St Theodore's

Wattle Park

Sermon of the Week
Look up the passage

21/3/04

Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath Luke 6:1-11

Can you imagine what it felt like for Jesus and his disciples having the Pharisees watching their every move? Here he is going for a stroll on a Sabbath with his disciples and the Pharisees are following behind checking his every movement. They're walking along one Sabbath day, going through the grain fields, and as they stroll along, the disciples are picking heads of wheat, rubbing them between their hands to get rid of the husks, and eating them. A fairly innocent thing to be doing you'd think. But, no. The Pharisees use this opportunity to jump on Jesus. "Why are you doing what's not lawful on the Sabbath?" they ask.

According to their understanding of the Sabbath law, nothing that constituted work was to be done on the Sabbath. The 4th commandment said: "the seventh 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 NRSV) now that included reaping and winnowing wheat. By their ruling, reaping even a small handful of wheat or corn constituted work. So what the disciples were doing was contravening God's Law.

So what does Jesus say? Well, he answers with a 2-pronged answer. First of all, he raises the issue of the precedent that David set in 1 Sam 21, where he and his men were running away from Saul and hadn't had time to get provisions for their journey. And what did David do? He went to the Tabernacle and asked the priest for some bread. Well, the only bread the priest had was the consecrated bread, the bread of the Presence, that he'd just removed from the Holy of Holies. This bread was consecrated each day and presented before the Lord as a cereal offering. When the new loaf was taken in to the Holy of Holies the previous day's bread was removed and was then given to the priests for them to eat. This was how they got their bread. Only they could eat this bread because it was holy, dedicated to God. Yet David had taken it and eaten it and even given it to his soldiers. So this was some precedent for Jesus to quote wasn't it? No-one would have thought to criticise David for his action. After all he was the great King of Israel.

   But that isn't Jesus' only answer. He also gives this enigmatic answer. "The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath." He doesn't elaborate on it here, but in Mark's gospel we find that he also said "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath." (Mark 2:27 NRSV)/

   So what do we make of this second answer? Is he saying something like, "Don't forget the reason that the Sabbath was established in the first place. That is, it was set up for our benefit, not to burden us. Or is he saying something even more significant about his role as Son of Man, as Messiah? That is, that as Messiah he's supreme even over the Sabbath law. And even beyond that, is he saying something about the way they reverence the Sabbath but don't reverence the one who's Lord over the Sabbath?

   Notice too, the juxtaposition of Jesus over against David in this answer. Jesus is subtly comparing himself to David. Saying that just as David, because of his position under God, as the anointed king of Israel, was able to bypass the law concerning the Holy Bread, so Jesus, because of his position as Messiah, as the descendant, the son of David, takes precedence over their Sabbath laws.

   The same issue arises some time later, on another Sabbath, when Jesus is in the synagogue, teaching. As he's going around the synagogue, speaking, he comes across a man with a withered hand. Again the Pharisees are there looking for a way to accuse him of wrongdoing. But he knows what they're thinking. And he isn't going to be caught out by them. So he asks them a question, which in fact goes to the heart of what he wants to teach them about the Sabbath. He says "I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?"

   What he does, you see, is to change the way the question is asked. They would have asked "Does healing constitute work?" because what mattered was whether the law had been broken or not. But he asks "Is healing good?" "Would it be evil to ignore this suffering person?" "What would God want you to do on the Sabbath?" He refuses to allow them to remain neutral in the face of a suffering world. He turns the question from one of following the rules to one of how God wants people to live.

   It's all too easy, isn't it, to close our eyes to the suffering in the world around us. To use the excuse of religious duty, even, to overlook the need for compassion and mercy. The issue of AIDS is a good example. There have been times when some Christians have refused to have anything to do with AIDS sufferers because of the moral issues associated with that particular disease. Others refuse to give overseas aid to people of certain countries because of the corruption within those countries. There's been an international movement for the past few years to forgive third world debt, to give relief to certain poverty stricken countries that can't possibly repay the loans they've received from the World Bank and the United Nations. And the most common objection to this idea is that these nations are poor because of corruption within their governments. So showing them mercy won't solve the problem. You'll just be letting their leaders get away with it. Well the Pharisees were a bit like that. They would have refused to help this man because his illness wasn't life threatening; because, to their way of thinking, the Sabbath law took precedence over mercy and compassion. But Jesus turns that on its head. He makes it quite clear that if you don't reach out to do good when it's within your power, it's the same as doing evil.

