On the Question of Time in the Legal Profession

Redeeming Time & Preserving Community

“Clocks cannot tell our time of day, for what event to pray. Because we have no time, because we have no time until we know what time we fill.”

(W. H. Auden)

INTRODUCTION

In his seminal work, Law and Revolution, Harold J. Berman describes the Germanic Codes’ connection to the peace of communal life in these words: “[r]ights and duties were not bound to the letter of the legal texts but instead were a reflection of community values, a living law which sprang . . . ‘out of the creative wells of the sub-conscious.’”^[1] What Berman describes here is a fascinating legal process. Where offenses occurred, the default position was retribution based on a system of accounting, which assigned values according to limbs and class: “[t]he little finger of a free man was worth 16 solidi, that of the half-free four, and that of a slave only two.”^[2]

And yet, the people did not simply apply the Old Testament ideal of les talionis. The community was measured and elastic—allowing space for diplomacy for the sake of restoration and a spirit of cooperation to override a rigid and destructive legalism. It was an adaptive and poetic system, which saw the law not as a force of constraint, but rather as a mediating institution for rehabilitation and repair. As Berman writes,

the institution of monetary sanction for crime payable by the kindred of the wrongdoer to the kindred of the victim, is to be judged, not primarily by the extent to which it served to deter or to punish or to compensate for crime, but primarily by the extent to which it served to forestall interfamily vendetta and, more particularly, by the extent to which it facilitated negotiation and mediation between hostile families.^[3]

In short, borrowing from the words of Fritz Kern, the customary law was “suited to human needs.”^[4]

Of course, this primitive system left plenty to be desired from the standpoint of the rule of the law and social fairness. No one today is going to advocate for the return of Ordeals or a legal system based on assigning values to body parts (Planned Parenthood and OnlyFans notwithstanding). But the Germanic system does provide a powerful lesson often lost on the legal profession today, with its incessant attempt to reduce the law to brute formalism. It provides a guide for what can possibly be a return to a restorative practice. For law today is often consumed by its internal mechanism without the due regard for human need. Clients are received, their complaints are heard, the barebone facts are compiled, and the briefs are drafted through the narrow lenses of favorable law. Briefs are narrowly crafted to spin the reality of opposing authority as negligible; depositions are structured toward the obfuscation of truth and hostility often rewarded; interrogatories are delivered using boiler plate responses; and far too often lawyers are overbilling their clients without a sense of shame or integrity (I know this because I’ve heard them bragging over Miller Lites).

But what if the law can do more than just apply laws to facts? What if the law can change the very structures of society that create the immediacy for lawsuits? What if lawyers can become synonymous with public servants? What if clients can be taught to accept accountability for wrongdoing? With the rise of generative AI, the time to ask basic questions is now: how can the Christian legal community help navigate the law into a new epoch of constructive engagement with the common good? How can lawyers appropriate the time they gain through cost-saving measures and funnel their energy into a reconstructed view of the legal profession?

It was not only Berman, but also Jordan Furlong who first invoked my thoughts on this topic when he wrote about the repurposing of law to be a practice focused on “human skills.” He writes how law schools have been spending a generation educating and training “half-lawyers” adept at technical functions but adrift in personal touch. (As anyone who has met a lawyer can attest, we tend to be a bit abrasive.) In a more recent post, Furlong foresees the end of billable hours in favor perhaps of higher-value work, ultimately advocating the need for firms to begin having difficult conversations about its very profit structure.^[5]

Fortunately for Christian law students and attorneys, we are in a good position to embrace these changes given our relationship with time and proclivity for dynamic change consistent with the mandates of faith to be an adaptive and shrewd witness (see my article on tropism here). While some rightly warn about the ill-effects that AI might have on our humanity and capacity for authentic relationships, others have remained sanguine about the coming wave so long as we create the proper systems of containment.^[6] As Jeremy Peckham rightly notes, “[o]ur mandate to steward creation means that we also have a mandate to be wise in how we use AI, will it be a tool in our hands that we are in control of or a creation that we become enslaved by.” So, let us be wise.

