Leah didn’t know why she kept coming to the synagogue. She counted the days up in her head... every seven days for eighteen years, it had to be at least 400 times, she thought. At first people were sorry for her, and someone would take her arm to help her up the steps to section reserved for the women. But as the weeks and months went by she was left to struggle up the stairs alone more often than not, and she got the feeling that they were thinking, “What sin did Leah commit that the Lord would punish her like that...?” Well, who could blame them. Of course she wondered the same thing. She had racked her brain for some ritual overlooked, some work accidentally done after the Sabbath began, some inadvertent uncleanness. But she couldn’t think of anything, she had always been as careful as she could be. Leah supposed she should be grateful. After all, she was still able to cook and weave, even though she could no longer work in the small garden, and the neighbors were generous when the crops were good.
Today would be just like every other day, she thought, stopping to rub her back where it ached. She would struggle up the steps, ignore the mixed looks of pity and suspicion, and listen to the rabbi. It always seemed the same, though, about how the Roman occupation was God’s punishment for Israel’s sin and how careful you had to be not to have anything to do with Gentiles and other sinners in case their uncleanness rubbed off on you. No, she took that back. When they remembered God’s mighty deeds in the days of Moses and David, or when they read from the Psalms, Leah could remember how much she had yearned after God when she was younger, how full of zeal she had been to learn the Torah and do everything just right, so that she could be a true daughter of Israel. But it had been so long since she had actually believed the Lord would ever listen to her prayers and straighten her back again that she didn’t even ask any more. It was habit, really, more than anything.
Leah lifted her head as she approached the synagogue. She heard the sound of voices raised in excitement and saw a crowd of men gathered in front of the door. She wondered for a moment if today was a Holy Day, and dismissed the thought. “Probably somebody down from Jerusalem to tell us what we’re doing wrong,” she said to herself. Maybe she shouldn’t go in today. But her feet carried her forward and she found herself sidling around the edge of the crowd trying to get in without anyone noticing her. And then she heard it. “Woman!” She froze, ducked her head and tried to be invisible. “Woman, come here!” Her heart sinking, she moved slowly in the direction of the voice. When she saw the sandaled feet in front of her she stopped, keeping her head down, wondering if there was some new regulation keeping cripples out of the synagogue, the same as there was for eunuchs or prostitutes. A hand touched the veil covering her hair, and then moved gently down to her shoulder, and paused. “Woman,” said the voice again, “you are set free from your ailment.”
And she felt something, a - a tingling or - more like an untwisting - move through her body and - and suddenly she was standing straight, straight as she hadn’t been for eighteen years, and looking straight into the kindest eyes she had ever seen. “What - who - who are you?” she stammered, and then unable to keep still turned around, almost dancing, and lifted her arms to the sky crying out in a loud voice. “Oh God, Oh Lord my God, thank you, thank you,” she kept saying over and over again until all of a sudden she was pushed roughly aside. It was Avner BarNathan, the leader of the synagogue.
“How dare you profane the holy day like this?” Avner rebuked the man who had touched Leah. Turning to the crowd he raised his voice and pointed to Leah. “This is the so-called Reb Yeshua you’ve all been yammering about. Well, now he’s here, and you see how he disregards the law. Isn’t it just like a Galilean! Well, we’re not lawbreakers. There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” [v.14] He made shooing motions with his hands. “Go home. There’ll be no Torah lesson today. The show is over.” The crowd muttered, and one or two began to move away.
But the man Avner had called Yeshua stepped forward and said contemptuously to Avner, “You hypocrite!” And turning to the crowd he challenged them: “Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? “Yes, that’s right!” came a voice from the crowd. “You tell ‘em, Yeshua!” shouted another. And turning back to Avner, Yeshua said, “And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” [v.14]
Leah stood wondering as Avner colored angrily. For a minute she wondered if he would actually lay hands on the visiting rabbi. But he controlled himself with a visible effort, turned and stalked stiffly back into the synagogue.
“Yeshua! Yeshua!” The crowd began to cheer. “Heal my wife, rabbi!” shouted one man. “Come to my house for dinner,” called another. Leah was forgotten. She turned away, smiling and wondering. The crowd had forgotten her, but God hadn’t. He had freed her at last, just like he had freed the Israelites so many years ago.
Has it occurred to you that there were at least two cripples there at the synagogue that day?
First there was the woman I have called Leah, whom everyone could see was crippled. Do you wonder why still she kept coming to worship? What did she expect from God? Did she come from habit, as I have suggested, or was she one of the rare ones whose faith enabled her to hope and believe and worship even though her physical condition made it at the very least inconvenient to show up, perhaps painful, and probably embarrassing. Because, you see, the theology of that day assumed that prosperity was a sign of God’s favor, and that illness or misfortune meant that God was displeased with you for some reason. Now, Scripture says she was crippled by a spirit. Whether this description represents the contemporary understanding of an illness that had no visible cause, or whether hers was indeed a case of spiritual bondage, is not central to the message. Everyone could see she wasn’t well. Leah wasn’t free to walk or work or dance or dream. And yet I suggest that she was freer than the synagogue leader, because when Jesus appeared and touched her, she was released.
The synagogue leader was also crippled. But he was crippled in a way that was not visible to the rest of the world. The man whom I have called Avner was crippled in his spirit, by his distorted understanding of God and his legalistic understanding of Scripture. And so when Jesus appeared, he was not open to healing. His ability to see and recognize a work of the Holy Spirit was clouded by what he thought he knew.
I’ve heard of an experiment where fish are placed in an aquarium and is allowed to swim from one end to the other. Then a glass divider is placed in the aquarium so that the fish can only swim in one half of the aquarium. The fish then will run into the glass divider, bumping into it only a few times, before it learns that they are confined to one side of the aquarium. When the glass divider is removed, allowing the fish full access to the whole aquarium, the fish continue to swim only in one half of the aquarium. They have been conditioned to limits that do not exist.
