Liberating Sabbath.

Psalm 92.  (Exodus 20:8-11; Deuteronomy 5:12-15; Isaiah 58:13-14; Mark 2:23-3:6)

I.

            In all four gospels, one of the big things that gets Jesus into trouble with the authorities is his approach to the Sabbath.  Arguments over the Sabbath are so common in the gospels that we could almost take the reformation of the Sabbath as the main purpose of Jesus’ ministry. 

            Jesus’ Sabbath practice involves healing, liberation, and justice.  He sees that the Sabbath is made for the benefit of humans and of the whole creation.  He rejects the imposing of Sabbath restrictions on a community merely as arbitrary religious prohibitions, or for the maintaining of national identity.

            He gets his understanding of the Sabbath directly from the Torah.  In the Torah, the Sabbath is given as first of all, in Exodus, as a time to imitate God’s resting at the conclusion of God’s work of creation.  God is saying that it is not our work, our production, that is most important.  The purpose of human life is a good and content resting in creation’s beauty, balance, benefits, and blessing.  It is a recognition that all that God has made is very good, and celebrating that truth together.

            The Torah goes even further in the book of Deuteronomy.  There, the Sabbath is also about justice.  It is not just for the Israelites, but for everyone.  Foreigners, slaves, and even animals are embraced by the Sabbath resting from productive work.  Later we see that even the land itself is allowed to rest.

            When God brings the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, God gives them the Torah as an explicit guide in how not to be like Pharaoh.  Pharaoh presided over a system of relentless production, 24/7, where the demands of economic growth were absolute, and where the burdens of that growth were placed upon a class of slaves who were worked mercilessly.  It was a system of gross inequality and terrible, daily, routine violence.

            As the Israelites gather at Mt. Sinai the one thing God wants to prevent is that this new people fall into a system that is anything like that of Pharaoh.  That is because Pharaoh’s corrupt regime of production and profit was toxic and fatal to creation, especially to the people being forced to do the work.

            So God gives them these commandments, the hinge and center of which is the requirement to keep the Sabbath.  The people shall not be worked, and the creation shall not be exploited and exhausted, 24/7.  Economic growth is not a value in itself; it is relativized and contextualized by something much larger, which is the shalom, or peace, of God.  God’s vision of the new community is characterized by equality, justice, and love.  The commandments mean that the economy has to serve those values.

II.

            God’s institution of the Sabbath goes further than just that one day in seven.  In Leviticus the Sabbath is extended into periodic sabbatical years, culminating in the 50^th year festival of Jubilee, when all debts were canceled.  The whole point of Sabbath is to reorient and reground the life of the people back toward God and God’s justice and shalom.  The weekly Sabbath is a foretaste and anticipation of the great Jubilee.  It is intended to sever the bonds of “economic growth” by which people were enslaved.

             So the Sabbath is nothing like our “weekend” in which we catch our breath and rebuild our strength so we can be more productive when we are injected back into the rat-race on Monday.  It is not like the medications we take so we can cope better, be more cooperative, compliant, and content with our role as cogs in the economy. 

            Rather, the Sabbath is a regular antidote and counter-measure, a reset button, intended to stop and even cripple the relentless ideology of economic growth.  It’s like a weekly ritual pulling the plug on the system, forcing it to start over. 

            Jesus knows this.  That’s why he redeems the Sabbath by intentionally reasserting the Sabbath’s true meaning as a time for healing, liberation, and justice.  This is not supposed to be a day for God’s people to be in synagogue listening to the Pharisee rabbi drone on about technicalities in the Torah, mostly reminding people how poorly they are keeping it.  Jesus uses the Sabbath as the best time to counteract the regime of disease, disability, demon-possession, and dispossession.  These conditions were largely the sour fruit of a corrupt and oppressive system.

            That’s why his work upsets the authorities so.  It’s not that they don’t want people to be healed, you understand.  But they just didn’t want healing associated with the Sabbath.  That’s not what the Sabbath was supposed to be about, for them.  For these authorities, the Sabbath was one of the means by which they maintained their place and power in the complicated social hierarchy.  Like most human systems where one group dominates others, for it to be maintained people had to become and remain in some sense sick.  They had to be blind, or lame, or addicted, or in debt, or outcast, physically or otherwise.  Healthy and awake people do not waste their lives making bricks for Pharaoh.

            When Jesus connects healing and Sabbath, he is explicitly saying that what he is about is not just physical or even psychological health.  He is about that, to be sure.  But he is also, more profoundly about addressing the root causes of our diseases, in a larger society that is itself sick. 

            Just as Sabbath is not an institution designed to give people a break so they can be better workers, so also Jesus does not heal people for that reason either.  His healing on the Sabbath means that he has come to overturn the whole order, reverse the hierarchies, and reorient the whole society back towards God.

III.

            We see this expressed in Psalm 92, the only Psalm specifically designated for the Sabbath.  Whenever Jesus heals on the Sabbath, it will have been after the people have sung this Psalm.  The other Scripture readings for synagogue worship changed each week; but this Psalm was sung every Sabbath.

