Pentecost 2 - 2 Jun 2024 Christ Church St. Lucia
Readings: Deuteronomy 5: 12-15; Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18: 1-10; 2 Corinthians 4: 5-12; Mark 2:23-6:6
In my second last or last year at primary school, I started playing hockey. I played right through high school, had a break while I was at university, and then played on and off for about 12 years when I was in the Army. I guess there’s many things I have forgotten about my hockey playing days, but one thing I’ve never forgotten was my father’s reaction when I came home and told him we’d been asked to play on a Sunday. He was not at all happy about it. My father’s family came from West Country Methodist stock and my mother’s family from Northern Ireland Presbyterian stock, so Sundays were definitely days of rest. In our family we’d go to church – my brother and sister and I to Sunday School and later to Christian Endeavour, then home for lunch, a rest, and then we’d often go on a family walk together – we didn’t have a car for a long time. I think my parents would hardly recognise Sundays now. Just about anything that can open is open, just about anything that can be done is done. We rarely hear talk these days of “the Sabbath”, but years ago you did. Sunday was “the Sabbath” and there were strict expectations and cultural norms about what could and couldn’t be done. What do we make of the Sabbath these days?
The Sabbath was a Jewish institution, and its observance was grounded deeply in Jewish identity. It reaches right back to the Creation stories when we’re told that God rested on the seventh day – in Genesis Chapter 2 we read “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So, God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”[1] It’s not saying that God needed a rest, rather it’s saying that for God, rest was part of the creation. The Fourth Commandment about remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy is one of the more lengthy and developed commandments and an extensive body of legal interpretation grew up regarding what did and did not violate Sabbath rest. The evidence of the Gospels suggests that Jesus didn’t reject Sabbath observance, but he did question interpretations he judged to be at odds with the original purpose of the Sabbath. And the two sabbath controversies we have in the reading from St. Mark’s Gospel today reflect this attitude of Jesus.
The first arises when the disciples walk with Jesus through a field of standing grain and begin to pluck heads of possibly ripening grain. The Law allowed this – you could pick grain in this way, but you weren’t allowed to use a sickle. That was harvesting, that was work. When the Pharisees suddenly turn up, it’s not the picking of the grain they object to, but that it’s being done on the Sabbath. In their defence, Jesus appeals to Biblical precedent – David and his followers, because they were hungry, had entered the house of God and had eaten the bread reserved for the priests.[2] The use of David’s name is significant – some say that there’s an implied messianic claim in the appeal to David. Be that as it may, Jesus in the next verse takes the defence much further and he declares with authority the true purpose of the Sabbath – “the Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” “Was made” some say is creation type language, so taking this view, Jesus is reclaiming an order of creation in the name of the Kingdom. The statement is much more than a general statement reflecting a humane view of the religious law – Jesus is revealing something of the coming of the Kingdom. He seems to make this specific in the next statement when he says the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath. As an agent of the Kingdom now dawning, Jesus has authority as Son of Man to institute the original intention and purpose of the Creator for human beings and to challenge with equal authority all the structures and attitude that are holding this back. So, an incident that begins as a trivial infringement of perceived Sabbath Law has ended with Jesus declaring God’s ultimate will for humankind. Bishop George Browning in his book “Sabbath and the Common Good” comments that under this interpretation, Sabbath is a gift from the dawn of time, a gift not simply for the Jewish people, but for the whole of humanity within the community of creation – a gift that edifies and empowers human life. This view does not allow for the abandonment of sabbath but promotes its rediscovery; its extraction from the legal requirements of disagreement to a celebration of engagement with God and the whole created order.[3]
The second conflict grows out of the first and it shows that Jesus is indeed the Lord of the Sabbath. The Pharisees have possibly set Jesus up – using the presence of the man with the withered hand to see if Jesus will flout the law. Traditional interpretation allowed for exceptions in matters of life and death. The man’s ailment is not life threatening. Jesus could ignore the man or postpone dealing with the situation until the next day. But he chooses to confront the Pharisees. He questions them as to what the Sabbath is all about – is it about saving life or destroying it? The Pharisees try to save face, but too late. Jesus has already taken the issue beyond the limits in which they had set it – simple Sabbath observance – to another level completely – God’s will and purpose to bring life in its abundance to all human beings. Jesus shifts the focus from what may be appropriate on the seventh day to what is always appropriate every day; a focus on sabbath as intended in the Genesis narrative; a focus on blessing and sanctification within the whole created order.[4] To delay the healing is to delay God’s Kingdom. The healing becomes a proclamation of the Kingdom and a symbolic rescue of a human life from powers opposed to the Kingdom – and here it’s not demonic powers – it’s hardness of heart, slavish obedience to letter of the Law, resistance to life and wholeness.
So, what do we do with all of this? The idea that ‘humanity was made for the Sabbath’ continues to be a popular theology in some places. Its basis is that God created the law and humanity needs to live up to it or else we are lost. In that theology, God is chiefly known as holy, and humans must achieve a certain level of holiness – through following laws or practicing certain observances or following certain restrictions - to be acceptable to God. The alternative theology, which is the one Jesus poses, is that ‘the Sabbath was made for humanity.’ In that sense, God is chiefly known as love and as George Browning observes “humanity is crowned with supreme value in the embrace of sabbath, in the interconnectedness of life shared with God and the whole created order.[5] The first sees “the sabbath” as one day of the week, the second sees “sabbath” as a gift from God.
In a polarized world consumed with conflict and western consumerism and individualism, sabbath calls us to a choice of mutuality shared with other human beings in the company of the whole created order under the sovereignty of God, or a life of competitive independence and self-interest.[6] To respond adequately to this gift of Sabbath as God originally intended takes time and space. That’s what Sabbath is about -that’s what we’re doing in worship – making time and space for God. That’s what we do in times of quiet and rest – make space for God. Sabbath observance shouldn’t be the legal straitjacket of Sabbatarianism,[7] but a joyful foretaste of something eternal.
But there are so many things that claim our time and energies – and in one sense there’s nothing new about this – the English romantic poets knew it – William Wordsworth wrote:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon![8]
Busyness can affect and infect us all - it can be really seductive. It can lead us to think we’re indispensable, or that we’re doing God’s work and no one else seems to be. In our spiritual journeys as individuals and as community, Sabbath is still crucial – slowing down, taking time out, just stopping and being quiet long enough to see what God is doing and how we respond. May God give us all grace to make that time and space. Let’s pray:
O Sabbath rest by Galilee,
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity,
Interpreted by love!
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.[9]
©The Rev’d. W.D. Crossman
[1] Genesis 2: 2-3
[2] 1 Samuel 21: 2-7
[3] George Victor Browning Sabbath and the Common Good – Prospects for a New Humanity Barrallier Books West Geelong, Vic 2016 p134
[4] Ibid p138
[5] George Victor Browning ibid p178
[6] George Victor Browning ibid p178
[7] Sabbatarianism is usually defined as the belief that Christians should observe a particular day of the week as the Sabbath, either the seventh day or the first day of the week.
[8] Composed c1802, first published 1807
[9] Together in Song No 598