I wonder what your feelings are about Sundays, the Christian
Sabbath? It might depend on your age. In the sixties, when I was born, most
shops were closed on Sundays, and there weren’t the Sunday sports activities
there are now, but the rather grim attitudes which had forbidden children from
playing or reading anything other than improving books had largely faded away.
I remember it as a quieter day than normal, a different day, a day which
normally included church and Sunday school, but not a solemn or boring day. Looking
back it may have been a high point in Sabbath observance, preserving the sense
of rest, but in a way which didn’t seem repressive – at least not in my family.
Some of you may recall a much stricter
Sabbath observance, or, if you are younger, may never have known a time when this
day was really much different from the rest.
At the time of Jesus, the Sabbath was a major preoccupation of
the religious experts, one of the things which singled out their nation among
all the others of the world. Who were these strange people who refused to work,
or even to fight in their own defence, on this one day of their week. Those
religious experts argued endlessly about what, precisely, constituted work
though. You couldn’t carry anything – that was work – but what distance did
that apply to? Did carrying a chair across a room count? You couldn’t travel,
but how far couldn’t you travel? You needed to get to the synagogue after all. Arguments
raged among the lawyers.
In the story we heard in the Gospel, Jesus runs up against one
of those religious experts, the leader of the synagogue he had come to on this particular
Sabbath. He already had a reputation as a healer, and maybe that’s what drew
the woman in this story to the synagogue on this day. She’d been ill for 18
years already, bent double by some disease, excluded from normal life by her
disability, unable even to look other people square in the eyes. At this time
disease was thought to be a punishment from God, so she may have been treated
with suspicion by her neighbours as well. She wasn’t going to push herself forward
though. It was Jesus who called her forward, laid his hands on her and lifted
her up to standing again. Cue great rejoicing; the crowd seem to have been
amazed and delighted. But the synagogue leader couldn’t see the wood for the
trees. It was the Sabbath. Healing was work. Work was forbidden on the Sabbath.
Jesus had broken the law. The fact that a desperate woman’s life had been
transformed meant nothing to him. He just “kept saying” to the crowd that they
should all have come on another day if they wanted healing…
Jesus wasn’t having any of it. The law permitted people to
take their livestock to food and water on the Sabbath, so why should it forbid
the healing of this poor woman, he argued. In fact, Jesus went further than
that. It wasn’t just that he believed he was allowed to heal on the Sabbath;
this was precisely what he ought to be doing. “Ought not this
woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years be set
free from bondage on the Sabbath.”
His answer hints at a much broader understanding of the
significance of the Sabbath than the synagogue leader has, but it wasn’t really
anything new; it was firmly rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures.
According to the book of Genesis, God created the world in
six days, and on the seventh day ceased from his work. It wasn’t that he’d run
out of ideas, but that when he looked at what he had made he knew that this was
enough - good enough, rich enough, diverse enough. He didn’t feel the need to
labour on and on, heaping up creation, striving after anything. It was good,
just as it was, and it didn’t need a single extra thing to make it perfect. What
it needed, was to be enjoyed, treasured and shared.
The story went on to tell how that first perfection was lost,
but human beings never quite forgot it, deep down in their spirits, the Bible
said, and they longed for a time when they could enjoy it again, longed for God
to bring about its healing. The Sabbath was supposed to be a foretaste of that
time, a foretaste of heaven. It wasn’t just a break to give tired bodies and
minds time to rest – valuable though that is – before re-entering the real
world of work. The Sabbath was the day that really mattered, a glimpse of a
world made right, the goal of our work on the other six days.
That’s why God said, through the prophet Isaiah in our first
reading, that Sabbath joy was inextricably tied up with justice and
righteousness. You couldn’t have a good Sabbath if you ignored those who were
hungry and afflicted, if you spoke evil of others, if you just pursued your own
aims. Remembering the Sabbath and keeping it holy, the commandment God gave to the
Israelites, wasn’t just about what you didn’t do on this special day; it
was about what you did do on it, and on all the other days too. Only then could the Sabbath be a day of delight
and joy, as God had meant it to be. That’s why Jesus could so confidently say
that healing this woman on the Sabbath wasn’t just permitted; it was compulsory,
the task for which that particular Sabbath had been made.
So how do we feel about this Sabbath which is just ending?
What glimpse of heaven have we caught in it? What call have we heard to service
in it? Where have we encountered God in it? And how are we going to share in God’s
healing work tomorrow, as a result of this holy day?
Amen
At our All Age Worship today I read this poem,
which I wrote many years ago after working on the story of creation with a
group of Sunday School children, who were rather unimpressed with the idea of
God “resting” on the seventh day – not what they would have done if they had
just made such a wonderful playground!
THE SEVENTH DAY - or what God did on
his day off
On the seventh day
God played with his creation.
In the morning
he ran down early to the sea’s edge,
and in the crusted rock pools teased
the waving fingers of sea
anemones.
He let the sand, like powdered silk,
run through his funneled fingers
and the shallow water play around
his feet,
drawing a sandy wake around them.
Crashing on the rocks the waves
leapt
to greet him with sprayed salt.
In the afternoon
he kicked up leaves,
musty in the dark woods,
and chased the spidery seed children
of the
rosebay willowherb,
tumbling idly into their new
generation
over dry earth.
He dammed the icy streams
to sail twig boats down rocky rivers
and climbed into the branches of
rough oaks
looking for secret squirrels
But in the evening -
in the evening he wanted to talk.
So he sought out man and woman by
their campfire,
finding worlds within its embers.
Late into the night,
they listened, with their arms
around each other,
to the songs of night creatures,
and invented music.
And God thought the seventh day was
good,
because he played with his creation
–
and the whole earth joined the game.
Oct. 88. Anne Le Bas
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