   One of the great fears of the Pharisees in all of this was that what Jesus was doing and saying would undermine the significance of the Sabbath. But Jesus wasn't abolishing the Sabbath. He was fulfilling it. As with the rest of the law, Jesus came to fulfill it. If you like, he came to Christianise it. He came to make it a day when people would be fed and refreshed, when God would be honoured, when good would be done, lives healed. To make the Sabbath rest an active rather than a passive thing.

   One of the reasons the Pharisees had got it wrong, was that they'd forgotten the original intent of the Sabbath law. They thought it was just about being different, about doing exactly what God said. Stopping work to show you were part of God's special people. But that was only part of the reason behind it. Listen to what Exodus 23:12 says: "Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your homeborn slave and the resident alien may be refreshed." The reason God set aside the 7th day was so workers could be refreshed. The Sabbath was made for people, not vice versa.

   So why hadn't the Pharisees understood that? Well, partly it was because their whole understanding of God's will was built around the law and total obedience to that law. In particular, around the traditions passed down for generation upon generation. And partly it was because they failed to measure their traditions against Scripture. I'm sure I've said this before, but let me say it again. The only way to understand Scripture is to let Scripture interpret Scripture. That is, make sure you find out what else the Scriptures say about a particular topic before you come to a conclusion about what a particular passage means. And that's even more important when it comes to our religious traditions. I'm always very wary when I hear someone say, 'it's the tradition of the Church to do such and such, or to believe such and such'. Even if it's one of our religious leaders. Perhaps we should be even more wary when it's our religious leaders, because they tend to have more at stake when it comes to supporting our traditions. No, we need to test everything we do by Scripture, even if it comes out of Scripture in the first place.

   That of course is what Jesus was doing when he raised the question of David's actions. He was showing from Scripture how there are times when the ethical imperative overrides the legal. Similarly when he asked the question about doing good rather than harm, he was showing how the ethical imperative to do good overrides the legal requirement to cease all work on the Sabbath. He was reinterpreting what was meant by not working.

   In fact, to understand this properly, we need to go back to what it meant for God to rest on the Sabbath. When we read in Gen 1 that 'God had finished all the work he had been doing, so on the 7th day he rested from all his work,' what do we understand by that? Do we imagine God going off to some parallel universe and leaving us on our own? Do we imagine God sitting back on his throne up in heaven and watching what will happen, the way we might sit back and watch TV this afternoon? Totally passive and disengaged? No, that's not a Christian concept of God at all. Rather, we understand God to be still active in his creation. The descriptions of God we find in the Bible are almost all active images. God's right hand stretched out to save, or in judgement. God upholding the universe by his powerful hand. God brooding over his people like a hen over her chickens. God wooing his people the way a lover woos the beloved.

   God's Sabbath rest isn't a passive rest, but an active rest. That's what he calls us to emulate. Me sitting around the BBQ after our service in Wattle Park today isn't emulating God's enjoyment of his Sabbath rest. It's just taking advantage of a sunny autumn day. To properly keep the Sabbath, the way God does, involves choosing good over evil, seeking to save life rather than destroying it, bringing order out of the chaos of our world.

   Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with sitting down and doing nothing on a Sunday afternoon. There's great value in rest and recreation. After all that was one of the reasons for the Sabbath in the first place, so the workers and the animals could get some rest. No, what I'm trying to say is that we mustn't start thinking that we're fulfilling the Sabbath simply by doing nothing, or worse, that we're breaking it if we do some chores around the house: mow the lawns or do the washing. And certainly not if we organise some church outing like the service and picnic in Wattle Park today.