In this article, I would like to delve not into AI, but rather into this question of time and the relationship that Christians have with time in their studies and practice. Time itself is inextricably connected with AI, for better (i.e., saving time) or for worse (i.e., end of time). As we progress deeper into what Luciano Floridi calls the “Fourth Generation,” Christian attorneys have a unique opportunity to model an alternative measure to success in the coming years as the byproduct of enduring faith and love for God and neighbor.

KEEPING TIME IN LAW SCHOOL

Anyone who has spent a semester in law school knows well you have no time. (Or, at least that’s how it feels!) Never mind the stress that accompanies this absence, time is a rare commodity and everyone else seems to want your time for themselves. How you spend your time has an immense impact on your future—including on whom you spend your time with and what you spend your time doing. That is why having an intentional conversation about time is so important—before you’ve run out of it.

In his new film, Tod Field’s depicts the life of a renowned musician and composer named Lydia Tàr, played by the eminent actress Cate Blanchett, who undergoes a career crisis as she slowly begins to devolve into a state of hyperacusis and hysteria. At the beginning of the film, there is a profound scene where her character is being interviewed before a packed audience by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, where she delivers a response about the keeping of time in her line of work. Listen (or watch) to her words:

Time is the thing. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me. I start the clock. My left-hand shapes, but my right hand . . . marks time and moves it forward. However, unlike a clock, sometimes my secondhand stops, which means that time stops. Now, the illusion is that, like you, I’m responding to the orchestra in real time, making the decision about the right moment to restart the thing, or reset it, or throw time out the window altogether. The reality is that right from the very beginning, I know precisely what time it is, and the exact moment at which you and I will arrive at our destination together.

Like a conductor, Christians have this capacity to keep time with its passing. To stop time in our existential in-temporality given the knowledge of the infinite ahead. And, to mark time with our presence here on earth as the vessels by which God has put salvation history between the grains of sand moving through the hourglass. Time is both an illusion and a reality for the believer and, in every moment, we shape that contradiction toward the purposes of God.

This unique tension is perhaps nowhere better tested than in the law school context. For it is in law school that the relationship with time is too often distorted for students in the way it builds bad habits of recognition and expectation toward, not only the relationship one has with time, but also in the way that time is used in sacrificing the essence of community for the attainment of vocational mastery. To say this simply, without a proper appropriation of time, community is likely to perish, and our capacity to develop the timeless habits of intimacy (i.e., selfless community) is traded in for those habits conducive to expediency and transactionalism (i.e., selfish community). Every moment is no longer a moment to embrace the divine spark in others and learn to be together in a state of intemporal communion. Instead, every moment is counted as the waning loss of opportunity that could be had by moving on.

However, at the same time, law school is also difficult, which means time is also bound-up with an incessant struggle for the aggregation of resources and understanding. Every semester, students seek to find the better path for taking notes and outlining cases in the hopes of successfully conveying that knowledge in a time-intensive period of testing. They seek out other students of equal value for this pursuit and, as a corollary, seek to avoid those students deemed unusable. The allocation of time or time well-spent is not only seen as a measure of success, but also as an impediment for the symbiotic community.

For those who succeed, the question remains “at what cost?” For those who fail, that humbling experience may very well prove to be the necessary fodder to reconsider the importance of true community, now that self-sufficiency has played its hand and lost. Returning to the words of Lydia Tàr: with one hand, law school brings us closer to our temporal existence, where we lose our eschatological footing and fail to see our neighbor through the lenses of divine perspective. And with the other hand, law school takes us above our immediacy through the introduction of humility and intentionality, thus offering a pedagogical tool to understand our historical and divine placement in God’s unfolding narrative. What experience you have depends on how thoughtful you become about the question of time!

KEEPING TIME IN LAW PRACTICE

In law practice, the situation is similar: the very value of a person is measured by his billable hours and, by extension, the value of the client measured by a simple calculation looking at the time it takes to win a case versus the eventual payout. When I worked at an employment firm in Georgia, this was made imminently clear to me by how often we shortchanged our clients through early settlements so as to avoid the time spent in discovery and writing briefs. This of course produced a higher influx of clients every month—each one being worth less and proven to be so by the trivial dollar amounts we’d recover through premature settlements. The same went for those on the other side representing large corporations who willingly dished out the requisite amount of cash to avoid the time it takes to offer a proper defense. Sometimes of course this was done to save face or even based on a desire to admit wrongdoing—which was very rare. But at the end of the day, time was inextricably connected with the value firms attached to another human being and correspondingly to our own sense of worth.

