We sometimes get stuck in a convincing argument because it sounds right. In the case of Sabbath law, we’re seduced by only half of the point.
Sabbath remains a revolutionary concept
Proper 16C | Luke 13:10-17
When we remember the creation story, we recall more than an origin. We receive our purpose.
- Light and dark. Day and night.
- A dome, separate from the waters: sky!
- From the gathering of water: land! Earth! Life!
- Stars, sun, and moon to define the night from the day!
- From the waters, swimming creatures and for the dome, flying!
- From the earth, land creatures and humanity!
This is very good!
Then, on the seventh day, God rests. He hallows that day. It is the day for resting and rejoicing.
And we receive the work of God in creation. This order and creativity amaze and confound us!
At one time there was only darkness and the deep and a spirit moving. And God. And then, by the end of the week, there is everything. That’s a big job. Even God needs a break. To rest and celebrate.
The Sabbath
Given that the Sabbath was hallowed in creation you might think we would take it seriously. But messing that up is old hat for humanity.
When Moses goes up the mountain and disappears for 40 days, he shows back up with a list of commandments from God. A few about God and some more about respecting each other.
And right there, among the central commands for the Hebrew people.
Keep the Sabbath.
And just as important: make sure you help everyone in your sphere of influence keep it too.
So don’t just worry about yourself. It isn’t just about you taking the day off. Make sure your family takes it off. Your slaves. Livestock. Every living thing. Give them time to rest and rejoice!
Of the Ten Commandments, this is the one explicitly just as much about caring for others as it is about yourself. Other commands are about the stuff you must never do to other people. Don’t steal, kill, defraud. But Sabbath is about making sure everyone gets regular time off.
In a way the most explicitly Jewish and Christian law wouldn’t be posting the Ten Commandments in a court house, it would be labor laws mandating regular time off.
Protecting the Sabbath
Laws protecting the Sabbath grew over time into the customs some continue to this day. Many people refrain from cooking after sundown on Friday night through Saturday. Often cooking a double-portion on Friday so they may have enough for Saturday. This practice is reminiscent of Exodus 16 where the Hebrew people receive a double portion of manna on the sixth day so they may eat on the Sabbath.
These laws and customs keep and protect the Sabbath.
And we must remember just how radical hallowing the Sabbath is. It is mandating rest and mandating equality. This isn’t bowing to the will of the market or the progression of innovation.
God has intervened in the human desire to exploit to make us all equal. Keeping the Sabbath ensures we may all hallow it: to honor it as sacred.
So when Jesus shows up and heals a woman, he threatens everything.
Jesus threatens the Sabbath
It’s easy for us to look past this moment. After all, most of us are clearly on Team Jesus. And we really make a sport of ensuring that this cat can do no wrong in our eyes.
And yet, there are a lot of us here who are also really into Team Tradition. We love our saints, our vestments, our music, and our liturgy. We bind ourselves to an ecumenical articulation of faith and bonds of affection maintained for centuries.
So if we’re being at least a little objective about this situation, we have to acknowledge that Jesus is messing with something you just don’t mess with. It’s like he’s cracking open Pandora’s Box.
And we know this leader of the synagogue must be scared to see this happen.
I’ve heard this same appeal in a variety of contemporary situations. Given the importance of the Sabbath, keeping its sacredness is essential! His appeal is earnest and true: There are six other days! Why break the Sabbath this way?
We must face the fact that the leader is right on this. He’s making a really compelling argument.
And…
Jesus is asking us to expand our sense of the Sabbath.
Here’s how.
Resistance
Think back to Luke chapter 10. This was weeks ago, of course. The disciples were given the very power of Jesus. And for a little while, it was amazing. But then they started to lose the thread. So Jesus pulls them back into focus. That’s when he tells them the parable of the Good Samaritan. And this story has an uncommon theme of expanding generosity and neighborliness.
What Jesus confronts in his disciples, the crowds, and especially in the religious leaders is an alarming ego-centric worldview. Everyone is focused on who is in and who is out. What team you’re on. Who you get to define as not on your team.
So for the last three chapters, Jesus has been preaching a gospel of radical inclusion. And this is based on a fundamentally consistent view of God’s love for creation. For Jesus, God’s love comes way before love of country or tribe or race or religious affiliation. Which means love transcends these barriers.
Remember again how Sabbath is not just a rule for the ego-me to honor. I must ensure everyone who is not me is free from an unrelenting mandatory daily workload. The nature of Sabbath law requires that we protect people and animals who are very much not us! Which also means not on our team. This is a command that goes way beyond our human divisions. And its mandate of equality flies in the face of a will to exploit people who are different.
So at a base level, Jesus is undermining a literal and traditional view of a radical Sabbath law. And he’s doing that to resurrect just how radical Sabbath really is.
In the face of empire, Sabbath is resistance.
Not just an argument
The reasons Jesus gives for this holistic view of Sabbath are more than theological platitudes. This isn’t a case of preaching “love everybody” while you road rage on the way home from church. Not that I know what that’s like. At all.
He’s drawing us back to the centrality of why Sabbath is not just about rest. Nor is it only for imitating God’s rest. But the radical heart of Sabbath is about establishing an equality in rest.
You don’t deprive your oxen and malnourish them to obey the law—that sounds like obedience to the law, and yet nothing like the law itself! Bringing them to water because they can’t get there when you’ve tied them up is granting them rest. Giving a woman, bedeviled for 18 years freedom to rest for the first time in decades! That sounds exactly like Sabbath.
Even more to the point is that Sabbath laws protected livestock more than people! To protect “investments,” they exempted the feeding of livestock from the prohibition of work. But they did not exempt the healing of people. Under the law, an ox is worth more than your neighbor.
Standing up to these laws is not just an act of resistance. It is the birth of freedom: redemption. This is Sabbath!
In Deuteronomy, the command to keep the Sabbath is given a second time. This time, it is not just about imitating God’s rest and delight in creation. It is because God freed the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt. Therefore Sabbath is explicitly for rest and freedom.
This radical character was there from the beginning. Sabbath is about joy, rest, equality, and freedom. So Jesus is trying to protect the Sabbath from Sabbath law!
Keeping the Sabbath Now
We may find the synagogue leader’s argument convincing, but Jesus doesn’t. He’s using a kin-dom lens. Keeping the Sabbath isn’t just a rule to follow or a law to enforce. Sabbath is an antidote to our dysfunctional view of work. All of our work.
The true beauty of the Sabbath is it’s both/and quality. It is rest and redemption, you and me, relaxation and rejuvenation, freedom and equality.
Sabbath gives us the chance to slow down long enough to remember what’s missing. To put on Jesus’s kin-dom lens; to rediscover life itself.
We’re invited to see just how amazing the cosmos is. To pause our ego-led selfish pride long enough to wonder and marvel and see the world.
The radical equality of Sabbath is needed in this work-around-the-clock, open-24-hours culture more than ever.
To keep Sabbath rest sacred for everybody is not just freeing us and our neighbors. It is restoring and redeeming creation. And giving God a new chance every week to exclaim
It is very good!