The easy life? Or the life worth working for?

Whenever the holiday season comes around, it reminds us that most of us are glad of the chance to take a break from the regular routine of our everyday lives; and ‘getting away from it all’ (whatever form that may take) gives us all a much-needed opportunity to recharge our batteries away from the daily grind. The hard-working breadwinner, the 24x7 housewife and mother, and even the young schoolchild – we all need a change from time to time, and the benefits of ‘taking it easy’ and relaxing for a while are known to be very important for both our mental and physical health. The workaholics among us may try to deny it, but the fact remains that, as human beings, our minds and our bodies are at serious risk if we starve them of the rest that refreshes us and enables us to keep working well.

From the earliest times of man’s recorded history, the God of the Bible has recognised the needs of His people in this important respect. He set the pattern by taking His own rest from His creative work on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2). He built this principle of rest into the lives of the Jewish nation by means of their weekly sabbath – the Hebrew word shabbath means ‘cessation’, and it became a God-given rule for the Jews that they should keep it special: “There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of rest” (Leviticus 23:3). And He went on to provide them with a whole calendar of feast days and ‘holy days’ (the origin of the word ‘holidays’), in which His people renewed their energies by resting from their daily labours.

In the 21st century, however, it seems that we may have taken this necessary principle of regular recreation (or ‘re-creation’ as it should perhaps be properly understood) to an unwarranted extreme. The pursuit of leisure has become almost a vice in our times. Long weekends, winter breaks, multiple holidays, and even early retirement are a distinguishing feature of our comparatively pampered Western lifestyles today, and many of us both aspire to, and achieve, the kind of easy life which earlier generations would certainly have thought of as self-indulgent.

None of us, of course, is called to precisely the same degree of self-denial and supreme self-sacrifice as that to which Jesus Christ was born, and to which he was personally dedicated in performing his Father’s will. “My Father is always at His work”, he insisted, “…and I too am working” (John 5:17). And yet, in asking his followers to take up their own cross and to copy his example of selfless work in the service of others – as he does for example in Matthew 16:24 – Jesus was surely calling Christians of every generation to refuse to take the pursuit of personal leisure to the extent to which it has gone in the 21st century.

When the first disciples of Jesus realised that Jesus was determined to go even to the lengths of giving his life on the cross, the Apostle Peter objected quite forcefully, and insisted that Jesus should ‘spare himself’ (the original Greek of Peter’s expression in Matthew 16:22 means ‘Pity yourself, Lord’). And yet, however well-meaning Peter was (from a human point of view), Jesus made it clear by his response that Peter was very much in the wrong, because he was standing in the way of the work that Jesus had to do: “You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men”, he said (Matthew 16:23).

Not that Jesus did not need, or deserve, to rest like everybody else. He was sometimes so worn out by his arduous labours in preaching and healing across the length and breadth of the hot and dusty land of Palestine that even his phenomenal energy occasionally flagged – as on the evening when he remained fast asleep through a really fierce storm on the Sea of Galilee while his disciples feared for their lives and fought for control of the little boat they were in with their Master (Mark 4:36-38). There were other times, too, when Jesus recharged his batteries in his own way – as when he went as a guest to a wedding in Cana (John 2), or spent whole nights alone in the mountains (Luke 6:12), or stayed overnight with close friends away from the hurly-burly of Jerusalem in the comparative quiet of the nearby village of Bethany (Mark 11:11). But even then, Jesus was always ‘on duty’: his mother called on him to perform a miracle at the wedding; his nights in the hills were spent awake in prayer; and his time in Bethany still found him at work teaching and healing. Jesus, quite clearly, did not seek the easy life, however much he may have yearned for the kind of ‘holidays’ that we take so much for granted today. ‘Getting away from it all’ was not part of his life, and the practice of self-indulgence was not his way.

In this respect, therefore, the call of Jesus to ‘follow in his steps’ is a real challenge for us in our leisure-fixated age. Insisting on our need for ‘R & R’, we may end up like the early disciples of Jesus, who fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane even though he had specifically asked them to stay awake to lend him moral support as he waited for his betrayer to arrive (Matthew 26:40-45). And yet, in asking us to labour in imitation of his selfless service to others, Jesus does not expect us to work ourselves beyond our breaking-point. Instead, he reassures us that, in whatever work we are willing to do for him, he will be with us, to share the burden, and that he will ensure that we are given all the rest we need. “Come to me”, he says, “all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me…and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

And Jesus offers us not only his personal help whenever we ‘take his yoke upon us’ in this present life, but – best of all – he promises to give us the eternal reward of unwearied life in his future kingdom, when those who refuse the easy life now will know what it is like to “run and not grow weary” (Isaiah 40:31), and when life will be like one long holiday. For as Isaiah says in the same place, those “who hope in the Lord will renew their strength”, and those who are part of the everlasting kingdom of Jesus “will soar on wings like eagles”. And that, surely, is the kind of life that is really worth working for.

[Bible quotations from NIV]

Our minds and our bodies are at serious risk if we starve them of the rest that refreshes us...

Jesus offers us not only his personal help whenever we ‘take his yoke upon us’ in this present life, but – best of all – he promises to give us the eternal reward of unwearied life in his future kingdom.

04 Sep 2006