A key part of what marks normalcy in contemporary life is the subsuming of time under the heading of “24/7”. While I may get off work at a certain time, or you may get a day off, we live –generally—in an electrified global system where the lights never have to go off in which production and consumption can continue without cessation or limitation.
We use the concepts of “24” (hrs) and “7” (days a week) but under a regime of 24/7 those numbers become meaningless. What makes a week a week? Why stop counting at 24? What makes a day a day? Jonathan Crary notes that although “[c]onventional and older durational units persist (like “nine to five” or “Monday to Friday”)” theses are all ultimately subordinated to “all the practices of individual time management made possible by 24/7 networks and markets” (2014: 57).
What becomes celebrated in this contemporary order is the degree to which human life mirrors the non-stop technological apparatuses that maintain our 24/7 system –“ways of encouraging identification with machinic processes themselves […] individual gratification from emulating the impervious rhythms, efficiency, and dynamism of mechanization” (2014: 57).
And while there have been some material benefits from the imagination of 24/7, it ultimately lies to us, telling us that what is really real at the heart of the world is the modern system of production and consumption. My time off is conceived in this production-driven system as only my temporary excused absence from the heart of reality; like a homebound person who misses-out on the eucharist or a vassal exiled from the metropolis.
Far from being merely a different way of counting time, it is a kind of pseudo-eternity, an artificial timelessness. As this system has increased so has the strange contemporary phenomenon of “burn-out.” Often however, this “problem” is conceived less as a systemic issue but as an individual problem –the worker couldn’t keep up with the machine; the problem is a weak human body that needs leisure (not just vacation), friendship (not just coworkers), meals (not just food), and that great catastrophic threat to 24/7, sleep. It is, essentially, a Pharaonic system that resists the divine interruption of a corporate ad collective cessation.
But God created the world not in a non-stop series of product line distributions but in six cycles of evening-and-morning, culminating in a day of cessation, Sabbath, of enjoyment and splendor. We need not keep things running 24/7 because Yahweh will… actually the point is stronger than that, we can’t keep things running 24/7 because we are not eternal… we are not 24/7.
The Lord of Creation invites us into his created pattern of Evening-and-Morning, of Labor and Sabath, of Temporal and Festal. To resist this pattern is to position ourselves at odds not only with Creation, it is to position ourselves at odds with who Yahweh is. This is the one mistake I think Christopher Ash makes in his Zeal Without Burnout when he says “We need Sabbath rests, and God does not” (2022: 57). While technically true it removes Sabbath too much from who God is. God does not need Sabbath because God is Sabbath. We can think of other examples of this sort of thing: God does not need holiness, God is Holy (1 Pet. 1:16). God does not need love, God is Love (1 Jn. 4:8).
To resist Sabbath is not merely to reject a kind of natural or moral law which has a life apart from who God is in Himself, it is to reject the God who is the Rest of his people (Heb. 4:10).