This relationship was of course often distorted, i.e., the more self-worth, the less time you give to others thereby diminishing their worth in your eyes. That old trifle—“I know you’re busy”—is often utilized as a sign of respect (at times, adulation, or idolatry) and self-effacement. We see this somewhat playing out with the Centurion in Matthew 8, who came to Jesus asking Him to heal his servant. Mindful of the cultural distinction between Christ and the man, he nevertheless extends his time to this man in a gesture of repair: “Shall I come and heal him?” (Matt. 8:7, NIV).^[7] To which the Centurion replied: “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matt. 8:8). Not wanting Christ to spend the time to accomplish what can readily be done from afar, this man who understands well the importance of time and delegation exhibits great faith and humility in the midst of divine hospitality. As noted well by most commentators, there is a secondary layer to this scene in the religious customs connected with the purity rituals of day, which prevent Jewish leaders from entering the homes of Gentiles and thus places Christ’s original question in greater tension.^[8] This supports my discussion of time in not only how we spend it here on earth, but also in the invocation of the judgment of God who sought the “reconciliation of the world” (Rom. 11:15) in accordance to his timing. It speaks to our own use of time and the way it can transcend cultural and economic barriers (see also John 4). It speaks to the opportunity of using time to dehumanize our neighbors. Thus, “Jesus’ healing,” writes Craig Blomberg, “verifies the appropriateness of the man’s faith, and it occurs at a time and in a way which confirms that supernatural power has been at work.”^[9]

This story helps illustrate that there are some things that deserve taking the long road home and exercising patience; it helps see the connecting power of God with those left outside the walls of immediate self-interest. There are some things that simply should not be conveyed through the expediency of emails or cell phones. Some things are better savored in the intimacy of physical proximity. We see the Apostle John in the second epistle reflecting on this reality when he writes on the importance of community: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead, I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12). Commenting on this text, I. Howard Marshall notes John’s “signature” by emphasizing the increase of joy that comes through physical connection.^[10] While social media gives the imprimatur of bringing us together, it does so through a shallow technique akin to what John was alluding to by his mention of “pen and ink.”

Certain things are sufficient to be accomplished through zoom calls and phone conversations, but that is not how God designed mankind to live together. This concern was raised by those like Kate Lucky, who writes that the real worry isn’t that AI will replace our regular relationships, but that AI will inhibit them. A distortion that goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3, when the writer contrasts how God walked with Adam and Eve, with the subsequent separation that led to shame and expulsion. And, in the way Christ dealt with Zacchaeus by indicating that he will go and dine with him at his house, contrasted with the Pharisees who would not enter the home of those they consider unclean.^[11] The major difference of course between the episode in the Garden and in Luke 19 is the fracture of community through forms of self-reliance and self-surrender. Where in Genesis, we see Adam and Eve succumbing to their own devices through the treachery of the Devil and henceforth seeing themselves naked and ashamed. It was Zacchaeus who recognized the ways that he has cheated his brothers and converted his shame into an act of reparation. Recognition yields fruit of virtue or vice—and no man knows what he will find when he stares into the abyss of the soul in relation to the lightning of God.

Likewise, in the legal practice, time itself has the capacity to turn us into self-serving students who use clients for profit and shame. Or, instead, into sacrificial witnesses who willingly go that extra mile for the sake of restoring the dignity of his neighbor.

THE TIME CHALLENGE

All of this connotes a simple and yet profound two-state existence for students and lawyers alike. On one side, to borrow from the title of an Aldous Huxley novel, all time must have a stop. On the other, humans constantly sense the dread of running out of time. The consequences of perceiving both together is important. For if we know that time must end, we know that we are meant to exist in an atemporal state of existence. In the words of the singer Ben Howard, “only time is ours, the rest we’ll just wait and see.” But the very notion of lateness implies the opposite—it has a control over us because our bodies keep a record of expiration dates for arrivals and departures. As James K.A. Smith writes, “Christian timekeeping is like a dance on a tightrope: on the one hand, we are called to inhabit time in a way that stretches us, to be aware of so much more than now. . . . On the other hand, we always live in the present. Past gifts and future hopes coalesce in us in the present.” We live in a state of thrownness, that is, we are mindful of being thrown into a physical space: that we possess the power to influence time and that time has an influence on us.