            Psalm 92 begins with an exclamation of thanks and praise to God.  It says that God alone is the focus of this Sabbath time.  It doesn’t even mention what we are to be thankful for, because that doesn’t matter.  We don’t want to get into the possibility of naming things to be thankful for, because first of all the list is infinitely long, and secondly, it might cause us to think that our thanks is only based on some of the things that God has done, as if we put ourselves in a position of God’s supervisor, evaluating God’s work.  No, praise and thanks to God should be something we do all day long, morning and night.

            The Psalm goes on to talk about our joy and gladness about everything God has done.  Remembering that the Sabbath is the seventh and final day of creation, it is also a time to look back on the work of creation as a whole.

            This affirmation of creation’s value and even holiness, as the opening hymn of Sabbath, is part of what Jesus is getting at with his healing ministry.  Disease and brokenness, injustice and oppression, are not listed among the things that God created.  They are not made by God and they are not declared very good.  There is no day in Genesis when God created epilepsy or scoliosis of the spine or diabetes or depression or heart disease or cancer.

            Jesus’ healing is about restoration to our original created goodness and wholeness.  Sabbath observes and celebrates this wholeness and integrity.  To leave someone, some member of the gathering, out of this blessing and order would be just wrong.  It would be a visible contradiction of creation’s goodness.  How could Jesus just let that go?  How could he not use the Sabbath as an opportunity to restore a child of Abraham to fullness and wholeness?

            To ignore that, to tolerate in the gathering of believers exclusion and judgment, disease and injustice, would be to act like, well, the Psalm calls such a person a “dullard,” and “stupid”… and even “evil”, “wicked”, and “enemies of God”.  It would mean that our praise and thanks to God for creation was empty.  I wonder if Jesus isn’t pointedly looking at the authorities at this point in the singing of the Psalm.  Maybe he doesn’t have to.

IV.

            The destiny of evildoers is sealed.  They are “doomed to destruction forever”.  Not as a matter of retribution and punishment; the Psalm does not have God actively doing anything to them.  It is more like simply the natural fate of people who do not understand God’s creation, and who live contrary to God’s laws, God’s truth, God’s will, and God’s life.  They may flourish temporarily, like grass, but in the end, in terms of forever?  Their end is sealed.  They have no future.

            The Psalm contrasts these people with the righteous.  The righteous are those who give thanks and praise to the Creator, and sing for joy over creation, the works of God’s hands.  Clearly the difference in this Psalm between the wicked and the righteous is determined by how one responds to creation.  The righteous rejoice with gratitude, while the wicked are about quick growth and ephemeral flourishing, leading ultimately to destruction.  The wicked have no understanding that creation belongs to the Creator, but presumably act as if it is there to dispose of as they please. 

            The righteous have deep roots and long lives because they do know that creation is God’s house, a place responsible to God, where God’s shalom and justice reign.  They do not reduce God’s Word to dry and dead facts, but God’s life and energy flow through them like sap in a living tree.  They produce fruit, the fruit of good works here and now that have a positive legacy moving into the future.

            This is exactly the approach to Sabbath we see in Isaiah 58.  The prophet is emphatic about the Sabbath not being a day to pursue your own private interests or go your own individual way.  It is not about selfish profit or what you can personally get out of it.  The Sabbath is not about what you want; it is about delighting in the Lord, the Creator.

            So when Jesus declares that the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath, he is saying that people are part of creation and that this giving thanks and being glad means partaking in creation’s bounty.  Creation is for us to enjoy together… which is wildly different from exploiting creation for private gain. 

            In Mark 2, Jesus and his disciples pluck and eat grain growing in someone’s field.  The Pharisees complain that he is technically “harvesting” on the Sabbath, doing prohibited work.  To which Jesus basically retorts that they have made the Sabbath oppressive.  It’s just an excuse; their real agenda is protecting the property of private farmers, exactly the opposite of what the Sabbath is about.  He says the Sabbath was made by God and given as a gift for us to enjoy.  All of us.

V.

            The Psalm concludes with a marvelous picture of the righteous whose fruitfulness demonstrates the faithfulness, trustworthiness, and righteousness of God, the Creator, the Lord.  That is the basis of a Sabbath rest.  Sabbath is a time for God to shine in and through us.  It is a time for all to see the goodness of the Creator, in us.

            This is what Jesus does.  He is himself the Creator, in whom the Sabbath is a time for celebrating, renewing, restoring, redeeming, and revealing the wonder and miracle of creation, integrating broken people back into their true shape and place.

            During his mortal life Jesus keeps every Sabbath; he even keeps the Sabbath that happened while he was dead.  For him the Sabbath is for liberating creation and people from bondage. 

            We, his gathered witnesses, are also called to do Sabbath in the Spirit of this Psalm.  It is our time of joy, praise, and thanksgiving, demonstrated in our witnessing to God’s liberating and healing power, and establishing among ourselves and in our world God’s shalom, God’s peace and justice, by welcoming, healing, restoring, and blessing creation and people.

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