I.N.I.
a sermon to be preached at Christ Episcopal Church, Accokeek, Maryland on Sunday, 3 June 2018, the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost, and based on the Holy Gospel for the day, St. Mark 2:23-3:6
Grace, mercy, and peace be yours in Christ Jesus, our Lord,
Dear Friends in Christ,
What I propose this morning is to look at this text through three lenses, and asking three questions: I. What is the Sabbath? (mostly an Old Testament view) II. How is it ‘made for man’ rather than the other way around? (the New Testament view) and III. How do we keep the Sabbath? (a present-day view)
Two incidents contained in today’s Gospel are both intimately tied to the Sabbath observances of Jews at the time of Jesus, so it’s good to review just what that was about. In both of the stories — the grainfield and the man with the withered hand — there are Pharisees watching Jesus and the disciples closely to see how well they follow the Sabbath laws. Those laws were important to the Pharisees.
You may recall that there were hundreds of laws and regulations specified in the Old Testament. There were laws about welcoming in strangers and aliens. There were laws regulating the animal sacrifices. There were what we might think of as “regular laws” prohibiting murder and protecting property and regulating marriage. Two large areas of the Jewish law were about clean and unclean things (the ‘kosher laws’), and the laws about the Sabbath.
The Sabbath in the Old Testament and in the Gospels is the last day of the week, the seventh day, what we call Saturday. The word Sabbath itself comes directly from the Hebrew word for ‘rest’. On the Sabbath, the basic idea was that the Lord rested on the seventh day from the work of creation, so His people the Jews should rest from their own work on the seventh day. It both honors the Lord by pale imitation of His own rest, and it sets His people apart because there were no other peoples then who had this weekly day of rest. That sounds plain enough, but probably right away people started asking all sorts of clarification questions.
Like, “Is it work if I do this or that?” The discussion and decision process really took years and years before it was first written down, and actually still continues. The law and subsequent decisions had then to be applied to all sorts of new situations as they came up. It’s sort of like the way our courts interpret our laws over the years and keep refining what those deceptively simple words in the Constitution and its amendments mean today in a new situation. I’ve read that there were 39 different broad kinds of work that were prohibited among the Jews, things like plowing, sowing seed, threshing, baking, shearing wool, lighting a fire or putting one out, carrying something from one place to another.
And the rabbinic discussions about the Law are the very definition of legalism. You can’t light a light a candle on the Sabbath, so you can’t turn on your electric house lights either: you light them before the Sabbath, or have them on a timer; and you need to be careful of, say, opening your refrigerator unless you unscrewed the lightbulb inside before Sabbath, and did something to make certain that the motor would not kick on because you had the door open. It’s against the Law to carry something on the Sabbath from a private place to a public place, so what if that something is in my pockets? No that’s not allowed. But, say with your handkerchief, if you pin it to your jacket then it’s considered part of your clothing and may be carried. An even more creative legal solution is the “eruv.” That’s a way of creating private space out of public space; so you might see families eating a Friday meal in a courtyard between homes which would make that shared outdoor space family space; or, even, more creatively some Jewish communities have strung a wire high up on poles around whole groups of city blocks so that they are “enclosed” and therefore within the private space in which people may walk and visit and carry things on Sabbath.
In essence, observant Jews have worked very hard to make sure that they don’t “work” on the Sabbath.
That’s certainly one way to observe the Sabbath. It does pretty much meet the letter of the Law in the 3rd (or 4th, depending on how you count them) Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy. What it seems to me to miss, however, is the spirit of the Law. This is where Jesus reaches in with today’s Gospel words and makes it clear to His hearers what should be going on during the Sabbath.
II
Our text from Mark 2 and 3 is divided into two parts. First there is the incident where Jesus and the disciples were walking through the grain fields and some of the disciples — maybe idly, maybe deliberately — plucked some of the seeds. The Pharisees immediately jumped all over them: ‘Hey, cut that out! You know that harvesting grain is not allowed on the Sabbath!’ Jesus intervenes by reminding the Pharisees of a story recorded in 1st Samuel 21 where David was in serious need of food, so he asked for (and received from the priest on duty) some of the consecrated bread at the Tabernacle. Jesus is saying in essence that if the great David could eat the consecrated bread, then surely we can pluck some some raw grains out of some guy’s field. Besides which, He says, the Sabbath is made for man, for people, not the other way around; people aren’t made to serve the Sabbath.
