Loving God, set us free from all that holds
us back from finding our rest in you ☩
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
One of the best feelings in the world, at least as I’ve experienced it, is actually the lack of feeling. When you’ve been in pain and the pain goes away, it’s one of most wonderful feelings there is. Sometimes it’s a sunburn, sometimes a headache, sometimes a pulled muscle, sometimes the relief doesn’t come until after surgery to fix a knee, shoulder, or back, but there’s simply nothing like that feeling of relief. That release from pain, which might also call liberation or salvation, is what God intends for us all and one of the ways that God seeks to grant us this relief is through the Sabbath.
We
heard the narrative in Luke that it happened one Sabbath, which, in the Jewish and
Biblical context is Saturday, a woman who had been deformed with back pain for
eighteen years came into the Temple. Luke, who is traditionally remembered as a
physician, knows a thing or two about physical ailments. He notes that the cause
of her infirmity was that she had a “spirit,” which is a way of saying that this
was more than a herniated disc, there was something deeper going on. And before
we dismiss Luke as being ignorant about modern medicine and point out that he
didn’t take any X-rays to confirm the diagnosis, we do ourselves a disservice if
we try to sever the link between the physical and the spiritual.
The
way we feel greatly impacts our bodies – we know this. Stress wreaks havoc on
our health. Depression often has physical manifestations as well as psychological
ones. Anger takes a toll on our vital organs. We can’t know what burdens this
woman was carrying, perhaps it was worries about her children, guilt over
something that she had or had not done, or anxieties about what people thought
of her, but whatever that spirit that was troubling her was, it manifest itself
in such a way that she was curved in on herself, unable to stand up straight.
This is what Sin does to us all, it makes us unable to stand upright in the
image that God gifted to us. To be very clear, I am not saying that all
physical ailments are the cause of our sin, just that there is more of a
connection between body and soul than we moderns like to think there is.
And
so Jesus comes to her, on the Sabbath day, and touches her, thereby setting her
free from her ailment. She immediately stands up straight and praises God. How
easy it is to forget that step. We pray to God when we are in trouble, and when
we are rescued, we so easily move back to normalcy that we can forget to praise
God. This woman is a great example to us all.
The
problem in this incident is that it happened on the Sabbath. We know from the
Creation poem of Genesis that “On the seventh day God finished the work of
Creation, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that had been
done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it” and then in the Ten
Commandments we read, “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you
shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord
your God; you shall not do any work.”
At
this point in the gospel narrative, Jesus has been upsetting the apple carts of
tradition and authority. Jesus has previously violated Sabbath commandments,
healed the sick, cast out demons, raised the dead, and rebuked the religious
leaders – all things that were making people wonder if he might be the Messiah.
Later in this chapter, Jesus begins receiving death threats as he is challenging
too many sincerely held religious beliefs and assumptions.
And
in doing so, Jesus is redefining what the Sabbath means. It had generally been interpreted,
and still is, that the Sabbath means not doing anything. Depending on how
strict the observance is, that can mean no cooking, no cleaning, no using
electricity, no doing anything job-related, and no healing. Even for those who
interpret Sabbath more liberally, the Sabbath is usually about stopping, about
not doing certain things. And so this healing was a violation of the Sabbath.
But
Jesus challenges this interpretation of the Sabbath as a law to keep and
suggests that the Sabbath is a reality to remember and enter into. Jesus cites
a widely accepted law that said that if you had an injured animal on the
Sabbath, you could nurse it back to health. He’s using a lesser-to-greater
argument – “How much more then ought this woman be liberated today.” She’s been
waiting eighteen years for this liberation and ought not to wait a day more. This
truth was spoken by Martin Luther King when he said that “Justice delayed is
justice denied;” and Jesus is not in the denial business. Jesus says that there
is no reason why this ailing woman ought not to be set free on the Sabbath day,
and in doing so, Jesus is redefining the purpose of the Sabbath. It is not about
ceasing from work, rather it is about receiving freedom from all that holds us
in bondage.
Sometimes
what is keeping us in pain is physical pain, and through physicians, nurses, therapists,
surgeons, and medicine, God very much seeks to heal us. But we are held in
bondage to so many other things: our need to be right, our need to have others
think well of us, our competitive spirits, our thirst for power, our abuse of
the planet and natural resources, our desire for vengeance, our insatiable
appetite for more when it comes to money. We are held in captivity by forces bigger
than ourselves: sexism, racism, classism, and consumerism. And Jesus has come
to liberate us from these forces because they prevent us from receiving the
abundant grace and love that God wants us to know and flourish in.
The
Sabbath is one way that God seeks to give us this salvation. But what exactly does
it mean to “keep the Sabbath”? Well, the idea of “stopping” is correct, it’s
just that stopping isn’t the purpose of the Sabbath, just the first step. The Sabbath
is about remembering a different rhythm of things, which means we need to get
off of the proverbial treadmill. We say that hindsight is 20/20, well it doesn’t
have to be hindsight, it can also be “present-sight” when we do as Jesus
suggests: to “Consider the birds of the air and lilies of the field.” Our world
is so face paced that it can be hard to stop. News travels the world in
seconds, whereas for previous generations it would have taken days or even
weeks. Humans have not evolved to know so much about the world and it is burdening
us.
