Luke 6:1-11 Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath
Ok so week 6 of Epiphany. We have been following the lectionary through the gospel of Luke. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, fled to Egypt to escape Herod and returned to Nazareth to grow up. He was redeemed as a child in the temple in Jerusalem, baptised by John in the river Jordan, tempted by the Satan in the desert and began a ministry of teaching and healing in Galilee.
As I have been talking about over this time Jesus early life and ministry is without a doubt a bit weird, often a bit much for the modern disenchanted world. It is filled with wonder and awe and punctuated by sacred traditions in ways I am coming to appreciate more and more.
Jesus then returned to his home town Nazareth to announce his mission,
“To bring good news to the poor,
proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free, and
announce the year of the Lord’s favor.”
At first the people were amazed but soon they were chasing him out of town. Things always went wrong for Jesus when he refused to stay his lane, when he refused to act the way he was expected to, to say the things people wanted to hear. It seems his home town wanted to claim him for their own and his response was “I am not yours to claim or contain.” This remains a poignant message for the church. He does this by citing God’s long history of prioritizing the outsider, the foreigner, the stranger. He draws on the story of Elijah who was sent to care for the widow at Zarephath and Elisha who was instructed to heal Naaman the Syrian, both outsiders and foreigners.
After being driven out of Nazareth Jesus goes to the river Galilee, he encounters his first disciples, the fisherman Peter, James and John which Janet spoke to us about last week. They began to follow him as he went around the towns of Galilee healing and teaching and arguing with the Pharisees. And this of course is what he is doing in today’s passage.
The theme is Sabbath.
Last weekend I was having dinner with Sarah and Janet our general secretary. Being general secretary of the Northern Synod is a big and right now pretty unsustainable job. I hope you might join me in praying for Janet. But I know many people have jobs like that and we were talking about how common busyness and burn out are. Sarah told me that she often reminds people that I will not be very happy if they are not practicing Sabbath.
And when my sister and I were talking about this reading coming up, she sighs and says “argh we do not need another sermon on how great the Sabbath is.”
It’s good to have a sister in your congregation isn’t it?
Well, despite her comment, it does give me great joy that the message of Sabbath is getting out there. I am sure I have said at least once (but probably more given Gemma’s comment) that I think it would be great if what the church became known for was being a Sabbath practicing community. What a gift this would be to the exhaustion of the modern world as well as the very earth itself that is crying out for rest.
But today’s reading of course is a reminder, probably mostly to me, of the ways that even something as good as Sabbath can become corrupted, can become idolatrous, can become a way to judge people and ourselves in ways that are not helpful. It seems humans have an almost endless capacity to mess things up.
Now, I have never been a great fan of the Pharisees of the gospels. They are mostly portrayed as the “bad guys” of the story (although there are some good ones) but as always I think it is more complicated than that.
The Pharisees emerged as a sect of Judaism in the third century BCE. The Jews were under Greek domination and many Jews were taking on Greek culture, values, customs and religions. The Pharisees were reacting against this. They wanted to protect Jewish identity, customs, laws and way of life against the imposition of Empire. They believed it was the way of God, that it was good and would lead to the flourishing of their people.
I can relate to their struggle. As the dominant secular, consumer culture continues to insert and assert itself into ever more areas of our lives, as more people are being formed by the values of social media, advertising, so called influencers and pornography I too want to protect my faith, identity, traditions and way of life against the imposition of this Empire. I believe if rightly understood and practiced they are good and lead to human flourishing, something many, many people are struggling with. And I believe it is true.
I imagine I am not the only one. While, there are of course some movements that are rooted in pure self interest and deception, most of them, across the whole spectrum of political, religious and social values and beliefs are rooted in a sense that what they are doing is good. That they have some solutions to the world’s problems.
This passage today I think is a warning to us all – from the extreme left to the extreme right and everywhere in between – that we need to tread carefully. We do not give up our commitments to whatever movement or religion or political party we are involved in. I think the world needs people committed to things, people who are willing to fight for what they believe in, not just nihilistic people. But we do need to make sure we do not become so fervent that we forget the people at the heart of it. That we lose our ability to listen to others.
The Pharisees also believed the Law of God applied to everyone not just priests. In some ways they democratized the Law and attempted to create what we might describe “as a priesthood of all believers.”