   Jesus made it clear that keeping the Sabbath is more complex than simply an absence of work. He didn't mean to abolish it, simply to fulfill it, to Christianise it. For Jesus the Sabbath was a day when people are fed and refreshed; a day when God and Jesus are honoured; a day when good is done, and lives are healed; a day of active participation in God's saving work in the world, not simply a day of passive rest.

   But having said that there's one more thing we need to remember. That is, that the Sabbath is a day that won't truly be fulfilled until Jesus returns. Jesus' coming has changed our understanding of the Sabbath. Our true Sabbath rest still lies in the future. Listen to what the writer to the Hebrews says: (Heb 4:9-11 NRSV) "So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; ¹⁰for those who enter God's rest also cease from their labors as God did from his. ¹¹Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs." The Jewish Sabbath was just a faint foreshadowing of the greater rest that God has planned for all his people. When Christ returns, he'll take us to be with him in heaven, in the new Jerusalem where there'll be no more tears, no more sweat from labour, no more death and suffering. That will be a true rest, such as we'll never experience here on earth. Therefore, says the writer to the Hebrews, let us make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through disobedience. Let us persevere in our faith and obedience to God, in doing good, not evil, in saving life, not destroying it.

   So what have we discovered from this short passage? First, when we're trying to understand how an OT law might apply to our circumstances, we first need to see the similarities and differences between our situation and theirs. We need to discern what's universal and what's specific to a particular situation. We need to read Scripture in the light of the rest of Scripture. We need to have our theological eyes and ears open, so we think in terms of what God wants, not just how human beings have interpreted his words. And we need to see what a difference Jesus' coming makes. What does Jesus teach us about the situation? What difference does our new relationship with God through faith in Christ make?

   If you have a concern about how you should treat the Sabbath, then here are some guidelines that Jesus sets: it should be a day when people are cared for and refreshed, when God and Jesus are honoured, when good is done and lives are healed. Apart from that, remember that the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath. Jesus' coming removes us from bondage to the law and frees us to serve him in freedom. And his coming shows him to be Lord of all human institutions. So don't revere the day, don't revere the Sabbath. Revere, rather, the Lord of the Sabbath.

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	Sermon of the Week	Look up the passage
	21/3/04
	Jesus, Lord of the Sabbath	Luke 6:1-11