We
hardly ever let our imaginations run anymore because we always have a tv on in
the background, or earbuds in our ears, or a phone in our hand to pacify our
inability to sit alone with our thoughts. So having time to stop really is
vital to our spiritual and physical wellbeing. Maybe it’s no phones on Sunday
afternoons, or no spending money on Saturdays, or not checking work email after
church – whatever it is, the first step is to stop giving ourselves so
willingly over to the things that we are captive to. And if you want to know
how to tell if you’re captive to something, if you say “Well I can’t not
fill-in-the-blank” then that means you’re as bound up as that woman was.
Another
way of stopping might be holy fasting – where you intentionally abstain from
something for a period of time each week. Maybe it’s a certain food like meat
on Fridays, or a certain type of drink, or putting your phone away on
Saturdays. These things are not ways of punishing ourselves, they are about
fasting – about intentionally giving something up so that we can focus more on
family, more on listening to God, more on just letting our mind wander.
As
I’ve already mentioned, when the woman is liberated, she immediately begins to
praise, because that is what the Sabbath is all about. For us Christians, we
understand the Sabbath to fall on Sunday, not Saturday because it is on Sunday
that we remember and celebrate that Christ has given us the ultimate salvation
by his Resurrection on the first day of the week. And it’s important to remember
that Sabbath, for us, comes at the start of the week, not the end. The Sabbath
isn’t at the finish line, it’s at the start. It is a mental shift to remember
that the week begins on Sunday and not Monday, but can have real impact. We don’t
slog through the week to get to the point where we can rest. No, instead we
begin with rest, by praising God and remembering all that God has done with us,
and we take that sense of grace, of enoughness, of peace with us into the week.
This
is why the Sabbath is about both remembering and anticipating. On the Sabbath,
we remember all that God has blessed us with, all the ways that we have known
and seen the love of God moving in the world, all of the blessings that have
been bestowed upon us, and even the challenges that have brought us closer to
God and to acknowledge our reliance on God. Remembering these things, the
Sabbath helps us to remember and focus on what truly matters. And we also anticipate
the fullness of this rest into eternity, when we live fully in the peace that
passes all understanding, when we can truly say that all things are well, when
we are with Jesus in the place that he has prepared for us. And so the earthly
Sabbath becomes a foretaste of that heavenly rest. This is why Eucharistic
praise is so important on the Sabbath – as the Eucharist allows us to taste and
see the goodness of the Lord as we gather as the beloved community of God and
are fed from the abundance of God’s love.
One
of the challenges to keeping the Sabbath is how un-Sabbathlike our world is.
Our society, our economy, our psychologies demand us to always be on the go. We
have that fear of missing out if we take time away from the news or social media.
But you know what, even if our phone doesn’t ding when there is breaking news,
everything is still going to be okay. When we mortgage our Sabbath time for
raises, promotions, or higher productivity, we are truly casting our pearls
before swine. We can come up with plenty of reasons why we can’t practically obseve
Sabbath, but the truth of the matter is Sabbath is what enables us to be liberated
from all the things that keep us from the life of grace that God desires for
us. And to be clear, I’m not talking about “Blue Laws;” keeping Sabbath isn’t
something for sports leagues, movie theaters, or malls to keep – it is
something for us, as follows of Jesus, to keep. It doesn’t have to start as 24
hours, start by keeping a 4-hour Sabbath, and then 8, then 12. And it’s okay if
there are failures along the way, God is always ready to meet us in our
failures and our do-overs.
Another
thing that keeps us from practicing the Sabbath is that we can be like the
authorities in this passage. We can focus so much on the rules of who is
allowed to be liberated that we can end up being tools of the demonic that keep
people in their bondage. To put it simply, if we use rule-following as an
excuse to deny people the grace that God intends for them, we might well be
doing the work of evil. This passage shows us that very earnest and religious people
can align themselves with evil in the name of maintaining tradition. If find ourselves
defending rules and norms before we are standing up for people, then we just might
be a part of the bondage.
One
last barrier to Sabbath is the question of whether or not we let Jesus touch us.
Jesus comes to set us free and to give us rest – but sometimes we are so used
to our captivity that we insist that things being broken is okay. The woman was
touched by Jesus and then found healing. But do we keep Jesus at an arms’ distance?
Do our schedules and priorities keep us away from God’s healing grace? To be
sure, God is like a St. Bernard rescue dog who will track us down to save us.
But we can make the process take longer than it needs to. So one way to begin would
be to name before God the things that you find yourself captive to and ask God
to help you find freedom. And don’t be surprised if God’s help comes through other
people, let them help you when the time comes.
I’ll
close with the Collect at Morning Prayer on Saturdays: Almighty God, who after
the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of
rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties,
may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here
upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in
heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