The thing I found remarkable is how much these two states need to coexist and water our spiritual development. It is what allows us to “keep time with the Spirit,” to borrow again from Smith. “Time is revealed,” writes Olivier Clément, “not as an opposition to eternity but as the vessel chosen by God to receive and communicate the truth of eternity.” We must master Time before Time becomes our master.

This tension triggers the responsibility for us to bridge our temporal and eternal existence: to help us become connected with the passage of time and the need to redeem the time in the labor we pursue. Søren Kierkegaard tells us that life must be understood backwards but lived forwards. I think that is a profound way to understand our existence in time from the vantage point of an accomplished act on the Cross and the Kingdom advancing from the future.

THE LOSS OF COMMUNITY

If it hasn’t been apparent up to this point, let me summarize my main concern with one sentence: the legal profession contains an internal mechanism for depriving us of true community. It does this in various ways as noted above, primarily by changing how we respond to one another. But it also does this comprehensively in community by selling a distorted pedagogy of time and togetherness. We’ve seen how time distorts our capacity to engage with our neighbors as individuals. Now, let us look at how time distorts our capacity to form true community. I offer three movements and invite you to continue this symphony elsewhere.

I. The Distortion of Tomorrow

The first distortion I’ve noticed is the deprivation of true community through the installation of an unsettled dependency on forward mobility. This involves a habit of always looking ahead to what doors opportunities open and who among your peers can help you once inside.

In law school, for example, students are fundamentally changed in how they interact with one another by accepting the premise that a habit of hurry is the ultimate process of getting ahead. In her article, Shayla Love imprints this obsession with the moniker of “cult”—and it is! She writes how “[a]t the turn of the 20th century, economists predicted that the ultimate symbol of wealth and success would be leisure—showing others that you were so successful that you could abstain from work.” That reality has not taken root in America. Instead, the opposite occurred. “It’s not free time, but busyness, that gestures to a person’s relevance.” How often do we begin a finely crafted excuse with “I was too busy”? Or respond to the question of “how are you” with “I’ve been staying busy” as the functional equivalent of “good” or “fulfilled”? We are consumed by a frenetic energy of a task-driven mentality; driven by an idea that staying busy is connected to an integral life, where time remains the greatest commodity due to its lack thereof. After all, as Nadya Williams writes, “these choices matter because of how our use of time shapes us as beings with a mortal body yet an eternal soul.”

A second part to this is the connection between the cult of busyness and the virtue of impatience. As law students, we are constantly being rushed from class to class; and as attorneys, from client to client—together cultivating an incessant dance that deprives us the capacity to appreciate the nuances of passing time or, more specifically, presence. One of the ways I’ve discovered this problem in myself is my inability to slow down to read poetry. Skipping over the words of William Carlos Williams to get to the end. Developing habits toward expediting my reading by using audiobooks or various short-cut apps like Blinkist. Neither of course are evil in and of itself, but they do create a tendency that is difficult to put aside in social settings. I will be the first to admit that I cannot stand small talk, but I’ve never wondered if my disdain for small talk is the byproduct of a tutelage I’ve received in offering my allegiance to the cult of busyness.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not saying being busy is bad, or that working hard is ill-advised. In fact, I think the opposite—that cultivating competence in your legal profession is among the most glorifying things you can do for God and this oftentimes requires staying busy. However, it is the way you become changed through this process that matters to God: for in your inability to appreciate the presence of God and neighbor in haste, you confuse the worship of the Vine Dresser with the cultivation of the vineyard. In the words of Romans 1:25, by moving through an unreflecting season of legal education and practice, you run the risk of “exchanging the truth about God for a lie, and worshipping and serving created things rather than the Creator.”

Your vocation is a product of the technological innovations of God. He has brought us to this place for this very purpose and demands that our labor is conducted through the conduits of sanctification and excellence. We grow personally and through our service by tapping ourselves into the City of God in reorienting our love toward first things—the praise of his glorious name. In our pursuit of forward mobility, quite simply, you must remember who you are and whom you serve.

