Good Sabbath

Mark 2:23-3:6

June 2, 2024

 

            I had a seminary professor who told our class that when she was growing up her family took the sabbath seriously, really, really seriously. There was no doing homework on the sabbath. If you hadn’t gotten your homework finished by Sunday, it was not getting finished. If the weather was warm and sunny and your friends were going to go swimming, you weren’t. I don’t remember if she shared with us how her family handled meals on the sabbath. I suspect they ate leftovers, so meal preparation would not have to be done on Sunday. But the point is, her family took sabbath seriously. I’m not sure this professor was quite as strict with her own children about the Sabbath as her parents were, but this strict observation of the sabbath stuck with my professor her entire life.

            When she told us about her family’s observance of the sabbath, it reminded me of the book Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I remember reading it for the first time as a little girl and being struck with how Laura and her family observed the sabbath, and how much Laura hated it. Laura and her sisters had to sit still and quietly all day long. They could hold their dolls and look at them, but they couldn’t play with them. Pa would play his fiddle, but his sabbath music wasn’t lively. He played hymns, slowly and somberly. Ma would have prepared food for the day beforehand. There was no having fun, no running and playing. The sabbath was about keeping quiet and being somber, and Laura hated it! She hated sitting still. She hated not being able to jump and shout and run. And one Sunday, she couldn’t stand it anymore and she began to play. She got in trouble, but then after a while Pa told her a story about her grandfather and how much stricter sabbath rules were for him.

            My family’s observance of the sabbath was not as strict as my professor’s and certainly not as strict as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s. We went to Sunday school and church. My mother started the Sunday meal before we left for church in the morning. We always had a nice Sunday dinner after church – something my kids did not get to experience growing up. It was a quieter day, but I wasn’t forbidden from playing outside. And we could watch tv and read the funnies in the Sunday newspaper. If for some reason we didn’t go back to church on Sunday night, we got to watch Wonderful World of Disney and that was huge! But looking back I realize that for my parents it was a day of rest. They weren’t working around the house. They weren’t running errands. It was their day of rest before the work week relentlessly began again the next morning.

            The sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the sabbath.

            This is the summary statement that Jesus tells the Pharisees who criticize his disciples for plucking grain on the sabbath day. Jesus and the disciples were walking through grainfields on the sabbath, and the disciples begin to glean from the heads of grain. The Pharisees question Jesus about this because what the disciples were doing was not lawful on the sabbath. Gleaning any other day of the week was acceptable, but not on the Sabbath.

            In response Jesus reminds them of the story of David and his companions. They were hungry. They needed food and sustenance. They entered the house of God and ate the food that had been blessed. According to the Law only the priests were allowed to eat that. But David and his companions were hungry and so they ate. The sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the sabbath.

            This response surely did not sit well with the Pharisees. But if they responded in any way other than appalled silence, the text doesn’t share that. Instead Mark moves us forward. Jesus enters the synagogue and there was a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees are watching Jesus closely, wondering – hoping – that Jesus would heal the man with the bad hand so they could accuse Jesus of breaking the Law. Jesus tells the man to “come forward.” He looks at the Pharisees, clearly aware that they are watching him and for what purpose, and says to them,

            “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?”

            The Pharisees keep their mouths shut, and their stubborn silence angers Jesus. He grieves at their hardness of heart and tells the man to stretch out his hand. He does this and the man’s hand is healed. The Pharisees don’t say anything else to Jesus, but they leave and immediately find the Herodians to coordinate their efforts to stop this troublemaker.

            I’m going to say something controversial here, but according to the Law the Pharisees were right. The disciples were breaking the law by gleaning on the sabbath. The Law allowed for someone’s life to be saved on the sabbath, but there’s no indication from the text that the man with the withered hand was in great peril. His healing could have waited until the sabbath was over. According to the Law the Pharisees were right. Jesus and the disciples were wrong. And to add to the controversy, the Pharisees were not necessarily the villains they are made out to be. They were religious folks who were trying to do what they believed the Law and their faith instructed them to do. I often compare the Pharisees to the ministers of today, to myself and to my colleagues, but they were also the lay leadership of the day. They were me and they were the session, trying to live out their faith and abide by the Book of Order.

            But Jesus upends their understanding of the Law and of the sabbath. He doesn’t throw the Law out, nor does he claim that it has no value. It seems to me that Jesus wants the Pharisees to understand that both the sabbath and the Law were gifts. The Law was a gift from God to help God’s people be in relationship with God and with each other. And the sabbath was a gift, not only to humankind, but to all of creation. It was the gift of rest. It was the gift of restoration. It seems to me that Jesus wanted them to understand that showing compassion on the sabbath, whether it was through gleaning for food or healing a man with a non-life threatening illness, was the heart of the sabbath. Compassion was at the heart of the gift that God had given them. And again, I’m not convinced that the Pharisees were without compassion. But where they went wrong was that they made the sabbath the object when it was intended to be the means. The sabbath was made for humankind, not the other way around. The sabbath is not the object. The sabbath is the means – to restoration, to rest, to wholeness. God gave humans and all creation the gift of sabbath. The sabbath was the means not the object.

            I think the Pharisees’ struggle to understand Jesus, his words, and his actions, is the same struggle we have today. The Pharisees were trying to uphold the rules. Rules are not a bad thing. We need them. We need their limits. We need their constraints. Rules allow us to live with one another. But the rules are not the object, they are the means. And when we get so caught up in the rules that we make them the object, I think we can miss the point.

            I think that’s what angered and grieved Jesus about the Pharisees. They were missing the point. They were missing the point that compassion was the beating heart of the Law. Love was the heart of the Law. God created the Law out of love. God gave the gift of sabbath out of love. A good sabbath was a sabbath that both remembered and honored that gift.

            It’s easy to say this, but it’s much harder to do. I struggle with balancing my need for the rules and my call to be, to live, compassion. And I don’t like it when others break the rules that I think are important, no matter what their reason. No matter how much I hate to admit it, I can easily slip into the shoes of the Pharisees in stories like this, and I find it much harder to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. I doubt that I’m alone in this. I suspect that if we’re all honest with ourselves, that this is true for you as well as for me. As much as I think of myself as a compassionate person, the truth is, living according to the dictates of compassion is a tricky, tricky balancing act and more often than not it’s just plain hard.

            Living according to the Law of compassion means that I must be willing to forego my judgment of others. Living according to the Law of compassion means that I must see the Law as a means of restoration and wholeness, of life and of love. It doesn’t mean that I can always achieve that, but it does mean that should be my guiding principle.

            Miss Erlene and I must make decisions every day about who the church can help and who it can’t. It’s hard, harder than you can imagine because I want to help everybody. I want to help every poor soul who walks into this church needing assistance, and there are many poor souls out there who need help. But we can’t help everyone. We can’t help with every need, no matter how hard we try and want to. We do have rules we have to follow and guidelines that must be met. But compassion requires us to remember that the rules and guidelines are not the object, they are the means.

            The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath. The sabbath was never meant to be the object. It was meant to be the means, a gift, a way to restoration and wholeness and life. Jesus practiced this good sabbath. Jesus lived this good sabbath. He understood that it was never the object, but the means. He meant it when he said that it was created for humankind and not the other way around. When we remember that, when we live that, we live and practice a good sabbath too; a good sabbath that is the means to restoration, wholeness, and life. Thanks be to God.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia!”

            Amen.