Sabbath is not about Rest

Holiness, our delight, and grateful worship | Proper 16 (21), Year C

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

“This divine heart is an ocean full of all good things wherein poor souls can cast all their needs; it is an ocean full of joy to drown all our sadness, an ocean of humility to overwhelm our folly, an ocean of mercy for those in distress, an ocean of love in which to submerge our poverty.” - St Margaret Mary Alocoque

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The first notion we get of Sabbath in Scripture is at creation. God’s work of creation was done and he rested. We, humans, had a home, and God rested.

Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. (Genesis 2:3)

Later, having rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and at the beginning of their journey to their new home, God gives them Sabbath. To a people who were enslaved, working every day, condemned to build without even having all they needed (“bricks without straw”, Exodus 5:16), one of the first things they are given to mark their freedom is Sabbath, a holy day without work.

Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. (Deuteronomy 5:15)

Sabbath pointed towards a promise of shalom, of wholeness, beyond the pain and toil.

Jesus is in a synagogue one day and “Behold,” Luke tells us, “a woman was there”. This woman had toiled in pain for 18 years due to a “spirit” that was keeping her broken and twisted. What Jesus has to do next is obvious because it’s a Sabbath, not despite it. Jesus knows that Sabbath is about God’s provision, God’s deliverance, God’s promise. Jesus knows that Sabbath is a delight (Isaiah 58.13), so the woman is set free.

As St Athanasius says:

God is good, or rather the source of all goodness, and one who is good grudges nothing, so that grudging nothing its existence, he made all things through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ. (On the Incarnation §3)

In both remembrance and prophetic action the Sabbath speaks to God as goodness that intends a holy wholeness for his creation. Including you and me.

That’s the whole sermon.

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Or it would be if it wasn’t so easy for humans to turn grace into law.

When this happens we get blinded to the goodness of God and see everything, including people, in categories of “lawful” or “unlawful”, good or evil. The woman becomes dehumanized as a foil for a question about law keeping. The synagogue leader then asks a question that sounds more like the stance of a Chik-Fil-A owner explaining why you can’t have fried chicken this Sunday:¹

There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day. (Luke 13:14)

Jesus’s response is to point out the hypocrisy of this position by noting the lack of hospitality and fairness. The guidance on Sabbath in the Old Testament extends beyond simply Jewish people and even foreign guests, to include, explicitly, donkeys (Exodus 23:12). Yet Jesus notes that in this particular case, those present would treat a donkey better than how they are caring for this woman. In Luke’s Greek the connection is explicit by Jesus’s use of the word loose:

"You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his donkey…ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham…be loosed from this bondage on the Sabbath day?" (Luke 13:15-16)

By naming her as a “daughter of Abraham” Jesus brilliantly points out her due inheritance of Sabbath traditions. But let me be clear here, Jesus isn’t actually engaging in a debate about whether or not this woman should be healed on a Sabbath. She has already been rescued. Jesus is highlighting the very things that Sabbath was designed to help them remember.

“Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:15)

Jesus is not being drawn into questions about right and wrong interpretations of Sabbath law. He has come with God’s deliverance in tow and casts aside all the regulations and associated distinctions which are making the synagogue leader inhospitable to this woman.

In his famous work Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us that Jesus is not operating here, or anywhere, in arbitrary decisions between right and wrong, or bad, good and better. Jesus is being guided in complete simplicity by one option:

“Jesus calls this one option the will of God. He calls it his food to do this will. This will of God is his life. He lives and acts not out of knowledge of good and evil, but out of the will of God. There is only one will of God.”²

In a paradigm of bad, good, and better the synagogue leader might rightly say, “Why not wait one more day, the woman has been ill for eighteen years already?” But the will of God has only one option: Deliverance. So she must be healed on this Sabbath.

That’s what Sabbath reminds us of. That’s why it’s holy. That’s why Jesus acts as he does. Bonhoeffer continues:

He broke the law of the Sabbath in order to keep it holy in love for God and for humans.³

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What does it mean, then, for the Sabbath to be holy? What does it mean to hallow a day of rest?

For many of us “sabbath” language is complex. Bad childhood experiences that seem awfully similar in attitude to the synagogue leader abound. Christians of a certain age tell stories of not being allowed to play, see friends, or watch TV on Sundays. Sabbath was only for church. Then a generation followed that reacted by not distinguishing Sabbath at all - so we watched TV, hung out with friends, did sports, and didn’t go to church at all. Now the pendulum swings again. But now it’s wider culture that has adopted sabbath by turning it into an individual lifestyle health choice. Alongside, mindfulness, and ethical eating, we now add “rest”. Christian literature has re-adopted it once more, but like society, Sabbath is often simply an individual notion of middle-class rest.⁴

Scripture, unsurprisingly, sees these approaches to Sabbath as shallow and invites us into something deeper. The Old Testament instructs observing a sabbath rest as a way of bringing us into something holy. In order to become truly aware and remember God’s holiness and goodness towards us we need to rest.

