I was chasing a rabbit the other day and I went down the theological rabbit hole. This is what I discovered.
There is a great deal of sleeping going on in the New Testament.

Jesus was asleep in the back of the boat during a storm. The story appears in all three synoptic gospels. The disciple’s question was, “Lord, don’t you care that we perish?” The Bible says after God created; he rested. The Hebrew word is the intensive form of the verb. God intensely rested and commanded us to rest too! I’m not surprised Jesus was asleep after a long day of preaching and healing!

According to Luke, the disciples were asleep on the Mount of Transfiguration. The bright light and the visitation of Moses and Elijah awakened them. As Luke records the story, the bleary-eyed disciples missed the good stuff and became “fully awake” toward the end of the event.

Jesus told His followers to stay awake and watch for signs of great spiritual upheaval and then the second coming. He asked the disciples to stay awake and watch while He was praying in Gethsemane. But after the big supper and wine, the disciples kept falling asleep.

Sleeping soldiers were the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. “And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descended from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it…. For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.” The punishment for a Roman soldier falling asleep on duty was death. The soldiers had a problem explaining to their superiors who rolled the stone back from the tomb’s entrance. Can you hear these soldiers trying to give the angel report? It was easier for them to face death and confess to being asleep.

The book of Acts records another example of a sleepy disciple. Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, “he fell to the ground from the third story was picked up dead.” The story has a happy ending, he was not dead, just had the wind knocked out of him.

Sleeping is a good thing. In some of the modern works on spiritual formation, sleep is listed as a spiritual practice under “stillness” or “Sabbath.” God rested, Jesus slept, should we not take the hint?

The other side of the coin is known as “spiritual sleepwalking.” That happens when we practice all the rituals of our faith, yet we are not connecting with God. It does happen in church, when after the hymn singing the congregation sits down and some of them zone out.

I leave you with the words of the Apostle Paul, “And do this, understanding the present time: The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.”