Isaiah 58.9-14, Luke
13.10-17
I wonder how you feel about
Sundays, the Christian Sabbath? It might depend on your age, of course. In my
childhood in the 1960s, most shops were closed on Sundays, and there weren’t
the Sunday sports activities there are now, but the really strict Sabbath
observance had mostly disappeared – no playing, no hanging out washing. I remember it as a quieter day than normal, a
different day, including church in my case, but not a solemn or boring day.
That may be partly because I was quite happy with my own company, with my nose
in a book, but even so, looking back, I wonder whether it might have been a
high point in Sabbath observance, preserving the sense of rest, but not in a
repressive way, at least not in my family. Some of you may recall a much
stricter Sabbath observance, or, if you are younger than me, you may never have
known a time when this day was much different from the rest.
At the time of Jesus, the
Sabbath was a major preoccupation of the religious experts. The rules
surrounding the Sabbath were a distinguishing feature of Jewish society, setting
it apart from the nations around it. But the trouble with rules is that as soon
as you make them, people will start arguing about them, finding complications,
asking for exemptions. Take the hosepipe ban. Hosepipe use is banned at the
moment here – unless you can’t run your business without using one, or have
animals to care for, or, in some cases, if you are disabled. But who draws the
lines between those who can and can’t – does washing the mud off your dog
count, or is it only hosing down an elephant which exempts you? Who polices
this? Would you report your neighbour for using a hosepipe on their runner
beans? And how should it be enforced? Fines from the police or naming and
shaming on facebook? Rules soon turn into minefields. That was just as true of the religious experts
of Jesus time. Carrying things was classed as work, for example, but did carrying
a chair across a room count? They couldn’t agree. You couldn’t travel, but how far
couldn’t you travel? You needed to get to the synagogue after all…
In the story we heard in the
Gospel, Jesus runs up against one of those religious experts, the leader of the
synagogue who had invited him to speak one Sabbath day, curious about this
travelling preacher everyone was talking about. But whatever he expected, he got
more than he bargained for. A woman turned up, who’d been ill for 18 years,
bent double by some disease. Her disability must have made normal life very
hard. She couldn’t even look people in the eyes when they spoke to her. And
it’s quite possible that they shunned her anyway. Disease and disability were
often regarded as punishments from God, so her neighbours may have thought
she’d done something to deserve this.
It’s clear that she wasn’t
going to push herself forward. She was used to being on the sidelines. It was
Jesus who called her to him, laid his hands on her and lifted her up to
standing again. The crowd were amazed and delighted, whatever they’d privately
felt about this woman before. 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. We’re told that he “kept saying”
to the crowd that they should all have come on another day if they wanted
healing… He kept saying it. You can almost hear the panic in his voice…
But Jesus stuck by what he
had done, stuck by this woman. The law permitted people to take their livestock
to food and water on the Sabbath, he said, so why should it forbid the healing
of a human being in need? In fact, Jesus went further than that. He didn’t just
believe he was allowed to heal on the Sabbath; he believed this was what
he ought to be doing, what the Sabbath was for. “Ought not this
woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years be set
free from bondage on the Sabbath.”
His opponents were put to
shame by his answer, we are told, perhaps because at some level they recognised
that his answer was firmly rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The Bible said that the
Sabbath had been given by God to the people of Israel as they trekked through
the wilderness with Moses, after their deliverance from slavery in Egypt, where
they’d probably have never known rest at all. But the gift of the Sabbath not
only gave them a precious break from work, it also reminded them that they
shouldn’t use their new-found freedom to exploit others, as they had been
exploited. It was profoundly counter-cultural. The aim of most nations at the
time was to expand, but how could you build a vast empire if you kept stopping
to do nothing every seventh day? You couldn’t even properly defend your
borders. The Sabbath set a limit to Israel’s power, and that was quite
deliberate. It was a weekly reminder that their true worth didn’t depend on
their productivity or their achievements; it came from God, who loved people as
they were, productive or not.
Even God’s own value wasn’t
located in what he did, according to the book of Genesis. God had created the
world in six days, but on the seventh day he “ceased from his work”. I’m sure
he hadn’t run out of ideas, but when he looked at what he’d made he knew that it
was enough - good enough, rich enough, diverse enough. He didn’t feel the need
to labour on and on, heaping up creation, striving after more. What he wanted
was for it to be enjoyed, treasured and shared, as the blessing he meant it to
be.
The Sabbath was meant to be a
reminder of that first perfection, and a foretaste of how God meant his world
to be in the future. The Sabbath wasn’t just a time to give tired bodies and
minds a rest – valuable though that is. It was meant to be a glimpse of a world
made right, the goal of our work on all the other days.
That’s why the prophet Isaiah,
in our first reading, linked the Sabbath to justice and righteousness. You
can’t expect to have a good Sabbath if you ignore those who are hungry and
afflicted, if you speak evil of others, if you just pursue your own aims.
That’s why Jesus could so confidently say that healing this woman on the Sabbath
wasn’t just permitted; it was compulsory, exactly what the
Sabbath was meant for.
This little story, then, packs
a big punch. It asks us what we think we are here for, what our labours are for,
what our lives are for. It challenges our priorities, and casts a light not
only on what we do today, but what we do in the rest of the week too. God calls
us to catch a glimpse of heaven on the Sabbath, the heaven we have been working
with him to build in all the other days. Where will we spot God at work, and
how will we join in with him?
Amen
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