Getting through to the Sabbath Rest

Getting through to the Sabbath Rest
Hebrews 4.1-10

I once heard a story about a priest who was fond of riding his horse – too fond, it turned out, because he was always out riding when he should have been working in his parish. So, according to the story, he called his horse ‘Sabbatical’, so that when people asked where he was his wife could say, perfectly truthfully, that he was ‘on Sabbatical’.

Among the many signs that the story is apocryphal is that clergy sabbaticals are a very recent invention, and have only become popular since horse-riding among clergy became a rare eccentricity; but it serves to remind us that in biblical theology there is a principle of ‘one day in seven’, or possibly ‘one year in seven’, or some variation on these, which is built into creation from the beginning. By the time of Jesus, the parts of the Mosaic law which dealt with sabbath observance had become such a tightly drawn legal system that people were forgetting their purpose, which was to help people by giving them rest, not to add burdens to them by forbidding things like healing. Jesus had to break through all that, as we see in the gospels. But nowhere does the New Testament deny that the principle set out in Genesis 1 remains important: a day of rest once a week, corresponding to God’s day of rest at the end of creation...

Taken from Hebrews for Everyone – by Tom Wright