We meet God at work. God seems to be the ideal of work: creative, free, collaborative, neither exploited nor exploitative, contributing to the flourishing of the other. That’s the beginning. Today’s reading, though, starts at the end of God’s workweek and so does the exclamation that humans be “created in our image, after our likeness.” Part of what it means to be human, it seems, is to participate in the creative activity of the divine. 

Domination has nothing to do with work here. The newly created humans are commanded to eat the abundant fruits and vegetables, not the other animals. Indeed, both humans and non-human animals appear to be herbivores in this picture of creative unity. This connection between creativity and humanity is reinforced by the placement of the “…and God saw that it was good” formula that brackets off each day’s creation. The ideal of labor for which humans and other animals were created provides for each without diminishing the other.

We leave God at rest. This rest isn’t just punctuation; rather, it’s the creation story’s climax. The text tells us that God blesses the seventh day and makes it holy because God rests. It is a day unlike any other. By making a day sacred, in a sense, the last thing that God puts into this new world is God. The holy day of rest, or better yet, the day of holy rest, helps to mark time and provides meaning to the other six days and the work completed therein. 

The only acceptable work is that which underscores the sacredness of the sabbath, that mark it as God’s such as additional sacrifices (Num. 28:9-10) and maintenance of the tabernacle (Lev. 24:8; Chron. 9:32). The day of sabbath somehow breaks the barrier between the mundane and the sacred. It is to be revered. 

In Exodus (20:8-10; 23:12; 34:21), all work must cease on the seventh day, even during the all-important harvest time, for humanitarian reasons: all workers, including work animals, servants, slaves, and migrants deserve rest. Similarly, in Deuteronomy 5:13-15, the commandment to honor the sabbath is extended to animals and marginalized, partial members of the community. Their inclusion is on the grounds that solidarity demands it: “Remember that you too were once slaves in the land of Egypt, and the LORD, your God, brought you out from there with a strong hand and outstretched arm.” Work, rest, and solidaristic care tie us to all of creation by virtue of our relationship to God.

The Hebrew Bible interprets and reinterprets the meaning of the sabbath. Despite this diversity of emphases, common threads arise: work and rest are linked, they are both part of a just social order, they pull us into God’s creation story, and finally, they implicate the community. That is, work and rest are political.

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) is a member-based labor organizing collaborative that works to improve the lives of day laborers, migrants, and low-wage workers. The work of NDLON, and its member organizations across the country, are vital because they build leadership capacity among some of the most vulnerable workers themselves, workers often treated as if they were disposable. All working class people have a shared interest in maintaining as high a floor as possible for the treatment of every worker.

Click the link to view the image: “May Day, 1914,” Library of Congress

This image from a May Day 1914 rally somewhere in the United States captures a largely lost collective memory: There used to be a greater shared sense that workers were the ones who generated the profits from which the nation as a whole, and the wealthy few in particular, benefit. Struggles for better wages, safer conditions, and even for worker ownership of the businesses themselves were never about asking bosses to be more charitable. Instead, those struggles were about making rightful claims to the fruits of working people’s labor, because none of this functions without us. It’s our labor that transforms building materials into a house or a messy house into an inviting home. We create value.