Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
Sabbath — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Isaiah 58:9b-14/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Luke 13:10-17/NRSVUE)
I don’t know what you’re doing this afternoon after church but I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing if it’s not raining: yard work. The summer sun and lack of water here in Utah have done such a number on my front lawn that it seems kind of disingenuous to continue referring to this pathetic patch of dirt as a “lawn” in need of care, but I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do in other parts of the yard — plants to water, weeds to pull, and things of that ilk — to keep me busy for a while and so that’s what I plan to do, as I’ve done most Sunday afternoons for many years.
But not too long after I became a minister and began serving a church, I learned through the grapevine that there was a handful of folks who thought this was inappropriate — especially for a someone in my line of work — because, in their way of seeing things, it violated one of God’s commandments — specifically, the one to keep the sabbath.
I was kind of surprised that they saw this as an issue — mostly because I didn’t think of what I was doing as “work” (the fact that the word “work” is actually part of the term “yard work” notwithstanding). I’m not necessarily saying their literal and broad-reaching interpretation of of the Fourth Commandment is wrong (heck, maybe it worked for them); what I’m saying is that we simply understood it differently.
But I must confess that I did view their desire for such strict adherence to “the law” to be a little suspect. After all, none of them seemed sufficiently worried about the prohibition against wearing wool and linen at the same time (mentioned in Deuteronomy 22:11 and Leviticus 19:19 for those of you who might be keeping score) to be checking my clothing tags (or likely even their own). And the prohibition, repeated three times in the Torah, against cooking the meat of a goat in its mother’s milk that led the early rabbis to say that meat and dairy must always be separated probably wouldn’t have stopped them from enjoying a cheese steak sandwich.
Maybe the whole sabbath thing seemed like a relatively bigger deal to them because it made God’s top ten list (though I don’t recall any of them taking issue with the fact that I, just by doing my job on Sunday mornings, was technically violating the Fourth Commandment). Or maybe we just pick and choose the rules we follow and don’t follow (and also the ones we expect other people to follow). Who knows? For whatever reason, some people have some pretty strong feelings about the one regarding the sabbath and, truth be told, they always have.
Ever since God first laid down the law for Moses and the Israelites in Exodus 20, telling them to,“Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy,” people have wondered and argued about what remembering the sabbath day, and keeping it holy actually means in practice.
Way back then, God said that “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work… For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.” In other words, we’re supposed to rest on the seventh day, because God did; so the sabbath exists to honor God’s creation of, well, creation.
But God’s declaration here definitely invites some follow-up questions. Which day is the seventh day — and is it necessarily the same day for everyone? I mean the Jewish sabbath is from sundown on Friday until nightfall on Saturday, while the Christian sabbath on Sunday. Is someone right (and thus some one wrong) about this, or doesn’t it really matter?
And what constitutes “work” — and is the answer the same for everyone? Since I work on Sunday, can my sabbath be Saturday instead, or do I get some kind special exemption from having to observe the sabbath at all for doing “God’s work” on the day that folks in my tradition have historically observed it? Just for the record, I’ve chosen to go with option number one and take Saturdays off.
If I were a professional landscaper, would mowing my own lawn on the sabbath count as work? And since I’m not a landscaper, does mowing my own lawn on the sabbath count as work? God doesn’t ever say one way or the other, so we’re left to figure these things out ourselves. And it kinda makes sense that God didn’t address the issue with that level of detail because they didn’t have landscapers and lawns back then (come to think of it, they didn’t have ministers either). So maybe, just maybe, God’s commandments are meant to evolve as we evolve.
Interestingly, when God presents Moses with the law for a second time in Deuteronomy, the reason God gives for keeping the sabbath holy is completely different than the one God gave back in Exodus. This time it’s not about commemorating God’s act of creation; here God tells the Israelites to keep the sabbath holy so that they will remember that when they were once slaves in the land of Egypt, the Lord their God brought them out from there with the mighty hand of an outstretched arm. Said slightly differently, the sabbath that was once all about creation is now also about liberation.
And while the commandment to keep the sabbath holy and to do no work on it didn’t change, this evolution in the rationale for why the sabbath matters opened the door for reinterpreting how it ought to be observed.
