality.
So our lives should not be, at the end of the day, preparing ourselves for an eternity of work. It should be preparing ourselves for an eternity of rest. And rest – delighting in truth, goodness, love, and beauty – that all takes practice. And Sunday’s the day for that.
We don’t want to let an attachment to work get in the way of our rest or we’ll be investing more in the temporary than the eternal.
Four
Sunday as a day of protest against work
As we’ve said before, a temptation to idolatry is always a temptation to put something else ahead of God. And as Scripture says, idol-worshippers typically worship the work of their own hands. In other words, workaholism, where we give our lives to our own work, is always a temptation.
Sunday is our day to resist that temptation. It’s our day to resist when our job or our to-do list tries to gain absolute mastery over our lives.
The Catechism puts it perfectly, Sunday is, “a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money.”
Is that a great image? Sunday is a revolutionary day. You put your fist in the air, and you say, “You know what, Work? You don’t own me. I belong to God. And today, you, work, can’t tell me what to do.”
Let’s make our Sundays like that.
Five
Don’t “Recharge,” or “Gear-Up”
Make sure your rest is real rest. Make sure you do things that help you appreciate life.
On Sunday, don’t use phrases like, “I’ve really got to recharge my batteries for Monday. I gotta rest up, gotta get energized so I can hit the ground running tomorrow. Gotta put some more fuel in the tank.”
Do you see how those phrases imply that rest is a means to better work, instead of the ultimate goal of human life?
God made us to be happy. Sunday is where we practice that. Work is good – but it’s not where happiness is ultimately found. So keep it in its proper place. And try to keep it out of your sabbath rest.