The Sabbath

Isaiah 58:9b-14

If you remove the yoke from among you,    the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

10 if you offer your food to the hungry    and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,then your light shall rise in the darkness    and your gloom be like the noonday.

11 The Lord will guide you continually    and satisfy your needs in parched places    and make your bones strong,and you shall be like a watered garden,    like a spring of water    whose waters never fail.

12 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;    you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;you shall be called the repairer of the breach,    the restorer of streets to live in.

13 If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,    from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;if you call the Sabbath a delight    and the holy day of the Lord honorable;if you honor it, not going your own ways,    serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs;

14 then you shall take delight in the Lord,    and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,    for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

John 13:10-17

10 Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” 13 When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. 14 But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the Sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? 16 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?” 17 When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame, and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things being done by him.

The passage from Isaiah contains two contingent promises.  The first is that, if the people stop treating their neighbors like enemies and instead feed the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then not only will those individuals benefit, the whole people will be blessed.  The communal needs will be met, their health secured; they well be like a spring water, gushing with life.   This concern for the welfare of the least in the community will result in the restoration of the nation itself, the walls rebuilt, establishing a legacy that will endure.  The way to be blessed is to first be a people who blesses others.  

The second promise is that, if the people stop disregarding the Sabbath and instead honor it, if they delight in the day of rest rather than continuing to pursue their own interests, then - then - they will take delight in the Lord, and he will bless the people.  The passage establishes a direct relationship between observing the Sabbath and knowing God, delighting in God. 

These two promises might appear more or less unrelated, two things which ended up beside one another in a list but which have no relationship.  In both cases, however, the moral of the story is that, in setting aside our own perceived interests our true needs are met.  There is a little bit of dying to yourself that must take place in order to both see and address the needs of the poor, or in order to trust that work can be put aside in the confidence that God will provide what you need.  As always, the good news is that it is in dying that we truly live.  

But the relationship the two promises is even stronger than that.  We tend to think of honoring the Sabbath - that is, if we let ourselves think about it all - as just refraining from work that allows to instead focus on God.  And that’s not wrong.  But it’s worth remembering that the command to honor the Sabbath first came to a people who had just been delivered from captivity in Egypt, a world - as it ever was - where those with power lord it over the weak, exploiting their labor to enrich themselves.  Pharaoh forced the Hebrews to make bricks every day, then forced them to gather their own straw as well after they complained about their plight.  Moses’ request was to have a day to gather to worship their God, but Pharaoh refused to let them take a break from their labors.  

Those first recipients of the Ten Commandments, with Egypt not far behind them, would’ve heard in the command to honor the Sabbath, not an unwelcome restriction, but a declaration that God - whatever the rulers of this world might say to the contrary - demands that the people get a day of rest.  The Sabbath is about justice for the oppressed, which is not ancillary to the worship of God but is, in fact, it’s very substance.  

So one day Jesus was teaching on the Sabbath, when he encountered a crippled woman, who for 18 years was unable to stand up straight.  Jesus called her over, laid his hands upon her, and healed her.  The leaders of the synagogue became indignant that Jesus “did work” on the Sabbath day.  In their minds, the miracle he performed was eclipsed by the obvious conclusion that this lawbreaker could not be a man of God.  For everyone knows that righteousness in God’s eyes requires scrupulously following the law and all its peculiar interpretations.   Jesus responds, not merely with an appeal to his authority, but to the very logic of the Sabbath itself - a logic, which, as he points out, his accusers submit to when they take their donkey to drink on the Sabbath.  That is, the Sabbath is day when our deepest needs are met.  This crippled woman shouldn’t have to wait another day.  

One of the things I like about living in Luxembourg is that we more or less observe the Sabbath here. Christendom may be dead, but its calendar lives on.  Almost all shops here either have reduced hours on Sunday or are closed entirely, while other sectors do not operate at all.  You kind of have to take it easy on Sunday, whether you want to or not.  However, even in my relatively short time here, this has begun to change, and there is a movement to allow retailers to open on Sundays without having to obtain a permit (as they do currently).  The articles on RTL cite surveys indicating that 80% of workers in retail and hospitality support the extension because it would give them more opportunity to earn money and potentially more flexibility.  

When I was growing up in the US Sunday was also commercially limited, but to a lesser extent.  Last week I visited my mother and, though I’m quite familiar with the consumer/capitalist imperative there, I was still a bit surprised to discover that everything was open, and for normal hours - which are already much longer than here.  I remarked about this to my mother and she matter of factly declared that it’s good for the economy and for the employee’s finances.  

So if we’ve come to believe that working on Sundays is good for both the consumer and the worker, does this mean that the Sabbath is outmoded?  To the extent that we think the Sabbath makes sense, it’s probably as a day to do things we don’t otherwise have time space for, like focussing on God, being with our families, or taking a nap.   And you hardly have to be religious to see the attraction, to find delight in a lazy day in which nothing is demanded of you.  

The point of the Sabbath is indeed to affect our relationship with God, but this is achieved by changing our relationship with work.  In the agrarian world where the command first appeared, where people worked hard just to survive, where their labor, by our standards, was largely unproductive, taking a day off work seemed to threaten their welfare.  “The fields are not planted, the crops are not harvested, our stores are empty, and you want us take the day of!?  There is so much work to be done!”  The purpose, in this context, is to remind the people that, though they must work hard, they should resist the illusion that they it is by their work that they can supply their ultimate needs, that they are sufficient in and of themselves to provide life.  They are always and everywhere dependent upon God’s generosity, not just in the sun and the rain, but in existence itself.  

Our lives are far removed from this existential precariousness, and yet even more than they, we are people convinced that we must maximize productivity, that our ultimate desires can be met by accumulating the means to acquire the things that we believe will bring us life.  And just to be clear, some of this stuff is indeed pretty nice.  But the danger, in places like America or Luxembourg, or pretty much anywhere in the Western world, isn’t merely consumerism, but the assumption deeply imbedded in our hearts and minds, that we really do need these things and that we must work for them, fantasizing about becoming the kind of people who don’t need to work for anything.  

Practicing the Sabbath - at least in theory - reorients our hearts and minds to that which is truly good by imposing upon us a constraint we naturally resist.  The problem that Jesus encountered in that synagogue was that Sabbath observance had become legalistic; the way they observed it denied the very reason it existed in the first place.  We don’t want to be legalistic people, of course. For a period in divinity school I refused to go restaurants on Sunday, which only had the effect of absenting me from fellowship after church.  But I do still think that we need to find some way to practice Sabbath in a way that interrupts what we would otherwise do, which puts a roadblock on our desires, which teaches us not merely to recharge our batteries so that we can get back to work but causes us to consider what the point of our life actually is.    And rather than Sabbath being a kind of bespoke, individual practice, I imagine - as I do with everything else - that for this to be truly formative we will need to do it together.  

So here’s a modest proposal: We all do our best to arrive here on time, and to allot the time afterwards to spend time together.  I know as well as anyone all the things that make this difficult, the pressures we feel, all the other things demanding our attention.  And we definitely shouldn’t be legalistic about this: I’ll do my best not to judge those who arrive late or leave immediately, and I trust you’ll do the same.   And we can do this in the hope that the logic of the Sabbath directly applies, that by resisting the imperative to productivity we discover that which truly gives life.