When remembering freedom from slavery becomes the reason (or at least a reason) for the sabbath, does the prohibition against “work” extend now only to labor that one is forced to do against one’s will and/or without fair compensation, or is it against all work of any kind? Once again, God doesn’t make this clear and so we’re left to sort this out, as individuals and as communities, for ourselves — which people have been doing for a few thousand years now, and often with a whole lot of disagreement.
Like it or not, in practice, the sabbath commandment — and the law more generally — has really never been etched in stone (though it was, as you will remember, actually etched in stone on those tablets Moses brought down from the mountaintop). It has always been more of a living, breathing thing that has changed, in fits and starts, through time and circumstance; throughout our tradition, the law itself has evolved.
So, into this tradition — and into the synagogue — walks Jesus. He knows darned well what the law regarding the sabbath says; he knows darned well the history of its interpretation. And he’s about to challenge that interpretation, to recast it to reflect a new reality — one in which God has sent Jesus into the world bearing the gift of eternal life.
Today’s story, at some level, is pretty straightforward. Jesus is teaching in a synagogue on the sabbath, when there appears a woman, all hunched over, with a spirit that has crippled her for eighteen years. Jesus calls her over, lays his hands upon her, and declares that she is set free from her ailment. The woman stands up straight for the first time in a long time and praises God.
The leader of the synagogue, of course, is none too happy about what has just transpired. If Jesus wants to come in and heal people on any of the other six days of the week, that’s fine, but this is the sabbath and you’re not supposed to do work on the sabbath — it’s against the law to do work on the sabbath.
Jesus, as he tends to do, points out the hypocrisy of the position held by this leader and his peers. If they had livestock in need of water on the sabbath, they wouldn’t hesitate to get their animals water in order to preserve their lives, but they have a problem with Jesus healing a fellow human simply because he does so on the sabbath.
The leader’s counterargument to Jesus would likely be, “This woman’s ailment is not life threatening, so why can’t just wait til tomorrow?” Jesus’s response to him would probably be, “Why should this suffering person have to wait even another second to receive healing.” It’s pretty hard to argue with that.
And Jesus’s choice of words in rebuking the leader are really important; just listen to what he says: “Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?“
Remember, God declared the sabbath to be a celebration of both the creation of the world and the Israelites’ release from slavery. Could there possibly be a better way to honor God’s acts of creation and liberation than to free a life from suffering? In Jesus’s way of seeing, this isn’t a violation of the sabbath, it’s the whole point of the sabbath.
And when Jesus describes the woman he heals as a “daughter of Abraham,” he making a really provocative point. As you may recall, way back in Genesis 12, God made some big promises to Abraham, including this one: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” In other words, we are all children of Abraham; Man or woman, slave or free, disabled or fully-able, Christian or Jew or Muslim — we all deserve to be set free from our suffering, even on the sabbath day.
Suffice it to say, this was a big challenge to the way people understood the sabbath law — but Jesus presented a whole lot of challenges to the way people saw a whole lot of things. And we continue even today to see and to observe the sabbath in light of the challenge Jesus throws down right here.
Even those among us who adhere to a fairly strict view of the sabbath — who are not thrilled by the fact that stores and restaurants are open today, or that I do yard work on Sunday afternoons — likely don’t have a problem with the fact that police and fire departments are working today, or that doctors and nurses are working today. These people, after all, are working to relieve suffering, and to preserve and protect life. And if you don’t have a problem with that, then you’re conceding, at some level, that the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law — and that’s exactly what Jesus wants people to understand here.
Okay, so mowing my lawn and pulling weeds this afternoon might not rise to the level of celebrating life and freeing people from suffering in the way that God and Jesus likely meant it. Then again, tending to all of the water-wise plants I’ve put in the yard is a way of celebrating of life in this desert climate, isn’t it? And doing something I enjoy as means of managing stress in this day and age is way of alleviating suffering, isn’t it? And so I don’t really believe that God would ring me up for a sabbath violation in this case (or at least I hope not).
But, hey, if you have a different view about this, let’s talk about it — heck, let’s even debate it, if you’re so inclined — because that’s what people of faith in each generation are called to do, in order to make this faith our own.