God spent six days in the work of creating and then took a day off on the seventh. God rested. The scribe of the Genesis account doesn’t use the word “Sabbath,” but all the scripture editors after that time assumed that “Sabbath” was meant. The word “Sabbath” doesn’t show up until the work of a later editor who wrote down in Exodus 20 the laws we know as the Ten Commandments:
Remember the Sabbath day and treat it as holy. Six days you may work and do all your tasks, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Do not do any work on it . . . . because the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and everything that is in them in six days, but rested on the seventh day. That is why the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-10a, 11-12)
As the Exodus account unfolds, God tells Moses:
Tell the Israelites: “Be sure to keep my sabbaths, because the Sabbath is a sign between me and you in every generation so you will know that I am the Lord who makes you holy. Keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you. Everyone who violates the Sabbath will be put to death.... Do your work for six days. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of complete rest that is holy to the Lord....The Israelites ... observe the Sabbath in every generation as a covenant for all time. It is a sign forever between me and the Israelites that in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, and on the seventh day the Lord rested and was refreshed.” (Exodus 31:13-17)The curious thing is that there is no mention of sabbaths in all the accounts of events from the creation until Israel’s arrival at Mt. Sinai. Apparently none of descendants of Adam and Eve or the patriarchs knew anything about Sabbath-keeping.
The first mention of Sabbath was in reference to the gift of manna. Collect it every day for six days (it won’t keep overnight), but on the sixth day collect two days worth which will keep the second day. The seventh day is “a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord” (Exodus 16:23). That is when the weekly Sabbath apparently becomes as a day of rest from ordinary secular labor. Ever since then the Sabbath has been a problem.
Some of you may remember when the only places open on Sundays were churches. No grocery stores, no gas stations, no restaurants. Sometime in the early 20th century one of the controversial issues before a Presbyterian General Assembly had to do with Sunday newspapers. They shouldn’t be printed on Sunday or delivered on Sunday. It wouldn’t surprise me if a few diehards said they shouldn’t be read on Sunday.
Let’s get practical. Every farmer knew that they couldn’t take a day off from milking cows or feeding and watering livestock. The circadian rhythms of biology don’t take every seventh day off. Life goes on.
There as a time, however, when strict practitioners of Judaism prepared the food for the Sabbath the day before. And ultra-strict observers of the Sabbath Law hired non-Jews to do necessary work on the Sabbath, including turning lights on and off and tearing toilet tissue.
That kind of overly-slavish approach to the observance of the Law was picayune in the eyes of Jesus. It was right up there with counting out the tithe of dill seed, lest one too few or one too many seeds be set aside for God. Observing the Law to that minute a degree wholly loses the intent of the Law, which was to glorify God.
The religious leaders had evolved a code of many actions that were forbidden on the Sabbath, including any type of work. They regarded healing as part of a doctor's profession and thus was work. Practicing one’s profession on the Sabbath was prohibited. The synagogue leader spoke to the people rather than to Jesus. He could not see beyond the law to compassion which Jesus had shown in healing this disabled woman.
The leader had concluded that if Jesus wanted to heal people, he should reserve his healing work for one of the other six days, any day but the Sabbath. If Jesus had stopped healing on the Sabbath he would have been endorsing the many petty, human-derived laws that had grown up around God’s basic laws regarding Sabbath observance. Jesus could not abide by those laws because they did not fulfill God’s intention for the Sabbath and were burdensome on the people.
What “work” had Jesus done? All he had done was to reach out and touch her. That wasn’t even as much work as was required to lead an ox or donkey to the water trough. Yet the synagogue leader and others like him – “hypocrites” to Jesus’ way of thinking – could not see past their laws. They hid behind their sets of complex and confusing laws and avoided the obligations which love entailed. As Paul reminded the Corinthian church people in his second letter, “He has qualified us as ministers of a new covenant, not based on what is written but on the Spirit, because what is written kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).
On another occasion Jesus addressed a deputation of Pharisees, saying,
“You ignore God’s commandment while holding on to rules created by humans and handed down to you. . . . Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘The person who speaks against father or mother will certainly be put to death.’ But you say, ‘If you tell your father or mother, “Everything I’m expected to contribute to you is corban (that is, a gift I’m giving to God),” then you are no longer required to care for your father or mother.’ In this way you do away with God’s word in favor of the rules handed down to you, which you pass on to others.” (Mark 7:8-13)People today can use the letter of the law to rationalize away their obligation to care for others (for example, by tithing regularly and then refusing to help a needy neighbor because that would take them beyond their tithe). Jesus declares that people’s needs are more important than rules and regulations. Our Lord commissions us to take time to help others, even if doing so might compromise our public images.
So we get caught between who we want others to think that we are and what we are under the facade of our public images. We proclaim grace but cling to law. Jesus called that sin. The personas of all of us together as the church make up a ragout of mixed messages when we try to say what we are about as the church. The church is not the community of the sinless. Rather we are the community of recovering sinners. We aren’t perfect. Often it’s one step forward and two steps backwards.
When the church gets all huffy about the minute intricacies of law and ritual rather than being hot and bothered about injustice and wholeness, the image is off-putting to the very people who desperately need the message of healing which Jesus was always proclaiming in word and action.
Eugene Peterson once said,
“There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. . . .Frederick von Hügel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease, dehydration, death. So, yes, the church is dead, but it protects something alive.” (1)Yes, we are sinners. Individually and collectively. No, we will never make ourselves perfect by our own efforts. Thanks, be to God that Jesus Christ makes us perfect in the final accounting. The ultimate truth to be advertised is not our adherence to the subsections and subclauses of law made up by sinful human beings. Our truth in advertising is that through God’s grace in Jesus Christ is that we are set free from the spiritual sicknesses that disable us. That makes every day a holy Sabbath to God!
Thanks be to God!
(1) Homiletics, August 22, 2010.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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