“I can be just as good a Christian without going to church,” said my friend Connie. “Besides, that’s the only day I get to sleep in. Isn’t it supposed to be a day of rest?” “That’s right,” said Walter. “Going to church just takes too big a bite out of my week. It’s just not realistic to expect people as busy as we are to add one more thing to their schedules.”
Scott chimed in. “My kids have soccer on Sunday mornings. Surely God wants me to spend time with my family.”
“I think the whole idea of a Sabbath is pretty out-of-date in today’s society,” said Rita. “Everything is open 24 hours a day. People can pretty much choose what times they do things, including spiritual things. I get more spiritual refreshment by spending time in my garden than going to church. I don’t think it’s very spiritual to be a slave to the calendar.”
Pretty valid points, aren’t they?
People do need to take time to rest, to spend time with their families, to escape the demands of calendar and clock. And how careful are any of us about keeping a Sabbath, anyway? I often do my laundry or my grocery shopping on Sundays. Isn’t it hypocritical of me to expect other people to work for my convenience on a Sunday and then complain because they’re not in church? What’s so special about Sunday? And why do we celebrate on Sunday which is the first day of the week instead of Saturday as the Jews do? Isn’t that a signal that things have changed?
Who wants to go back to the bad old days when you couldn’t laugh or play games or read anything but the Bible on Sunday? One character in Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit remembers Sundays as “days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification,” days when “he was marched to chapel by [his] teachers three times a day morally handcuffed to another boy...” And Robert Graves wrote, “I do not love the Sabbath, the soapsuds and the starch; the troops of solemn people, who to salvation march.” Christians actually managed to outdo the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, or the orthodox Jews in our own time. How absurd it seems to us now to have rules saying you can’t carry a package, or turn on the oven, or sew on a button.
Aren’t we free of all that? Aren’t we under grace, not under the law?
Didn’t Jesus free us from Sabbath observance in the passage we just read? Shouldn’t we be able to do just anything we want?
I don’t think there’s any question about what Jesus was getting at in the part about healing on the Sabbath. Very few people argue, any more, that one shouldn’t do good on the Sabbath. It’s the Lord’s work. That’s why pastors have always been allowed to work on the Sabbath. . . Or perhaps I should say, required. And when I worked every other Sunday as a part time hospital chaplain for a year, I noticed that priests and rabbis also showed up regularly to care for their people. That’s allowed. So, OK. Pastors can work on Sunday. And doctors. And police.
So can mothers, incidentally. Nobody ever said you weren’t allowed to feed a baby on a Sunday - or change one. As a matter of fact, I’d like to point out that no mention at all is made of mothers in the original fourth
Commandment. The exact wording is, “the 7th day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work - you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.” [Ex 20:10] See? Mothers don’t get Sundays off.
Actually, fathers aren’t mentioned either. This commandment was addressed to anyone who had the freedom and authority to set their own work schedule, or that of those who worked for them. Men and women alike. At any rate, it’s always been permitted to do the Lord’s work on the Lord’s day.
The question is, what did Jesus mean when he said, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” [Mk 2:27-28]
Remember that Jesus and the disciples were walking through a grain field, and they were hungry, so they picked some ripe grains of wheat to eat. This was classified as “harvesting”, under the law, and was therefore prohibited. Why was it ok for the disciples to do it?
A friend of mine at the Federal Reserve Bank where I used to work had a sign over her desk which said, “Lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”
Why hadn’t Jesus and the twelve packed sandwiches, for goodness’ sake? They knew they were going to get hungry, why didn’t they prepare ahead? Does lack of preparation on their part constitute grounds for ignoring the law? It sure looks as though the lesson for today is that it’s ok for me to do my grocery shopping on Sunday, doesn’t it? Anything goes, if it’s convenient for you and doesn’t hurt anyone else. Is that it?
I don’t think so. I think that observing a day set apart to belong to God is as important now as it ever has been, if not more so, and for the same reasons God gave it to us in the first place.
The first point to be made is that Jesus did not abolish the Sabbath. What Jesus said was that HE was the Lord of the Sabbath, not the Pharisees or, for that matter, the disciples. The problem with what the Pharisees had done was that they had added a long checklist of rules to the simple commandment God had given through Moses. They meant well. Their desire was to honor the holiness of YHWH. But instead what they wound up doing was to make religious life an obstacle course that weeded out spiritual weaklings. Jesus didn’t want people to stop honoring God. He just wanted them to get their focus right. If you spend all your time checking the fine print of the law, there’s no time left for gazing upon the face of the Almighty. If you use up all your energy monitoring your own spiritual temperature, you certainly can’t spare any attention for your neighbor.
The early Christians did change their worship from Saturday to Sunday. But they changed it to honor Jesus’ resurrection, not to abolish the fourth commandment. Both days were set aside to celebrate the mighty works of God; the first Sabbath honored creation, the second redemption. Both were days for rejoicing.
The second point Jesus made was that the Sabbath was a gift from God for the benefit of his people. It is itself a time of grace. The Sabbath was given as a time out, a king’s X (do people still use that phrase?) a breathing space between the fire of the week just past and the frying pan of the week to come. Grace does not free us from the Sabbath, grace frees us for the Sabbath.
What do I mean by "frees us FOR the Sabbath?"
The Sabbath is a day when we are to rejoice in God’s creation, not demand that it produce for us. 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 God’s original gift of dominion that God gave the man and woman in Genesis 1. We are made to be 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. And these gifts include 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. It is a day to celebrate what God has made, not to worry about what we shall eat or drink, or what we are to wear.
The early Christians did change their worship from Saturday to Sunday. So there is a change. When we remember the Resurrection, let us remember that all our days, all our times, have been redeemed, not only Sunday. By the grace of the Holy Spirit we can experience the freedom of God’s Sabbath gift even during the week, even in our work, even if only partially. But we need God’s day, the Lord’s Day to sustain us.
The poet 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!”
The world IS too much with us. The only place, the only time we are truly free of the world’s insistent, deafening, maddening, deadening pressures is when we are in the presence of God, giving ourselves to him in worship and prayer, and receiving from him once again the renewing life of our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ. And we cheat ourselves out of the full benefit of this precious time with God if we rush right back into the world the minute we are done. The busier you are, the tireder you are, the more you need the time of freedom God has given you in this day.
A member of my congregation told me a few years ago that the real problem with the rat race is that, even if you win, you’re still a rat. The reward isn’t worth it, folks. Opt out of the rat race, and rejoice in the Sabbath freedom of our God.
