Christians have often been poor at practicing the Sabbath, imagining it to be a Jewish practice for which Jesus showed apparent disregard. But a careful reading of the Gospels shows a very different reality. Jesus’ work was not to diminish the Sabbath but to extend it, welcoming all into its embrace. He came to proclaim a new age of Sabbath, an epoch of jubilee in which the division between heaven and earth would join in the great, “one fabric of creation.”
So it is that the Sabbath, if practiced well, is no refuge from our everyday lives, but a reorientation that should come to permeate them. Our work, if done well, will become more and more continuous with the rest of Sabbath. One hopes that most of us have had a hint of this experience; a time in our lives when our work and pleasure were the same, when our labor and our rest were united.
—from Franciscan Spirit‘s “Honoring the Sabbath, Honoring Creation“
by Ragan Sutterfield
