A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the township of Newman, a modern, remote outback town in Western Australia’s Pilbara region that located some 1186 km north of Perth. Originally a closed company town built in the 1960s, when I visited it, it was as it remains today, a residential and service hub for the world’s largest single open-cut iron ore mine at Mount Whaleback.
There is a lot that recommends life in the Pilbara—a truly beautiful part of the world. And Newman could be a nice town. But one thing I noted when I was there was that the place was pretty horrid. The cultural and environmental cancer that is FI-FO work is a topic that can be covered elsewhere, though I suppose the immediate concern of this short post overlaps with the many criticisms that could (and should) be made of such a practice. What I noted particularly in my short visit however, which happened to be over what was putatively the ‘weekend’, was that the place was utterly devoid of sabbath.
Sabbath as we know is a biblical term. We read the injunction to keep the sabbath given by God to his people Israel in a number of places in the Old Testament, and we see it repeated in the New. We see God himself observing sabbath rest in the first of the creation accounts after completing the work of creation (Gen 2:2-3). We see God instructing the Israelites to observe a sabbath rest in the wilderness, teaching the people to trust in him by collecting manna for six days, but relying on God’s providence on the seventh (See Ex 16). Finally, we see this formally set down by God in the 10 commandments given to the people through Moses (see Ex 20:8-11).
Christians continued the sabbath observance, moving the day dedicated to the worship of God and rest from labour to the Sunday, the Lord’s day, noting the resurrection as the beginning of the new creation. Our contemporary calendar is marked by this reality – and even in heavily secularised Australia, Sunday is a ‘day-off’ from most full-time work, and the day itself still commands a premium rate for a lot of casual employment, over and above the Saturday which, taken together with Sunday constitutes the ‘weekend’. It is not clear, however, how much longer this will be retained as the modern aversion to hierarchy already has Sunday in its sights.
Convenience and efficiency taken together are one heck of a motivator, even amongst the devout. The failure to recognise the ways in which the collective practice of communal worship shapes a people has infected all of us who live in liberal societies as they drift further and further away from their Christian roots. In those halcyon days when most shops in Perth were closed on Sundays, and the idea of extending trading hours into Sundays was being publicly debated, I even remember seeing a poster campaigning to open up Sundays to the market which featured a prominent Roman Catholic priest sipping a cup of coffee at a local café with the words ‘Everyone enjoys a bit of Sunday trading’ underneath. My guess is that while it is only the power of certain unions that are preventing its abolition, it won’t be too long before the penalty rates for those who work on a Sunday will be removed. My greater concern is that Christians are being habituated into a culture (or indeed an anticulture) that has simply forgotten God.
The weekend is a great invention. And while I am indeed grateful of our culture’s exceeding the barest requirements of the Mosaic law by offering two days of rest weekly, I am cognisant that the loss of the transcendent meaning behind this weekly festival is playing out in deleterious ways culturally. The weekend is a welcome break from the drudgery that is a lot of modern labour, providing an opportunity for people to engage in all manner of recreation, to spend time with friends and family (with whom we generally do not work), or to attend to household chores that otherwise go neglected due to the vast majority of our work taking place outside the home. This is all good. But as the late Rabbi Abraham Heschell wrote, ‘the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of [one’s] work.”[1]
Sunday, it seems, stand out as a day of inconvenience and inefficiency. And the task of retaining the Sunday as a day dedicated to the worship of God requires a certain embracing of such inconvenience and inefficiency. Paradoxically, it is here where true freedom is found. In his Apostolic Letter on the importance of Sundays Dies Domini, Saint Pope John Paul II noted that:
Christ came to accomplish a new “exodus”, to restore freedom to the oppressed. He performed many healings on the Sabbath (cf. Mt 12:9-14 and parallels), certainly not to violate the Lord’s Day, but to reveal its full meaning: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mk 2:27). Opposing the excessively legalistic interpretation of some of his contemporaries, and developing the true meaning of the biblical Sabbath, Jesus, as “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mk 2:28), restores to the Sabbath observance its liberating character, carefully safeguarding the rights of God and the rights of man. This is why Christians, called as they are to proclaim the liberation won by the blood of Christ, felt that they had the authority to transfer the meaning of the Sabbath to the day of the Resurrection. The Passover of Christ has in fact liberated man from a slavery more radical than any weighing upon an oppressed people — the slavery of sin, which alienates man from God, and alienates man from himself and from others, constantly sowing within history the seeds of evil and violence.[2]
The observance of the Lord’s Day is a key way in which we can preserve and live out the memory of God. But this practice will increasingly require something of us all. It will set us apart from the broader culture and its mores, but it will also see a certain flourishing of creativity as a kind of epiphenomenon of this day of worshipful leisure, which will be increasingly apparent in a world overrun with artificially generated simulations of reality. Keeping Sunday—an observance we are obliged to keep—both effects and is demonstrative of our freedom. And, in the words of Saint Paul, it is ‘for freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.’ [Gal 5:1]
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[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath : Its Meaning for Modern Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 14.
[2] John Paul II, Dies Domini: On Keeping the Lord’s Day Holy, Australian ed (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1998), 63, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1998/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_05071998_dies-domini.html.
