Working Worship

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     Why is it that so many of Jesus’s parables involve working – tending a vineyard, building a house, harvesting grain, and so on? Not every one, but a solid chunk of his teaching moments give voice to some level of necessary exertion, from kneading bread dough to hacking down barren trees. What are we to learn from the preponderance of labor in the Savior’s stories of what the kingdom of heaven is like?

     One of my favorite theories runs like so: Work and worship are inextricably linked, woven together so’s to be completely inseparable. I’ve never heard anybody say that floating around in heaven on a cloud forever, playing a harp for the Lord, sounded like a rockin’ good time. Yet we know that praise will continue throughout eternity, loudest and most vibrantly among the redeemed who are experiencing the full fruit of redemption. Does that leave work out? Is there nothing constructive to do in heaven? That sounds awful.

     Though it’s technically not a parable, a snapshot from “the days of Jesus’s flesh” serves the same purpose for we who are twenty centuries removed from the day of the event:

One Sabbath, when he went to dine at the house of a ruler of the Pharisees, they were watching him carefully. And behold, there was a man before him who had dropsy. And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” And they could not reply to these things (Luke 14:1-6).

     Why couldn’t the lawyers and Pharisees reply to Jesus? Surely they had plenty of words; they had attained high standing in the use of words. If I were a betting man I’d say they had at least two to three dozen responses to the Master’s question. But sitting atop the stone wall they’d laid up between the sacred and secular, they couldn’t give an answer without dismantling the very wall on which they sat. What would your answer be?

     I’ve never once pulled an ox from a well. Can’t be easy, especially using First Century equipment. But I did once work with my bride to pull our young son from an Atlantic riptide, using nothing but our wits and bodies. Was it on a Sabbath? I don’t remember. As if it would have mattered. We simply appealed to the maker of the riptide to make us smarter if not stronger than the riptide, and convey us to the shore. It still ranks as the most worthy physical effort we’ve ever put forth. And yeah, we had a more recognizable kind of worship service on the beach.

     The writer to the Hebrews posits four phases of Sabbath: one that began on the seventh day of creation, one offered to our forbears in the wilderness, one called “Today,” and another yet to come. The phases will, in God’s good time, circle back on each other; the fourth will be just like the first, in which God took his rest and great joy in his work. But I have to ask: Does that mean God doesn’t create anything anymore? Surely it doesn’t mean that! Living the life of Christian faith is glorious precisely because our God is intimately involved in the work of his hands. Imagine, if your soul is able, God as the master craftsman and us as his apprentices, and then worship the one who calls us into glorious work.

     Worship and work flow together with nary an objection from either. Resting from our labors involves resting from strife, not accomplishment. As God would have it, strife is part of the experience here in a creation not fully restored – “In the world you will have tribulation,” Jesus said in John’s Gospel (16:33a). Likewise, he gives relief from the strife – “But take heart; I have overcome the world” (the rest of verse 33). That’s an Already thing, not a Not Yet. The lawyers and Pharisees of Luke 14 were stuck in Phase 2 of Sabbath, not entering into cooperative rest with God. Jesus has made a way for the people of God to live freely in Phase 3, as we anticipate Phase 4, which circles back on the original Sabbath instituted by the Creator. As Jesus took joy in doing the will of his Father, smack-dab in the middle of his work, so may we.

     I pray a working worship for you, Church, a spirit-level manner of praise that honors the LORD our God and erases frustration, cancels the aching need for quitting time. May you find such satisfaction in the work of your hands, your brain, your body, that your soul must needs magnify the Lord! Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again. God will make this happen, for he who calls you is faithful (1Thessalonians 5:23-24).

      

Grace and Peace (from the Lord of the Sabbath),

 

John