What’s in a name?
Why Octet? You probably know an octet as something to do with the number eight… a group of eight musicians, a stable group of electrons in an atom, an eight-bit unit of digital information. But why name our community of students and scholars the Octet Collaborative?
Human flourishing is the core of our mission, and at the center of the Christian vision of human flourishing is the concept of sabbath rest. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the Sabbath gives rhythm to a week ordered around humanity’s chief end: one day in seven given over to rest, peace, and worship. The key to the Sabbath is that it’s not about what you’re not allowed to do. The Sabbath isn’t merely a cessation of work, as Old Testament scholar John Walton has argued. The Sabbath is about what human beings are made for, what our work is made for. Sabbath doesn’t merely end work; Sabbath fulfills work, gives its meaning and purpose. This kind of rest doesn’t merely “recharge our batteries” so we can return to work with greater efficiency. On the contrary – as the Jewish scholar Abraham Heschel wrote, “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.” (The Sabbath, New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1951, p. 14).
In the Jewish tradition, Sabbath was the seventh day of the week. There’s a bit of a misconception that Christians abandoned their Jewish roots when they began to practice Sabbath on the first day of the week, in recognition that Jesus was raised on Sunday. But that’s not quite right. Early Christians spoke of Jesus’ resurrection as being, not the first day, but the eighth day, and drew on their Jewish inheritance in making the connection.
The eighth day had always been a day of new beginnings. Jewish boys were circumcised, initiated into their covenantal connection to their people and their God, on the eighth day of their lives; the priests went through a seven-day process of consecration before getting to work on the eighth. The way the early Christians told the story, the final week of Jesus’ life had been an echo of creation itself. Like his Father, Jesus had declared his work “finished” – from the cross – on the sixth day, and rested on the seventh. When he rose, he inaugurated the eighth day, a day to put death at its end and to begin a new life, fit for eternity – the eighth day, the first day of a whole new creation.
Christians believe that Jesus’ death and resurrection provide hope for a world mired in death and decay. Apart from that hope, all our work must ultimately be meaningless because there is no future for any of us beyond the grave. But of first importance, the apostle Paul wrote, is the truth that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Here, Paul said, is our hope: “Death is swallowed up in victory… your labor is not in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:54, 58). The gospel invites all of humanity to find rest in Christ, and it is in the hope of that rest that our work can find true and lasting meaning.
The Octet Collaborative is dedicated to the pursuit of the true human flourishing that began on that first, and greatest, eighth day of the week.
