© 2024 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.
For a few years—from the time my family moved to Fairhope, Alabama, until the time his family moved away—Bryant Stringham was my best friend. We did everything together. We climbed in his tree fort. He taught me how to play chess. One day, at the end of P.E., in an expression of how silly we were, we tied each other’s shoelaces together. When our sadistic P.E. teacher saw what we had done, she decided to make the whole class run one last lap. Frantically, we tried to untie the knots we had made, but they were too tight. One row at a time, the teacher dismissed the students to run that extra lap, saving our adjacent rows for last. We managed to half-run-half-hobble around the field and back to the school building, falling face first into the dust every few strides. I would tell you that we learned our lesson, but I don’t think we did.
Bryant and I did everything together. I played at his house, and he played at mine. One Saturday, I was having so much fun in his backyard that I got a feeling that something this good shouldn’t have to end. “What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked him. “Would you like to come over and play at my house after church?” “I can’t,” he said, with a clarity and finality that surprised me. “Why not?” I asked. “Because Sunday is a day for family. We spend the whole day together,” he said. “Well, can I come over and play here?” I asked innocently. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t work like that.”
I didn’t understand it at the time, but Bryant was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As a Mormon, Bryant and his family approached Sunday as a Sabbath day. Instead of working, shopping, or even playing with friends, they believed that Sundays should be spent going to church, focusing on their family, and resting from their usual activities. For them, it was a beautiful opportunity to reconnect with the most important things in life. For me, it meant I wasn’t allowed to see my friend.
Thirty-five years later, I’m still not ready to say that spending time apart from our friends is a good thing, but I do find powerfully attractive the idea of setting aside a day each week to realign my life with what truly matters. What if all of us set apart a weekly Sabbath day, not merely as a day away from work but as a day to celebrate the best things in life?
For the most part, our understanding of the Sabbath comes not from the Jewish tradition, in which Jesus lived and taught, but from the Western and, eventually, Protestant reinterpretations of that tradition. As a result, we tend to think of the Sabbath as a day off—a day when sabbath-observers rest from their labors in order to renew their strength for the next six days of work. But, according to Jewish teaching, that approach is backwards. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, “The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.”[1]
We see and hear what Jesus says and does in this gospel reading, and we think that our Lord and Savior came to set us free from Sabbath observance. But that approach ignores the beauty of a practice that Jesus surely would have treasured. And, more significantly, it misses the important and life-giving point that Jesus is making. Jesus doesn’t rebuke the Pharisees, get angry at them, or grieve their hardness of heart because they love the Sabbath. He is upset because of what they have allowed sabbath observance to become—a means for death instead of the means for life that God intends. But, to see that, we have lean into the importance of sabbath observance a little more fully.
Did you know that many modern appliances come with a Sabbath or Shabbat mode? When you put your oven in Sabbath mode, the interior light won’t come on when you open the door because turning on or off a light is prohibited on the Sabbath. Also, the oven won’t cycle on and off but will maintain a steady temperature to keep your food warm and ready to eat because neither cooking nor kindling a fire is permitted on the Sabbath.
Preparing for Shabbat, which begins at sunset on Friday, takes time, effort, and intention. You must remember to leave a light on in the kitchen and the bathroom and to turn off the lights in the bedroom. You need to put the brisket in the slow cooker early in the day and make sure the challah is finished in time. You must even pre-tear sheets of toilet paper or else the Sabbath won’t be very pleasant.
Why do those things matter? Because time itself is a sacred gift of God that we all too easily pollute with things that distract us from the truly important parts of life. As Rabbi Heschel wrote, “The Sabbath is the most precious present mankind has received from the treasure house of God. All week we think: The spirit is too far away, and we succumb to spiritual absenteeism, or at best we pray: Send us a little of Thy spirit. On the Sabbath the spirit stands and pleads: Accept all excellence from me…”[2] Only a strict observance of the Sabbath allows us to give our best to God. As soon as we bring even the smallest shred of work into the day of rest, we lose our ability to dwell undistracted in the presence of God.
Was Jesus taking issue with the sort of legalistic religiosity that leads to pre-torn toilet paper? It’s tempting for Gentile Christians to think that, but I don’t think that’s right. There are thirty-nine categories of work that are prohibited on the Sabbath, including spinning, weaving, sewing, and tearing; trapping, killing, skinning, and curing; writing, building, demolishing, and transferring; planting, ploughing, reaping, and threshing. When Jesus’ disciples plucked those heads of grain, they were violating Sabbath observance. When Jesus told the man to stretch out his hand in order to heal him, because the man’s life was not in danger, Jesus violated Sabbath observance. But the gospel text shows that Jesus wasn’t challenging the holiness of Sabbath observance as much as the way that the religious authorities were eager to use it to condemn others.
When the Pharisees pointed out the disciples’ unlawful act, Jesus replied by appealing to the story of David from 1 Samuel 21: “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food?” At first, Jesus’ choice of that biblical passage doesn’t make a lot of sense. Other than being hungry, which isn’t a valid excuse in either case, there isn’t an obvious connection between the two episodes, unless you focus on David himself.
David was God’s anointed. He wasn’t perfect by any means, but he was the one whom God chose to be the King of Israel. The scriptures do not condemn David for giving the showbread to his companions, but the Pharisees were eager to condemn Jesus for allowing his disciples to pluck heads of grain on the Sabbath. But Jesus was the new and perfect David—God’s anointed one, the Christ. As the Son of Man, who came to the earth with the full authority of God, Jesus wanted the religious leaders to recognize what they were missing—him.
All along, God’s will for God’s people has always been abundant life. Observing the Sabbath as fully as possible is one way to celebrate the life that God has given us and has promised us. But our failure to be as faithful as God asks us to be or as we hope to be is as sure and certain as the cycles of the sun and moon. How those failures affect our relationship with God is at the heart of this gospel passage.
Jesus came to give life to the world, and he succeeded in giving us that life in a way that no effort or intention on our part could ever accomplish. “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” Jesus asks, calling into question not only the Pharisees’ agenda but our own approach to religiosity—the fiction we write of our own self-justification and the condemnation of others. When the result of Jesus’ healing act is the religious leaders’ decision to go out immediately and conspire with the political leaders about how they will destroy Jesus, the universal failure of humanity is on full display.
Jesus didn’t come to set us free from something as beautiful as keeping the Sabbath. He came to set us free from our proclivity to make good and holy religious observances a channel through which we would condemn others or ourselves. Faithful practices are supposed to bring life, but, when we define ourselves by them and by our failure to live up to them, we make them an instrument of death.
Because of Jesus, we are already good enough, holy enough, even perfect enough to inherit the full and abundant life that God has promised us. When we recognize who Jesus is and what he has given us, that life becomes ours here and now instead of a longed-for hope that is beyond even our fullest striving. As a people who belong to God in Christ, our religious observances are not a path to abundant life but a celebration of that life which God has already given us, and that is something worth celebrating any day of the week.
1. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York: 1951, 14.
2. Ibid, 18.
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