They believed that God could be worshipped away from the Temple and outside of Jerusalem. They professed that true worship consisted of prayer and the study of the Torah rather than bloody sacrifices and that the synagogue (that is the local church), which the Pharisees developed, was a valid institution of religious worship in addition to the Temple.
Finally, the Pharisees believed in an after-life and in a messiah to come who would usher in an era of world peace.
This seems to be mostly good to me. I imagine Jesus would have agreed with them about all of this.
So it seems to me Jesus was not reacting to Pharisees per se. There were perhaps 6,000 of them in Israel at the time and so we too need to be careful about coming to conclusions about all Pharisees based on these particular ones. Something that never goes well.
What Jesus was reacting to was that had become so fixated on rightness, on believing the right things, doing the right things and having the right answers that their hearts had become so hard (as Mark describes them in his version of this story) that they had become unconcerned about hunger and could not celebrate a man’s healing.
In fact it enraged them. This can happen. Last year Sondra was putting out free food in front of the Op Shop. It was food given to us by foodbank that they didn’t sell and so would go to waste. We were surprised, although I realised we should not have been, to discover that this had caused rage on the community forum. The comments were obsessed not with people’s need for food but with whether they deserved it.
Again Jesus’ response here should remind us as Christians we too need to be careful that we do not become so fixated on rightness – right doctrine, right practise, right words, that we produce anger and self-righteousness rather than the fruits of the Spirit – Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-control. Despite the demands on us we need to pray for soft hearts, responsive hearts. Not defensive and prickly hearts.
Now please do not hear me as advocating that truth, righteousness and spiritual disciplines do not matter. Most of you know me well enough to know that I think these things are very important but this is not an either/or thing. We do not have to throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak. I think mostly following the Law of the Lord and the spiritual disciplines of the church will help to produce these things, but if they do not, and we find ourselves acting something like the Pharisees, unconcerned about hunger and healing, (and in my case perhaps going on and on about something) then we may need to ask ourselves if Jesus is still at the heart of our practice.
Those of us who do practice Sabbath are often asking ourselves questions about what we can and can not do on the Sabbath. This is a reasonable question but the real question about Sabbath is not what but who. Who is the Lord of the Sabbath?
As those of us who attended Sunday School know the answer is Jesus. The Son who along with the Father and the Spirit, rested on the seventh day, who liberated the Hebrew people from slavery and called them into an alternative reality to that of Pharoah.
Sabbath is not the same as a wellness retreat, it is not self care as in the modern day packaging of it. Again not to sound like a broken record but it is a practice that is older, wiser and deeper than any of the gurus of that movement. It is according to the Biblical story weaved into the very seams of creation and liberation. Sabbath is not just about you and your personal edification. Of course your rest is part of it, that does indeed matter to God but it is also about the rest of the whole community and the earth as well for the purpose of worship and producing people with soft hearts.
Now the Bible sets some parameters around how we do it. The laws of God are interested in helping us live together well, to keep people, particularly the vulnerable safe, to limit production and greed and violence, to keep us ever aware of the sacred and eyes open to the work of the Kingdom and the Holy Spirit. This is a good thing. Societies do need common laws, government and organisations do need policy and procedures. But how often do we experience the fact that policies and procedures actually hinder our ability to be welcoming and inclusive and just helpful. And how often do people hide behind these things to avoid the work of discernment and thoughtfulness.
No doubt the church is always at risk of this. I am glad that the BoU of the Uniting Church says in its opening paragraph that we remain open to constant reform under the Word of Christ. But I am not sure we always are. And I have had conversations with many of you about the way they stand in the ways of your connections with people too.
This is what was going on for the Pharisees that Jesus encountered. They had become more interested in the Law itself than what it was for. And Jesus will not stand for that.
Jesus, asked the Pharisees, is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to destroy it?” He then went ahead and healed a man’s hand. This was not a life saving event, if it had been the Pharisees likely would not have been so enraged, it was never prohibited to save life on the Sabbath. But as Jesus said in John “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly.” Abundant life is what Jesus longed for, for this man.
Abundant life.
This is the gospel of the Lord. (together) Praise to you Lord Jesus Christ.
