Sunday rest

In our last post, we focused on Sunday worship in the life of the Catholic Christian. We discussed the meaning, importance, and necessity of going to Mass on Sunday.   In this post, we will focus on the “rest” of Sunday so to speak.  We can use that word two-fold to mean both,  1) the rest of the day besides Mass, and 2) to relax, and not work.

We mentioned in the last post that Sunday is indeed a different type of day than the other days the rest of the week.   God rested on the Sabbath.   Sunday is the fulfillment of the Sabbath.   If we are indeed the image of God, then we, too, must follow God’s blueprint for life, so to speak, and have periods of work and creativity, followed by periods of rest.   It is how our bodies are designed.  After all, consider our experience.  We yearn for rest after long periods of work, but after a certain time period of rest, usually much shorter than the work period, we are ready to return to work, or at least some sort of activity.   There is a certain rhythm to our bodies and our lives, inscribed by the Creator.   We honor God by allowing ourselves periods of leisure.  In honoring God, we honor ourselves as God’s design, and then, we realize the reality of Christ’s words that we referenced last post that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  (Mark 2:27).

However, there are some deeper insights that must be made here, that show that the meaning of Sunday rest goes beyond just the traditional (yet still valid) points I just made.  I will use Saint John Paul II’s 1998 apostolic letter “Dies Domini” as reference.

1)      Sunday rest is not inactivity.     John Paul II references Genesis 1:31 where we read on the evening of the sixth day (the last day of creation), “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.”  Then on the seventh day, God rested.  On that day, God was still delighting in the wonder of his creation, like a contemplative gaze.   Contemplation is not inaction, as those who regularly pray know.  When we pray, especially when we are engaged in contemplative prayer, we are engaging so-to-speak with God, delighting in him.   This is anything but passive.

2)      Sunday rest is an indistinguishable and necessary element of our love relationship with God.   This aforementioned gaze of God is a look of love.   God’s is gazing at the beauty of His creation, which includes man and woman.    If, for God, it was necessary and good to rest from his work, and engage his whole self in the love of his creation, then surely it must be for us, as well, when we try to return that love to God.   While it is good and possible to pray always, even as we are in the busyness of our everyday lives, certain periods of time of intense prayer, where we can engage our whole bodies, are necessary.   The symbolism of marriage is used throughout the Bible as a sign of God’s relationship with us.   Those of us who are married know well that we cannot sustain our married relationship if we are always working.  We must learn to “rest” in one another, and enjoy and delight in each other, as God did on the seventh day with us.

3)      One of the purposes of Sunday rest is to remember.    “Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day  Six days you may labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord, your God…In six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but on the seventh day he rested.  That is why the Lord has blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11).   The Lord wishes us to remember what he has done!  This has to be a key element of our observance of Sunday.    For Christians now, this would include not just creation, but salvation through Jesus Christ.  Now, a lot of that happens at Mass, as we celebrate and indeed, represent, the Paschal Mystery.   However,  if Sunday is indeed to be a day of rest from work and an engaging in a contemplative gaze with God, it absolutely would make sense that recalling and remembering  all that God has done would nurture that love relationship.  This remembering can and should go beyond just God’s general work of creation and salvation for all men and women to include the wonder of our own individual creation, and all the “work” of God in our own individual lives.   Again, think about married relationships.  Is not “recalling” and “remembering” how we met, how we fell in love, and doing that on a regular basis,  critical to maintaining a healthy relationship?   We do not need to do that every day, but like we are discussing here, there should be regular periods of time for that.   The same is true of our relationship with God.

4)      Sunday rest must be in God.    Sunday (again, the fulfillment of the Sabbath) is holy.  We are called to rest on that day.  Therefore, logically, we must conclude that there is something sacred about this rest.  If it is sacred, then it must involve God.   It must not just be rest for rest’s sake.  It must just not be for leisure.  It must just not be an escape from work.  It cannot at all be an escape from reality in general.   No, it must be an imitation of the sacred rest of God, who on this day, marveled at his creation.   Our Sunday rest, then, must, likewise, be focused on the marvels of creation.   We must, like God, gaze.   On Sundays, we should gaze into our family member’s eyes, especially those of our spouses, and gaze at their God-given beauty, and the love they have for us.  We should take a drive, or take a walk, and marvel at nature.   We should be thinking about philosophical and theological thoughts, if we are suited for that.  

5)      Sunday rest, in conjunction with the Sunday Mass, should build solidarity.  We gather as a people at Mass, and participating in the Sacrament of the Eucharist unites us to God, and to each other.   At the end of Mass, we are sent forth to do good.  Well, we should not delay!  Jesus performed cures on the Sabbath (Mark 3:1-6).  Therefore, we must likewise seek to do good on Sundays for our fellow men and women, “works of mercy” as they are sometimes called.  But I thought we were supposed to refrain from work on Sundays!  Well, if we look back at both the Creation account in Genesis, and the command in Exodus, the work that is not being done (Genesis), and the work that is forbidden (Exodus) is creation.  We are not called to create anything on Sundays.   On Sundays, on the other hand, we are called to gaze on creation, not build it.  If, when we gaze on that creation that is man, we see there is a need, we can act, and those are the works of mercy, charity, and the apostolate, as the Pope suggests we do in his letter.   If we do not take the time to gaze, we often will not see the need.   We can see here another reason why we need the Sunday rest!   Nonetheless, we must ensure the amount of time devoted to these works does not deprive us of the necessary time for rest, and if they do, that is probably a sign they are servile work, and not authentic Spirit- inspired acts of mercy.

So we need to keep these things in mind if we are to truly celebrate the Lord’s Day in the manner befitting to God, and ourselves as children of God.   Let us recapture the true spirit of Sunday in our lives, in the Church, and in our culture today.  If we do, we may just experience a rejuvenation in the world of peace and solidarity.

Saint Joseph, who worked hard, but as a faithful Jew, observed the Sabbath, and used that time to gaze on the child Jesus and the Blessed Mother, inspire us to imitate God as you did, and learn the proper rhythm of life inscribed by the Father, so that we may learn to love God, our fellow men and women, ourselves,  and all of creation, as you did.