Notice that in Scripture the Ten Commandments never tell us to work, but to rest from work. Work is assumed, but Scripture is also well aware that work will become our God. In place of the Lord, we will see work as that which will provide for us: stability, sustenance, status, and safety. But all these things are the domain of God in Scripture:

In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat— for he grants sleep to those he loves. (Psalm 127:2)

The Bible wants us to see that we live and are sustained by the Almighty. Bonhoeffer notes:

A day of resting [Feiertagsruhe] is the visible sign that a person lives from the grace of God and not from works. …Human beings who have been reduced to machines and have been exhausted need rest so that their thoughts can clear, their feelings be purified, and their desires be oriented anew.⁵

But here’s where we get tend to go astray. The resting is what opens us up to the possibility of the day being holy. Simply doing nothing is not sabbath. What makes a Sabbath holy is the worshipful remembrance and gratitude of the God who sustains us. The Jewish Sabbath remembers God’s creation and liberation. Likewise, the Christian Sunday in its preaching of the gospel and celebrating Eucharist remembers the death and resurrection of Jesus. As Karl Rahner notes, both the Christian and Jewish practices are remembering the events of God’s salvation history.⁶ As such, he suggests, for a Sunday to be holy we “really should occasionally do something Christian.”⁷

So rather than seeing Sabbath as a lifestyle choice, or as a rule or regulation, because a sabbath is holy not because of what we do or don’t do, what if we see Sabbath as holy because, just as in the synagogue, Jesus has acted? How we sabbath is our response to that. We can rest from our work and let Jesus act towards us in the gospel and the Eucharist. Not insignificantly, this is why our worship should be shaped like it is. What’s more, it is exactly this which brings us gratefully into what is holy rest.

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Now that we are thinking about the church, I wonder if we should ponder how the idea of a hallowed sabbath might be a gift to the world. Almost all of the therapeutic industries are at pains to tell us we are overworked and under-rested. What little rest time we do have we pack with programming. Whether you’re 7, 17, or 47, when do you actually rest? Where is the truly sacred space where you stop and are able to be grateful that you are delivered and sustained by the Lord?

If we can realize that we are released from any shackles of “guilt”, “obligation” or “regulations” regarding Sabbath, our response perhaps shouldn’t be to do nothing. Rather we are free to ask ourselves whether our lives have holy space in them. Where are we hallowing time and taking opportunity to flourish in the goodness of God? Is there any more holy time in your week (or your kids’) than a person chosen at random from your street?

The idea of holy time is a sacred mystery the world needs the church to model. What habits of healthy holiness could we and you adopt that would draw you into grateful remembrance? Despite our 24/7 world, what if we sabbath-ed our phones, our social media, our streaming, our mall visits, store trips, sports clubs. What would this bring alive in you (after you overcame the inevitable discomfort)? What if we replaced the noise with grateful worship?

Would we, like the woman who encountered Jesus and his hallowing of time, find ourselves straightened up? Would the keeping of holy time cause, like it did in the synagogue, as Isaiah prophesied, the people around us to be delighted?

If you call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honourable…then you shall take delight in the LORD. (Isaiah 58:13-14)

The people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. (Luke 13:17)

When Jesus acts, and when we remember that he has, we can rest from being a machine and in turn find that our wholeness is not found in our effort, but in our gratefulness.⁸ This is what Hebrews calls us to today when it says:

Since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude, by which we may offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe, for indeed our God is a consuming fire. (Hebrews 12:28-29)

Consuming fire at worship in the Old Testament was a marker of God’s approval. So when we lay aside our efforts to prove ourselves, our working to show ourselves self-sufficient, and instead hallow time in gratitude, we find rest in God and approved by God. That’s what Sabbath is. Here’s Bonhoeffer again:

Before the world’s eyes, Sunday is the evidence that the life of the children of God proceeds from God’s grace and that all people are called into God’s kingdom. And so we pray, “May your kingdom come!”⁹

Sabbath is rest, but Sabbath is not about Rest. It’s about so much more.

This time, for real, that is the sermon.

Amen.

Can Jesus be a Consuming Fire?

1. For international readers I should explain that Chick-Fil-A is a tasty fried chicken franchise that closes all its stores on Sundays. To be clear, not only is my reference above a joke, I do think, as this sermon shows, some intentional “inaccessibility” would be good for us (me). That said, it’s a source of some humour amongst my friends how many times I’ve been on a ministry trip and found myself stuck in an airport on a Sunday only to remember that the Chick-Fil-A will be closed!

2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, SCM Library of Philosophy and Theology, p.154.

3. ibid. p.213.

4. I don’t believe in “class”, but you get the point I’m making.

5. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945 DBWE 16, p.643. Feiertagsruhe is the word that Luther chose to translate the Hebrew “Sabbath” to ensure that the “resting” notion wasn’t lost.

6. Karl Rahner, The Sunday Precept in an Industrial Society, p.1.

7. ibid. p.3.

8. This is what Richard Beck calls an “Eccentric Identity” a key posture of which is thankful worship, or “doxological gratitude. “Doxological gratitude cultivates the experience of life as gift and prophetically rejects the idols of self-esteem enhancement proffered by the principalities and powers of the culture. Where gratitude combats the basic anxieties associated with the loss of resources, worship combats the neurotic anxieties associated with appearing “successful” in society’s eyes.” Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death, p. 102.

9. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940-1945 DBWE 16, p.644.