	Can you imagine what it felt like for Jesus and his disciples having the Pharisees watching their every move? Here he is going for a stroll on a Sabbath with his disciples and the Pharisees are following behind checking his every movement. They're walking along one Sabbath day, going through the grain fields, and as they stroll along, the disciples are picking heads of wheat, rubbing them between their hands to get rid of the husks, and eating them. A fairly innocent thing to be doing you'd think. But, no. The Pharisees use this opportunity to jump on Jesus. "Why are you doing what's not lawful on the Sabbath?" they ask.
	According to their understanding of the Sabbath law, nothing that constituted work was to be done on the Sabbath. The 4th commandment said: "the seventh 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 NRSV) now that included reaping and winnowing wheat. By their ruling, reaping even a small handful of wheat or corn constituted work. So what the disciples were doing was contravening God's Law.
	So what does Jesus say? Well, he answers with a 2-pronged answer. First of all, he raises the issue of the precedent that David set in 1 Sam 21, where he and his men were running away from Saul and hadn't had time to get provisions for their journey. And what did David do? He went to the Tabernacle and asked the priest for some bread. Well, the only bread the priest had was the consecrated bread, the bread of the Presence, that he'd just removed from the Holy of Holies. This bread was consecrated each day and presented before the Lord as a cereal offering. When the new loaf was taken in to the Holy of Holies the previous day's bread was removed and was then given to the priests for them to eat. This was how they got their bread. Only they could eat this bread because it was holy, dedicated to God. Yet David had taken it and eaten it and even given it to his soldiers. So this was some precedent for Jesus to quote wasn't it? No-one would have thought to criticise David for his action. After all he was the great King of Israel.
	But that isn't Jesus' only answer. He also gives this enigmatic answer. "The Son of Man is lord of the sabbath." He doesn't elaborate on it here, but in Mark's gospel we find that he also said "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath." (Mark 2:27 NRSV)/
	So what do we make of this second answer? Is he saying something like, "Don't forget the reason that the Sabbath was established in the first place. That is, it was set up for our benefit, not to burden us. Or is he saying something even more significant about his role as Son of Man, as Messiah? That is, that as Messiah he's supreme even over the Sabbath law. And even beyond that, is he saying something about the way they reverence the Sabbath but don't reverence the one who's Lord over the Sabbath?
	Notice too, the juxtaposition of Jesus over against David in this answer. Jesus is subtly comparing himself to David. Saying that just as David, because of his position under God, as the anointed king of Israel, was able to bypass the law concerning the Holy Bread, so Jesus, because of his position as Messiah, as the descendant, the son of David, takes precedence over their Sabbath laws.
	The same issue arises some time later, on another Sabbath, when Jesus is in the synagogue, teaching. As he's going around the synagogue, speaking, he comes across a man with a withered hand. Again the Pharisees are there looking for a way to accuse him of wrongdoing. But he knows what they're thinking. And he isn't going to be caught out by them. So he asks them a question, which in fact goes to the heart of what he wants to teach them about the Sabbath. He says "I ask you, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?"
	What he does, you see, is to change the way the question is asked. They would have asked "Does healing constitute work?" because what mattered was whether the law had been broken or not. But he asks "Is healing good?" "Would it be evil to ignore this suffering person?" "What would God want you to do on the Sabbath?" He refuses to allow them to remain neutral in the face of a suffering world. He turns the question from one of following the rules to one of how God wants people to live.
	It's all too easy, isn't it, to close our eyes to the suffering in the world around us. To use the excuse of religious duty, even, to overlook the need for compassion and mercy. The issue of AIDS is a good example. There have been times when some Christians have refused to have anything to do with AIDS sufferers because of the moral issues associated with that particular disease. Others refuse to give overseas aid to people of certain countries because of the corruption within those countries. There's been an international movement for the past few years to forgive third world debt, to give relief to certain poverty stricken countries that can't possibly repay the loans they've received from the World Bank and the United Nations. And the most common objection to this idea is that these nations are poor because of corruption within their governments. So showing them mercy won't solve the problem. You'll just be letting their leaders get away with it. Well the Pharisees were a bit like that. They would have refused to help this man because his illness wasn't life threatening; because, to their way of thinking, the Sabbath law took precedence over mercy and compassion. But Jesus turns that on its head. He makes it quite clear that if you don't reach out to do good when it's within your power, it's the same as doing evil.
	One of the great fears of the Pharisees in all of this was that what Jesus was doing and saying would undermine the significance of the Sabbath. But Jesus wasn't abolishing the Sabbath. He was fulfilling it. As with the rest of the law, Jesus came to fulfill it. If you like, he came to Christianise it. He came to make it a day when people would be fed and refreshed, when God would be honoured, when good would be done, lives healed. To make the Sabbath rest an active rather than a passive thing.
	One of the reasons the Pharisees had got it wrong, was that they'd forgotten the original intent of the Sabbath law. They thought it was just about being different, about doing exactly what God said. Stopping work to show you were part of God's special people. But that was only part of the reason behind it. Listen to what Exodus 23:12 says: "Six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your homeborn slave and the resident alien may be refreshed." The reason God set aside the 7th day was so workers could be refreshed. The Sabbath was made for people, not vice versa.