The second part of the text, the first 6 verses of Mark 3, is a real life demonstration of how Jesus viewed the Sabbath. On some other Sabbath (Luke says it was a different one) Jesus was in a synagogue for the weekly worship and the eagle-eyed Pharisees were watching to see what He would do about a man there with some sort of physical handicap. They knew that Jesus had this healing way about Him, and their interpretation of the Sabbath law would have said that practicing medicine was work, and therefore forbidden on the Lord’s day — plus, the man’s condition was a chronic one, not a sudden life-threatening one for which the Pharisees could more easily see an exception. Jesus, of course, sees to the true core of the Law and asks these experts whether it is permissible to do good or to do harm, to save a life or to take it. The Pharisees should have known better than to challenge Jesus. Their minds were all silently clicking through all the possibilities of permissions and prohibitions, “Well, on the one hand…. But on the other hand….” Jesus cut through the silence by asking to see the man’s withered hand. The man stretches it out like he probably hadn’t done for ages and found that he was healed.
So what these two incidents show us is how the Sabbath is made for our benefit. Jesus teaches both by His word and then by His deed that the true purpose of the Sabbath had been perverted, even way back then. Instead of focusing on what God had done for humanity, the focus had shifted to what people do and don’t do. Instead of letting the Sabbath be a break in the necessarily hard labor of those days, it had become another burden, an extra stress, an added difficulty.
What the Sabbath was supposed to provide God’s people was a break from their routine. If they were not working, then they would have a day of unspoken-for time that they could use for worship and praise, for prayer and supplication, for study and teaching. Men and women both went to synagogue at the time of Jesus. It was a time for all Israelites to fill up their spiritual gas tanks. This was not supposed to be a time for more burdens, more lists of dos and don’ts.
The flip side of the coin was, as I just said, the worship of the Lord. Incumbent upon His followers every day, worship was especially called for on the Sabbath. It’s maybe good to view it as a two-way street: God’s people receive the blessing of Sabbath rest from Him, then they give worship back to Him.
III
Which is also where Christians, you and I, have adopted and adapted the Sabbath. Of course we do not make our regular time of corporate worship as a congregation on Saturdays. Christians since the earliest days of the Church have gathered on the first day of the week, not on the seventh. We do it (whether we think about it or not) as a way of remembering the Easter Sunday resurrection of our Lord. But, and here’s an interesting point, we do it in a way that fulfills the Old Testament’s commandment “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”
We keep this commandment first of all for the sake of our body’s rest. It breaks our week’s routine. Secondly, we keep these days of Christian sabbath so that we have time and opportunity to participate in public worship, here with each other. Not that we restrict our worship to this day only, because actually there should be worship daily — as there is in various places throughout the Church. Most Christians will probably fulfill that part of the commandment through personal Bible reading and maybe reading a devotional booklet, and praying on their own. Either way works.
God wants this particular day to be holy for us, so the commandment says “…to keep it holy.” That basically means devoting this day to holy words, to holy works, and to a holy life. We don’t get to that point simply be refraining from work, whether it’s not plucking grain or any of those other kinds of work outlawed by the rabbis. We get there by occupying ourselves with God’s Word. So here we are with Scripture readings, yes, and a sermon based on one of the lessons. But also with our liturgy, so much of which is taken directly from Scripture. And [in our second service] hymns based on God’s Word. Here we are at church where through most of the year we teach God’s Word to our children in lessons directed at their learning level. And where, also through most of the year, we have an Adult Forum after second service where we can discuss the sermon and Scriptures asking questions and seeking understanding.
But, again, we Christians should make every day holy, as we occupy ourselves with holy living everyday of the week. We can make each and every day a sabbath day. They won’t be ones where we avoid our jobs, but they will be days where our relationships rest in God. We can tuck His Word into little corners of every day, and the more we do so the easier it actually gets. We will start to think of this or that Bible verse, this or that hymn, this or that snatch of prayer at times throughout the day. And slowly but surely our every day will be sanctified. Slowly but surely this commandment will be fulfilled. Our every day will be a sabbath unto the Lord.
This is a real treasure we’ve been given. And as Saint Paul wrote in the Epistle for today, we hold it in clay jars (his way of speaking about our physical bodies), jars that are usually sturdy enough, but could just as easily go smash to bits. We are afflicted in every way, but we believers are not crushed because we have Christ and His Word in us. We are perplexed but not driven to despair because we know Christ is our Savior. We’re persecuted, but not destroyed, since we have God’s Word of promise living in us. We are “struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” (2 Cor. 4:8-9) That, my brothers and sisters, is how every day of our lives becomes a Sabbath day, how every day is made holy. Paul, the former Pharisee, was right on target writing to the Corinthians. He knew his Jewish Law. But he also knew that in Christ the old Law is both expanded and made lighter all at the same time. It is expanded to cover all our days (not just Saturday) and to include all people (not just the Jews). It is made lighter because we follow it out of joy and gratitude to God for the death and resurrection of Jesus which free us from having obsessively to try to follow every little interpretation of every possible facet of every law in hopes that we do not offend the Lord. We are forgiven people. Christ has set us free. And His sabbath rest serves us.
May the peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen
S.D.G.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 