Leviticus 16:29-34: in context

This is the closing instruction for the Day of Atonement, the single most important day in Israel's year, the one day when atonement was made for all the sins of the whole people at once. God commands it as a perpetual statute: on the tenth day of the seventh month, you shall be cleansed from all your sins before the LORD. The whole accumulated guilt of a year, for the priests and the people and even the sanctuary itself, dealt with in one day, a complete cleansing and a fresh start.

And here is the striking thing about what the people were told to do on that day. They were told not to work. It is a Sabbath of solemn rest, God says, you shall do no manner of work, and you shall afflict your souls, humbling yourselves. On the very day their sin was being dealt with, the one requirement laid on the people was to stop working and to humble themselves. The actual work of atonement was not theirs to do; it was done for them, by the anointed priest, who made atonement for the sanctuary and the altar and the priests and all the assembly. The people's part was to cease their own striving, to rest, to humble themselves, and to receive a cleansing they could not perform. The day sin was removed was a day of rest precisely because the removing was God's work and not the people's.

That cuts against a deep instinct. When I am weighed down by guilt, my reflex is to work it off, to punish myself, to try hard enough to make up for it, to earn my way back to clean. The Day of Atonement was built the opposite way. On the day of cleansing, the command was to stop working and let atonement be done for me. Am I trying to labor my way out of my guilt, when the day of atonement was designed as a rest, a ceasing and a humbling in which the cleansing is done for me rather than by me?