II. The Distortion of Utility

The second distortion is seeing other people through the lenses of professional ends. This one compliments the one above connecting busyness with the perception of forward mobility but, in a more profound way, it digs further into the vice of impatience by making us unable to appreciate what it means to be an “unhurried person.” It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who made me sense this distortion in my own life in his discussion of the church in a little book called Life Together. Written while living in an underground seminary during the Nazi years, Bonhoeffer discusses our tendency to judge the quality of our community based on what it provides us. In his book, he draws our attention in the way we seek to use the community for our own purposes and not for building up the body. Listen to his words:

Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift of God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.

For me, this was an indictment on the way I’ve gone about reacting to people through a utilitarian lens, and I know I picked up this habit in law school when the environment began to tutor me about the need to “build my CV,” “find opportunities,” and “join organizations that help advance my career.” These are all good things, of course, if made to serve their ultimate ends without becoming an article of love. They must all be subservient to the great dimensions of our lives and our calling. How we spend our time with others will be inextricably tied to the question of how we see that person.

That is why we must return to the practice of being a people in control of time. In his biography, Winn Collier has a wonderful passage expressing how Eugene Peterson sought to live a life of unhurried grace on the edges of burning out from the feeling that everything depended on him. He recounts how Peterson wanted to be a pastor that prays, a pastor reflective and responsible and relaxed in the presence of God so that he can be reflective and responsive and relaxed in the presence of men. Peterson spoke this truth well when he said, “I can’t do this just by trying harder. I want to be a pastor who has the time to be with you in leisure, unhurried conversations so that I can understand and be a companion with you.” In his discussion of these words, James K.A. Smith rightly connects this longing for unhurried grace to a discipline of hope. That Sabbath itself is a discipline of hope in knowing that “God is always and ever acting in, around, beneath, and sometimes even in spite of our own labor.”^[12] Therefore, we can rest!

The practice of developing into an “unhurried life” is a central counter-narrative to the legal profession’s attempt to pilfer from our lives with a pedagogy on how we should relate to time. And it does this from the very beginning by conditioning our values on how well you can answer questions under the pressure of time. How well you can sift through cases by only focusing on the necessary parts. How well you can distill the essence of a client’s complaint without having them share the extraneous details of their life. And, how quickly you can climb the ranks of law firms by mingling with the right partners or joining the right causes. Prioritizing meaningful, unhurried time together is an essential piece of remaining distinct in the legal practice.

To escape the banality of legal practice in its attempt to render us citizens of the city of man through a disordered preoccupation with the love of self and the love of professional achievement, we must challenge ourselves to live a life centered on restoring true community through a discipline of unhurried grace and intentionality. A life as citizen of the City of God—bent on love for God and neighbor. As Smith writes, “building margins into a life so you can respond to opportunities to muse, play, talk, pray is its own defiant act of trust and expectation.”^[13] In order to understand how to inhabit time, we must fight the urge to let the profession dictate our schedules and our relationships with others. We must take time for ourselves and others by seeking rest and practicing introspection in the hopes that God illuminates the pieces of the old self (Eph. 4:22) that remain in you. Which brings me to my final point.

III. The Distortion of Rest

The third distortion within the legal profession is a theft of meaningful rest. Not only during the semester, but also on Sunday where things left undone before the Monday-dawn breaks open another week of hustle.

In his article entitled “Work-Life Balance and the Need to Give Law Students a Break,” Jonathan Todres efforts to tackle the conundrum that even when students get a break, they never really get a break. Why? Because they always have something they can work on. For example, when I was in law school, did I spend every Thanksgiving resting? Of course not! I spent it getting a jump start on finals prep by updating my outlines and re-reading cases (at least the highlighted portions). I didn’t go home; I didn’t take time-off; I sought to either catch-up or get ahead. This is why I think what Ruth Haley Barton says in her new book on work and rest is so important and difficult. She writes that the Sabbath is itself fundamentally communal. By contrasting the unjust production schedule imposed by Pharoah in Exodus 5 with the redemption of Israel orchestrated by God in the subsequent chapters, Barton capably draws the tension between a community of servitude and a community guided by grace. She writes, “If the Israelites’ experience teaches us anything, it is that sabbath-keeping was always meant to be a communal practice and not merely a privatized one. And it all starts with leadership.”^[14]