That is what the Pharisees had done. They had created a system which shrunk God’s providence to a manageable size. It enabled them to control and to dominate the religious impulses of the people who came to them seeking guidance about God. They had taken God’s gift of a free day and made it into a cage.
The Sabbath had been turned into an obsession. The act of avoiding work became work. Every action had to be classified as work or “not-work.” In Israel today, all elevators are set to stop on every floor on the Sabbath, because if not people would have to use the stairs, because pushing elevator buttons is work. And so of course the practice of medicine was considered “work.” If someone were acutely ill, then a healer was allowed some leeway. But in the case of chronic illness, they taught that healing should be postponed out of respect for the law. This woman had suffered for eighteen years. Why couldn’t Jesus politely wait until the next day to heal her? Why did he have to poke the establishment in the eye? Very simply, he wanted to break their captivity to the system and move them into the true, life-giving freedom of God’s sabbath rest.
We have over-reacted, I think, against the legalism of the Pharisees, or even of the days of our own recent ancestors, when you couldn’t read a novel or play a game. Nowadays Sundays hardly mean anything, even to Christians, except for one or two hours in the morning. But think about it. God makes quite a big deal about the Sabbath. Why?
Until Moses, there was absolutely no known analogy anywhere in the ancient world to the idea of a seven-day week - or indeed a any period of time - marked by a halt to economic activity.
Not that there wasn’t any significance to the seventh day. There is. In Ugaritic and Assyrian and Sumerian mythology, all predating Abraham’s departure to Canaan, all kinds of important things happen in seven-day cycles. But most of them are bad. And the seventh, fourteenth or twenty-first of some lunar months were unlucky; many people thought that demons had special powers on those days.
Furthermore, and this is truly astonishing, whereas all major units of time in the Ancient Near east, the year, the month and the week, were all based on the phases of the moon and the solar cycle, the Israelite seven-day week is totally independent of either. It is completely independent of the movement of the celestial bodies. This is just another confirmation of the fact that God emphasized in the first three commandments: that YHWH God, Israel’s God, is entirely outside of and sovereign over nature. He is lord of time as well as Lord of space. In a very real sense, then, the institution of the Sabbath day constitutes a suspension of time.
But even more than simply a suspension of time, the institution of the Sabbath implies a suspension of the curse.
Until Genesis 3, human oversight of God’s creation was an honor, one to be celebrated. But things changed. In Genesis 3, God curses Adam and Eve after driving them out of the garden, saying “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you... by the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread.” [Gen 3:17b-19a] This is in pretty sharp contrast to the original condition. We are made to be joyful workers, creators, doers - in God’s image - but the fall has poisoned our labor with struggle and bitterness. That seventh day of rest that God gave his people at Sinai was to be a day free of struggle and bitterness, a day to contemplate unfallen creation, not a day to give or receive orders, to rule or be ruled, but a day to rejoice in the gifts of God.
But why is it, do you suppose, that God found it necessary to give this commandment?
I think there are two reasons.
One is maybe a little obscure, but I think quite important. It is my opinion that the idea of the seventh day being special came from a sort of leftover spiritual memory in the Near Eastern cultures. The people knew there was something important, something powerful about that seventh day, but out of fear and guilt and shame, like Adam in the garden, instead of welcoming God’s presence in the day, they feared it, calling it evil. They took a good gift of God, a blessing, and made it a curse, instead. And how easy it is still to do that. Where did the idea of “a month of Sundays” being a bad thing, if not from our propensity to turn God’s presence among us from a blessing to a curse? From “It’s Sunday, you can’t work,” there is only a short step to “it’s Sunday, you can’t play” and from there to “God disapproves of anything that makes you happy.” That’s blasphemy, and it drives people away from God, just as the Pharisees drove people away from God by making the Sabbath observance a burden rather than a joy. God gave us the Sabbath to remind us that even that old tyrant, Time, bows before the awesome reality of our God. The Sabbath reminds us that God is good, that his creation is something to be celebrated, and that he provides for us.
And that leads us right into the second reason God gave us this commandment. Another effect of the fall is that human beings have a tendency to put a price tag on everything. We are always asking, “What’s in it for me?” “What will I get out of it?” So much of our relationships - especially in our prosperous consumer society - are tainted by economic utilitarianism. And on this day - this one day of the week - we consciously act out what Jesus said, “Do not worry about your life, what you are to eat or to drink, or about your body, what you will wear... It is the Gentiles who strive for all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God, and all these things will be given to you as well.” The sabbath is a day to set aside worry and to remember - and praise - the God who clothed the lilies of the field, and to give thanks. It is a day to give thanks for all the gifts of God, including laughter, relationships, food and drink, music, baseball, or tinkering with the car - as long as you are doing it for love, with delight and gratitude to God, and not for economic gain, or to acquire an edge over a competitor, or to earn enough brownie points to ignore God for the rest of the week. And it is a day to gather with the people of God, as the writer to the Hebrews wrote. We need to meet together to remind one another of the power and goodness of God, and to encourage one another, he said, “to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.”
So the Sabbath is a gift. It is a gift from God to remind us that he is Lord not only of created things, of food and drink and work and play, of cities and farms, of kings and nations, but also Lord of time. All our days were given by God and belong to God; but this particular day he gives us is a day of freedom. Free of having to produce. Free of making others perform. Free of worrying where the next meal is coming from. Free from the world’s pressures. Free to rejoice. Free to delight in God.
What is it for you? Let us take a moment to consider how carefully each of us keeps the Sabbath. What things of the world are you bringing into your Sabbath rest, keeping you bent over so that you cannot lift your eyes to the face of God?