	So why hadn't the Pharisees understood that? Well, partly it was because their whole understanding of God's will was built around the law and total obedience to that law. In particular, around the traditions passed down for generation upon generation. And partly it was because they failed to measure their traditions against Scripture. I'm sure I've said this before, but let me say it again. The only way to understand Scripture is to let Scripture interpret Scripture. That is, make sure you find out what else the Scriptures say about a particular topic before you come to a conclusion about what a particular passage means. And that's even more important when it comes to our religious traditions. I'm always very wary when I hear someone say, 'it's the tradition of the Church to do such and such, or to believe such and such'. Even if it's one of our religious leaders. Perhaps we should be even more wary when it's our religious leaders, because they tend to have more at stake when it comes to supporting our traditions. No, we need to test everything we do by Scripture, even if it comes out of Scripture in the first place.
	That of course is what Jesus was doing when he raised the question of David's actions. He was showing from Scripture how there are times when the ethical imperative overrides the legal. Similarly when he asked the question about doing good rather than harm, he was showing how the ethical imperative to do good overrides the legal requirement to cease all work on the Sabbath. He was reinterpreting what was meant by not working.
	In fact, to understand this properly, we need to go back to what it meant for God to rest on the Sabbath. When we read in Gen 1 that 'God had finished all the work he had been doing, so on the 7th day he rested from all his work,' what do we understand by that? Do we imagine God going off to some parallel universe and leaving us on our own? Do we imagine God sitting back on his throne up in heaven and watching what will happen, the way we might sit back and watch TV this afternoon? Totally passive and disengaged? No, that's not a Christian concept of God at all. Rather, we understand God to be still active in his creation. The descriptions of God we find in the Bible are almost all active images. God's right hand stretched out to save, or in judgement. God upholding the universe by his powerful hand. God brooding over his people like a hen over her chickens. God wooing his people the way a lover woos the beloved.
	God's Sabbath rest isn't a passive rest, but an active rest. That's what he calls us to emulate. Me sitting around the BBQ after our service in Wattle Park today isn't emulating God's enjoyment of his Sabbath rest. It's just taking advantage of a sunny autumn day. To properly keep the Sabbath, the way God does, involves choosing good over evil, seeking to save life rather than destroying it, bringing order out of the chaos of our world.
	Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with sitting down and doing nothing on a Sunday afternoon. There's great value in rest and recreation. After all that was one of the reasons for the Sabbath in the first place, so the workers and the animals could get some rest. No, what I'm trying to say is that we mustn't start thinking that we're fulfilling the Sabbath simply by doing nothing, or worse, that we're breaking it if we do some chores around the house: mow the lawns or do the washing. And certainly not if we organise some church outing like the service and picnic in Wattle Park today.
	Jesus made it clear that keeping the Sabbath is more complex than simply an absence of work. He didn't mean to abolish it, simply to fulfill it, to Christianise it. For Jesus the Sabbath was a day when people are fed and refreshed; a day when God and Jesus are honoured; a day when good is done, and lives are healed; a day of active participation in God's saving work in the world, not simply a day of passive rest.
	But having said that there's one more thing we need to remember. That is, that the Sabbath is a day that won't truly be fulfilled until Jesus returns. Jesus' coming has changed our understanding of the Sabbath. Our true Sabbath rest still lies in the future. Listen to what the writer to the Hebrews says: (Heb 4:9-11 NRSV) "So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; ¹⁰for those who enter God's rest also cease from their labors as God did from his. ¹¹Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs." The Jewish Sabbath was just a faint foreshadowing of the greater rest that God has planned for all his people. When Christ returns, he'll take us to be with him in heaven, in the new Jerusalem where there'll be no more tears, no more sweat from labour, no more death and suffering. That will be a true rest, such as we'll never experience here on earth. Therefore, says the writer to the Hebrews, let us make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through disobedience. Let us persevere in our faith and obedience to God, in doing good, not evil, in saving life, not destroying it.
	So what have we discovered from this short passage? First, when we're trying to understand how an OT law might apply to our circumstances, we first need to see the similarities and differences between our situation and theirs. We need to discern what's universal and what's specific to a particular situation. We need to read Scripture in the light of the rest of Scripture. We need to have our theological eyes and ears open, so we think in terms of what God wants, not just how human beings have interpreted his words. And we need to see what a difference Jesus' coming makes. What does Jesus teach us about the situation? What difference does our new relationship with God through faith in Christ make?
	If you have a concern about how you should treat the Sabbath, then here are some guidelines that Jesus sets: it should be a day when people are cared for and refreshed, when God and Jesus are honoured, when good is done and lives are healed. Apart from that, remember that the Sabbath was made for us, not us for the Sabbath. Jesus' coming removes us from bondage to the law and frees us to serve him in freedom. And his coming shows him to be Lord of all human institutions. So don't revere the day, don't revere the Sabbath. Revere, rather, the Lord of the Sabbath.