Barton then goes on to offer what I think is a fitting corollary to the types of habits wrought by the legal profession and the incoming wave of Artificial Intelligence that will help our devices create habit-forming feedback loops that color our relationships through instrumental lenses. It is undeniable that we crave recognition; it is an inherent part of our human nature. And so, in craving recognition, we transform our relationships into conduits for that recognition. However it works, the self is motivating our actions, and others are seen as vehicles toward that realization. Neighbors become stepping stones toward that next line in our CVs, that next connection toward a clerkship or partnership. And through it all, our hyper-individualistic culture is incessantly helping fuel those tendencies

Hence, to restore true rest, we must first recognize the communal nature of the Sabbath. For us to seek genuine rest, professors, friends, and family must cultivate an ecosystem based on intimacy and the absence of those things that remove us from being physically and mentally present—like cell phones. Neil Postman is right that every new device comes with new techniques that fundamentally change our ecosystems and the way we interact therein. So, as people in time and above time, we must be on the front lines of speaking truth into the temporality of the world and the eternality of our beings—in harmony with others. We begin that journey by reflecting on the work of God through a time of rest and introspection.

And, second, we must refuse to let our individualistic strivings distort our true identity in Christ and distort our vision of our neighbors as not just other, but holy other. “No matter how enslaved we’ve been during the week, on the Sabbath we remember our true identity as free people,” writes Barton. “Many of us have fallen into the trap of identifying ourselves by what we do, but sabbath cultivates a sense of identifying around who we fundamentally are” and “when we are.”^[15]

CONCLUSION

In his book, James K.A. Smith offers an incredible journey on the habits of time. In it, he writes poignantly about our collective need to understand how to live in the past, present, and future. And about the way the Holy Spirit works wonders in the lives of saints in whatever context they find themselves and with the benefit of hindsight and eschatological truth that the Kingdom is arriving from the future. Listen to his poetic imagery:

The God who saves is a mosaic artist who takes the broken fragments of our history and does a new thing: he creates a work of art in which that history is reframed, reconfigured, taken up, and reworked such that the mosaic could only be what it is with that history. The consummation of time is not the erasure of history. The end of all things is a “taking up,” not a destruction. ”Time was not made for death but for eternity.”^[16]

As I write these words, I hear in the background the beautiful melody of Gabríel Ólafs’ Noktúrna and I am reminded of the stillness that comes when we grasp the words of W.H. Auden when he writes about the moment when “clocks cannot tell our time of day.”

Imagine that, living in still life—a moment where we find ourselves entirely suspended in time and space, no longer moved by the progress of time, but removed all together, “float[ing] easily in an infinite sea.”^[17]

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^[1] Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition 71 (1983).

^[2] Id. at 55.

^[3] Id.

^[4] Id. at 58-59, 77.

^[5] Interesting, Stephen Wu of Silicon Valley Law Group speculates that firms may charge “a technology fee,” so that “clients don’t expect to get generative AI for nothing.” Generative AI could radically alter the practice of law, The Economist (June 10, 2023), https://www.economist.com/business/2023/06/06/generative-ai-could-radically-alter-the-practice-of-law.

^[6] See Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma (2023).

^[7] See R.T. France, The Gospel of Matthew 313 (2007) (offering support for translating this verse as a question).

^[8] Id. at 314. There is a profound irony at the heart of all this: for the centurion believed that Christ had the power and authority to supersede the normal laws of physics and nature in healing from afar, but the idea of him breaking cultural barriers (entering his home) perhaps seemed more difficult to imagine given the physical presence of those customs in the life of Gentiles.

^[9] Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew 142 (1992).

^[10] I. Howard Marshall, The Epistles of John 76 (1978).

^[11] See Matthew 9:1-13; Luke 19:5-9. R.T. France speculates that one of the reasons why the Pharisees addressed the disciples in Matthew 9:11 is because they were unwilling to enter the home. R.T. France, supra note 7, at 351-54.

^[12] James K.A. Smith, How To Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now 168-69 (2022).

^[13] Id. at 170.

^[14] Ruth Haley Barton, Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again 49 (2022).

^[15] Id. at 37; Smith, supra note 12, at 8.

^[16] Smith, supra note 12, at 173.

^[17] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 10 (2007).